Take the case of Reddit. Programming reddit used to be the place where smart programmers used to hang around and have quality discussions about the subject they care about the most, but the simple fact that reddit supported other kinds of news/content in the form of subreddits made the site a place for a lot of funny, worthless and snarky comments. Now people are more interested in taking sides in worthless arguments (about Joel Spolsky?) than serious productive discussions.
Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of reddit, but what I am trying to say is that reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.
Meanwhile Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing happeneing to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned in some social websites (including reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:
"We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter."
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously.
It is not that the people using programming reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks in reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much funny is kinda annoying.
Agreed. And equally important is the fact that no one really talks about it. Instead of bringing up how they were around for "Erlang Day" in every comment thread, people just remember it in the back of their minds as something amusing that happened in the past.
I see this a lot, particularly on here: when someone doesn't find something funny that another finds funny, they're accused of not having a sense of humor.
I have a sense of humor. It might be different than yours, but I have one. I also have a low tolerance for noise on HN. I don't come here for "teh funny." I have others places I go for that. I come here for interesting, hacker related items. I can find funny all over the internet. This is the only reliable place I know of to find good hacker news. I'd rather not spoil that.
Scott, chill, it was tic. I'm sure that you have a sense of humor, but you didn't get my joke, apparently. You see, the thread is asking why HNers have no sense of humor, and... ah, screw it, it loses it if you have to explain it.
The erlang articles were mostly very interesting, and seeing a HN meme flare up and go away just as quickly, especially one that is self-deprecating in poking fun at the stereotype of the HN reader doing everything pg says, was very fun. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it.
The only kind of noise that I really hate on HN is the "hacker news sucks" crap. If you think it's too noisy, get better filters, or help out by flagging the articles that violate the TOS, up-voting the articles that are good, and ignoring the rest.
Complaining about HN in an HN comment is frankly just humorless.
I kinda agree with you partly but, just playing devil's advocate here, one could make the exact opposite argument in that just because you'd like to keep it serious doesn't mean everyone else feels the same way.
Well, I come to hacker news to read news and to learn, not really for laughs. Sure a bit of comic relief here and there is okay, but god when the site gets covered in junk links (which rarely happens but I've seen a few bad days) -- it's beating the purpose of the site.
I noticed this (though not in regards to the traffic - I only read Hacker News and not the associated blog/news) and had some itching curiosity as to why there was so much Erlang discussion going on.
I figured HN had some strange seating in the Erlang community :)
Let's be fair. It's not just that reddit has a million jokes, it's that all these jokes are a rehash of jokes before it.
Posting a million lines of text and then ending it with Bell-Air was funny. The first time. Same for masking a link to some site you don't expect to go. It was funny the first time they did it. Some ten years before they reused the joke for Goatse, and then for tubgirl, and then for 2g1c, and then for a Rick Roll. Kind of gets boring...
I'm sorry, but I find the whole meme-thing rather annoying. Not only does it get in the way of serious discussion, it even gets in the way of new jokes.
I don't mind seeing a joke on HN, but only if it's funny. I'd rather risk no humor on any site than stupid humor.
I agree with that the size of HN helps with the goal of maintaining quality. I have always loved being able to visit digg/reddit and get more socially-involved content, then visiting HN and being able to get more professionally-involved content.
One thing I have noticed that could be good or bad depending on the situation, but sometimes good posts I notice in new (technically relevant, different content that is truly interesting) doesn't make it to the front page. However, every 3rd+ Tech Crunch article does.
Well, I don't go to techcrunch or NYT on my own volition (okay NYT sometimes but never techcrunch) -- so any articles interesting enough to make news.yc are the only ones I read. therefore, I appreciate them. But yeah if they vanished I don't think I'd care.
"You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang "
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously
Haha, a bit ironic that you mention this, considering it turned into a pretty sophomoric joke...
Comments
Take the case of Reddit. Programming reddit used to be the place where smart programmers used to hang around and have quality discussions about the subject they care about the most, but the simple fact that reddit supported other kinds of news/content in the form of subreddits made the site a place for a lot of funny, worthless and snarky comments. Now people are more interested in taking sides in worthless arguments (about Joel Spolsky?) than serious productive discussions.
Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of reddit, but what I am trying to say is that reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.
Meanwhile Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing happeneing to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned in some social websites (including reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:
"We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter."
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously.
It is not that the people using programming reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks in reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much funny is kinda annoying.
Taken from http://www.diovo.com/2009/04/broken-windows-theory-online-co...
And the spate of Erlang articles which followed pg's quoted post was one of the funniest occurrences on Hacker News, ever.
Agreed. And equally important is the fact that no one really talks about it. Instead of bringing up how they were around for "Erlang Day" in every comment thread, people just remember it in the back of their minds as something amusing that happened in the past.
For about ten minutes. Then it became obnoxious that it covered the front page.
That's just because you don't have any sense of humor.
I see this a lot, particularly on here: when someone doesn't find something funny that another finds funny, they're accused of not having a sense of humor.
I have a sense of humor. It might be different than yours, but I have one. I also have a low tolerance for noise on HN. I don't come here for "teh funny." I have others places I go for that. I come here for interesting, hacker related items. I can find funny all over the internet. This is the only reliable place I know of to find good hacker news. I'd rather not spoil that.
Scott, chill, it was tic. I'm sure that you have a sense of humor, but you didn't get my joke, apparently. You see, the thread is asking why HNers have no sense of humor, and... ah, screw it, it loses it if you have to explain it.
The erlang articles were mostly very interesting, and seeing a HN meme flare up and go away just as quickly, especially one that is self-deprecating in poking fun at the stereotype of the HN reader doing everything pg says, was very fun. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it.
The only kind of noise that I really hate on HN is the "hacker news sucks" crap. If you think it's too noisy, get better filters, or help out by flagging the articles that violate the TOS, up-voting the articles that are good, and ignoring the rest.
Complaining about HN in an HN comment is frankly just humorless.
I got the joke. I just don't think it's a funny joke - which is one of the reasons I'd rather people not try.
I like HN, and I think it's worth explaining how the community works. That includes why (bad) humor is downmodded so often.
That's just because you don't have any sense of humor.
I find complaining about HN (especially the "whaa to much noise") on HN highly ironic.
Like people continually whispering "shhh," creating more noise than there was in the first place?
I kinda agree with you partly but, just playing devil's advocate here, one could make the exact opposite argument in that just because you'd like to keep it serious doesn't mean everyone else feels the same way.
Well, I come to hacker news to read news and to learn, not really for laughs. Sure a bit of comic relief here and there is okay, but god when the site gets covered in junk links (which rarely happens but I've seen a few bad days) -- it's beating the purpose of the site.
and that's something we never want ;)
I see what you did there... ;D
Taking a casual remark unreasonably literally is "one of the funniest occurrences on HN, ever"?
I'm having trouble finding any variation on that joke that I've found funny since the 5th grade...
I noticed this (though not in regards to the traffic - I only read Hacker News and not the associated blog/news) and had some itching curiosity as to why there was so much Erlang discussion going on.
I figured HN had some strange seating in the Erlang community :)
Let's be fair. It's not just that reddit has a million jokes, it's that all these jokes are a rehash of jokes before it.
Posting a million lines of text and then ending it with Bell-Air was funny. The first time. Same for masking a link to some site you don't expect to go. It was funny the first time they did it. Some ten years before they reused the joke for Goatse, and then for tubgirl, and then for 2g1c, and then for a Rick Roll. Kind of gets boring...
I'm sorry, but I find the whole meme-thing rather annoying. Not only does it get in the way of serious discussion, it even gets in the way of new jokes.
I don't mind seeing a joke on HN, but only if it's funny. I'd rather risk no humor on any site than stupid humor.
I agree with that the size of HN helps with the goal of maintaining quality. I have always loved being able to visit digg/reddit and get more socially-involved content, then visiting HN and being able to get more professionally-involved content.
One thing I have noticed that could be good or bad depending on the situation, but sometimes good posts I notice in new (technically relevant, different content that is truly interesting) doesn't make it to the front page. However, every 3rd+ Tech Crunch article does.
Yeah. I too cannot understand why the techcrunch articles are getting to the frontpage so often. I see a lot of NYTimes too.
As of now, I am satisfied with the content in HN.
I like the ask-HN kinda stuff more.
Well, I don't go to techcrunch or NYT on my own volition (okay NYT sometimes but never techcrunch) -- so any articles interesting enough to make news.yc are the only ones I read. therefore, I appreciate them. But yeah if they vanished I don't think I'd care.
I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore
There still are discussions I consider worth my time to read, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8dsxr/is_there_...
"You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang "
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously
Haha, a bit ironic that you mention this, considering it turned into a pretty sophomoric joke...