Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?

[yekanchi]

I have known HackerNews for quite a year and most of the time (daily) i review the top 5, 6 links based on my favor, i recently started to think that it's very diverse and mostly i forget about the tricks and fresh thing i read, i just want to know are others like me and they just read and forget or do you feel and act other than this!?

[zuzuleinen]

HackerNews is a great community. I love the comments because they come from people much smarter than me. I actually started to make a newsletter from comments which contain an important lesson: https://lessonsofhn.com

Sadly the newsletter has only 4 subscribers and I might discontinue it in the future. However, I will not stop favoriting comments which contain important lessons.

Now I'm thinking about building a tool which will send you favorite comments of a user to your mailbox on a frequency you choose. You can add your own user and then you will not forget the things which you favorite because you will keep getting them in your inbox.

[deadcoder0904]

Wow love the lifting lesson. Subscribed. Telegram bot will be amazing as I use it a lot. I probably will make it myself if I can do something with that RSS Feed. Do you mind if I make it?

[zuzuleinen]

Absolutely not :) If you make it let me know I can share it on the website as well. You can find my e-mail on my profile.

[zuzuleinen]

Sorry, I wanted to say Absolutely :D Without the not :))

Sorry I'm on mobile and cannot edit the comment

[deadcoder0904]

Lol I thought absolutely not. Its a good site. I'll probably launch it in a couple of days. And when do you release new newsletters? Any specific days?

[zuzuleinen]

Yeah, I was on train and busy, but yes I wanted to say I don't mind :)

I release every Friday morning around 8:00 UTC+1

[vertis]

I love the lessons you've shared so far, but I don't enjoy getting newsletters (I drown in emails). Maybe there is another way to share them.

[zuzuleinen]

Thank you, I'm so happy you love them :)

I chose the e-mail format to make sure that I don't lose any lesson. E-mail forces you to act on it: either read it or delete it. I made a weekly newsletter so people don't get drown in e-mails.

But I totally get your point, I will think about a way of solving this issue. Until then you can also subscribe via RSS to the e-mails:

https://us9.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d...

[znpy]

Same here: thanks but I don't need more emails in my Inbox. RSS would be fine though.

[zuzuleinen]

Here is the RSS https://us9.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d...

[Kevin_S]

I've subscribed via RSS.

[gletard]

Thanks, please continue publishing. I have just subscribed via Feedly.

[zuzuleinen]

Thank you :) Will do!

[jitendrac]

One more subscriber ;)

[zuzuleinen]

Thank you :) I hope you will enjoy the next emails :D

[ibnishak]

Subscribed

[zuzuleinen]

Wow, you guys are amazing :D I got 80+ subscribers because of this comment.

It definitely helps with the motivation :D Already started to build a small tool for myself to help me curate the best content for the subscribers.

Hope you will enjoy the e-mails to come :)

[bmpafa]

I like it for curation of articles I'd otherwise not likely find (esp. ones that aren't new, which makes it feel like a temporally separate newsfeed).

I also like the general distaste for clickbait, markety bullshit,etc. I guess in that respect, it's like all the brains you'd expect from silicon valley with very little of the Kool Aid.

...but mostly I just like seeing people piss & moan about Electron using >50MB of RAM

[w4tson]

Don’t forget those rust vs go threads. 300 comments of people talking past each other ;-)

[muzani]

It's slightly more productive than procrastinating on other sites.

[jordansmith]

"Productive" procrastination is my favorite form of procrastination.

[whatyoucantsay]

To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly.

It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth.

HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news topics that it once avoided. Moderators have clear political axes to grind. While the site initially shunned submissions related to politics (and even codified this in its guidelines), it's no longer uncommon for flags to be turned off explicitly political stories that lead to viscous flame wars.

HN is invaluable, as a reminder in the fragility of communities and of the impermanence of anything we create. If a project that some of the smartest people on the planet put their heart and soul into can fall apart so ruinously, who are we to have any ego about our creations?

[badcede]

And yet here you are.

[dang]

People can assess the ruins for themselves, but I need to correct some factual errors.

1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).

[whatyoucantsay]

1. Which years?

2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars.

Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents.

3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting.

Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether.

#3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed.

My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.

[dang]

Arguments about HN getting too political / ruined by politics go back almost as far as HN itself:

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485

Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually interesting and not just about politics:

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775

We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518

Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.)

[dang]

(This is the second half of what used to be at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I've split it off because the first half turned out to be useful to link to in other contexts.)

Re "I've seen it happen countless times": since you don't know anything about our politics, what you're seeing is your own interpretation of whatever stood out to you, which is likely whatever you most disliked. I know it feels convincing, but people convince themselves of everything this way, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307091. It is called the Hostile Media Effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), and there are countless examples on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Re your account, it looks like we rate limited it because it has a history of using HN primarily for political (and especially national) battle, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's routine HN moderation. Saying something about YC was not the active ingredient; people do that all the time without getting moderated. Indeed we have a rule against moderating HN for that reason: see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Re the YC/GDPR thing: it's impossible to say much without a specific link but I can tell you we didn't downweight it because of YC—that would break the rule I just mentioned. Users were complaining about a flurry of GDPR posts in recent weeks and even posting lists of recent discussions, so if we touched it at all it was probably dupe-related.

[whatyoucantsay]

This comment further validates the concern. If regularly countering demonstrably false propaganda encountered within threads is "national battle" that gets an account limited, but the demonstrably false propaganda itself is accepted, then something is broken.

The Eternal September comment rings true. There was a staggering change from 2006-2008, and a gradually decelerating decline ever since. Site policy changes are not necessarily the primary factor. As an audience gets orders of magnitudes larger, it grows diluted and less cohesive. That said, I fully agree with DanielBMarkham's comments from the election thread (despite having been in political agreement with the majority myself).

PG has made truly non-PC comments here and in essays. His writing isn't that of a populist or a cultural conservative by any means, but is also clearly out of tune with the bay area echo chamber. There is a wide space between supporting Trump and not fitting in in SV! Broadly, the political topics pg seems to write about have been an opposition to political correctness, favoring equality of opportunity, and a belief that individuals creating wealth help the world rather than harm it. Some of these positions were either left leaning or had broad popular support 20 years ago, but most would now be considered right or centrist. This, coupled with his previous willingness to voice deeply sensitive but true observations, may have lead to his retirement (e.g. "founders with strong foreign accents have less startup success"). Things may have changed after Valleywag took aim at him, however.

The only "battle" being waged from this side is

    1) for the pursuit of truth
    2) for the freedom, happiness and well-being of every human to the greatest degree possible

This does involve criticising certain bad ideas (e.g. "It's acceptable to invade a peaceful neighbour to regain territory our ancestors held hundreds of years ago", "Human traits are shaped only by environment, without influence from heredity" or "Gay men should be thrown off rooftops"). Politics is far from the most important thing, but it, or tribalism generally, is often involved when a strong majority believe something at odds with history or empiricism. Investment bubbles and other herd behaviour are also deeply fascinating and worth debating.

Trying to accumulate karma leads to ever stronger filter bubbles. Consequently, karma is a resource best spent on ideas that are both possibly true and deeply unpopular. Given the willingness to dissent and the apparent alignment of goals with HN's stated guidelines, these and future comments may possibly serve as a useful canary in a coal mine.

[dang]

Everyone in flamewars thinks that they're "countering demonstrably false propaganda". That's how flamewars feel from the inside.

[zamazingo]

Do you know where the new elves are?

[whatyoucantsay]

I believe pg, pmarca and many of the others went from Reddit to HN to Twitter to more private lives.

If the question is "what site in early 2018 most resembles HN of 2006", I believe the answer is Indie Hackers. Its community is open, friendly, genuinely helpful and focused on business.

It's not quite the same since it takes more of a pro-bootstrapper stance, but then again the HN ethos used to be more tilted towards frugality and truly early-stage companies than it now is.

Things will undoubtedly change as they grow, but IH is arguably the finest place on the internet for entrepreneurs.

[lfxyz]

Did we know those elves were elves at the time?

[whatyoucantsay]

pmarca had two separate $1B+ exits and the invention of the first mainstream web browser under his belt

[jokh]

I like how comment authors employ real critical thinking, unlike places like reddit where all the top comments echo each other. So fresh perspectives helps me learn from people with different viewpoints who aren't afraid to question others when they're wrong/BSing.

[MoBattah]

Right. HN readers call out logical fallacies well. Makes me a better analytical thinker.

[O_H_E]

From the most productive ways to keep-up with news and a nice place to hear comments from knowledgeable people about these news. I learn about new technologies, and sometimes comments from people help me decide next language or technology to explore next.

[meesterdude]

It's been a mixed bag. I think there is a toxicity in the moderatorship and a predisposition for downvotes - which is frustrating. There are also recurring cirlce-jerks which distorts things as well. Nor has the HN platform improved in the years I've used it.

But sometimes there will be a worthwhile link, or a salient comment, perhaps once a week; and that's about ratio i've found when using HN over the years. And those things are the things I remember.

If you like something, comment on it - it means more than a vote, and helps you bookmark it if you ever want to track back to it.

[tptacek]

We've hired a bunch of people from HN over the last 10 years.

[MoBattah]

Is this usually someone writes a comment related to your field, you find it insightful, check their profile and it goes from there?

Or is it usually started by someone's "Show HN" post?

I'm sure these generalizations are too broad.

[invalid_]

I get to read well documented arguments AGAINST hype and trends. I like that

[quickthrower2]

It gives me an impression about what is going on in tech in other countries, that would be hard to know about. For example I know I can double my salary if I got to SF, although I may not act on that.

[yekanchi]

SF?

[JunaidBhai]

Very frequently we come across prospects for our design services who are part of the HackerNews community. It becomes a great opener to connect with them.