[taraploughman]

This seems a good time to point out that a few of us been organizing a revolt against HN. I wish it wasn't so, and the drama is mostly uninteresting. Suffice to say, expressing concerns about HN on HN is a quick way to end up beheaded.

If you're looking for an alternative: https://www.laarc.io/

You may find the site a welcome change of pace. We just had our first Show post today.

There is a good chance that this account will be quickly banned, this post killed, and this account marked as "uncommentable", meaning this is the last comment I am likely able to post under this handle. But you may also know me as sillysaurus.

I've missed you guys.

[ProAm]

Why the revolt over HN?

[untog]

I can't speak for the OP, but I've been frustrated to find that any time a controversial topic comes up on HN (say, sexism) it is immediately flagged off the homepage. A small cohort of HN users get to dictate what the site at large discusses, and I'm not sure that's for the betterment of the industry.

[bilbo0s]

???

So is this basically a revolt by the more political oriented people? I mean, the people who want to discuss the political type controversial stuff and not so much tech and science?

Just wondering why I never heard of it until I read that comment?

[nostrademons]

It's interesting, I just checked it out (I'd never heard of it before) and a number of the usernames seem familiar, and are not who I'd think of as more political-oriented people. The topics are actually more technical and arguably interesting than what shows up on HN these days.

I think it may just be that beyond a certain size, online communities break, and you get crap. And laarc is effectively a splinter off HN of users who got fed up with the content here.

[untog]

> Just wondering why I never heard of it?

Because it gets flagged off the site immediately.

[bilbo0s]

In fairness though, if you want a politics version of HN, you can just make your own. I think there are a large number of flags required to get a post removed from the front page. So, to me, it sounds like there are a lot of tech, math, science types who are just not interested in posts that they feel "pollute" the stream so to speak.

I mean, again, if we're being fair, those guys should get as much of a say as you do.

[untog]

I think the core contention is that tech, maths and science do not live outside of politics - they're all political topics. Books have been written about the politics involved in science.

> those guys should get as much of a say as you do.

Absolutely agree. But the flagging mechanism means that a small number of users make the choice for the rest, who never see the story in question.

I'm not suggesting I have an easy fix, community moderation is one of the biggest problems out there. But I'm not sure the current approach is the best one, that's all.

EDIT: and you might notice it happening now. This story has slipped down to 23rd on the front page, despite having far more upvotes in a shorter space of time than the stories that surround it. Soon it won't be on the front page any more.

[yongjik]

Upvoted because, even if I don't really care for what you think about HN, there's something interesting about someone getting so enraged with HN that they go through the trouble of building an identical-looking clone.

[minimaxir]

The core framework of HN, Arc, has an open source variant and it's not hard to deploy a strict HN clone. https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

[brylie]

What is the rationale for the HN revolt?