We need more sites like hackernews.
X /twitter used to be that , but it's now overwhelmed with bots and SEO.
The more boring you make a site (no colors, no images, no links) the better the defense against spammers.
"More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one.
There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture."
The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good)
Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed.
And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users.
------------------------------
It's like how twitter was at the start, but better.
If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice.
You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.
Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big enough, regardless of its motives or polish, there will be more incentive to game it.
Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason.
I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
Oh, I don't mean that scale is the only factor. Clearly, the structure of Mastodon is way better than the structure of Twitter. But, I'd bet that if Mastodon was as big as Twitter, if it was that juicy of a target, it would have way more spam than it does today.
I both agree and disagree, in that;
- the amount of spam on Mastodon will surely increase in amount proportional to the size of it's network.
And
- Mastodon users won't usually see that new spam by the dynamics of the current system because we're only shown content from sources we explicitly follow.
Yeah, it's not some ten-person forum buried in the annals of the old Internet, HN is popular enough, but does a random person sitting in a Boston cafe know what HN is? Probably not, but they sure know what Twitter is.
I think a large part of the reason hackernews is good is that operator's incentives are more closely aligned to the desires of users than average. Ycombinator benefits if HN is the best place to discuss the creation of technology/software because it boosts their brand and gives their companies a communication and recruiting advantage; most other platforms are primarily interested in ad revenue and are only incentivized to provide a good experience to users as a factor in that equation.
Defense against spammers/bots is a tough problem though. Having great moderators and users who are savvy and intolerant of bad content probably helps but I think it would only go so far on a large site. HN might benefit from the relatively narrow appeal of its content in that regard.
bots and SEO have really destroyed the internet. and now that we have AI to further streamline the production of BS, I feel like the Internet is just going to become even more of a quality content wasteland.
LLMs are only a deathblow, albeit a massive one, to a trend that's been 10 years in the making.
I feel it's time for another small internet for us, with blackjack and dancers. But this time let's agree not to make it friendly and accessible for everyone, alright?
Everyone just bind to some other port than 443 and there you go. The traffic won’t be worth any money so no spammers will show up there. All existing content and functionality will still work, just on a different port. It’s like a www fork.
I fully believe that, especially with the rise of AI models, the future of the internet is going to be small enclaves of a few thousand people on invite only message boards. Anything else is just going to be far and away too much effort for anyone to maintain, especially when advertisers twig that their ads are mostly being shown to bots.
I just don't see how anything else could be sustainable.
It was and it wasn't. Search engines arose to solve a very real problem, and did so quite well for a long time.
Curation was what search engines replaced, as the scale
of information available outgrew human capacity to keep up. We are almost certainly going to have that problem again soon, for a while at least.
Really, what I hope is that the already burgeoning problem of AI-generated garbage gets solved, and that people rediscover the virtues of social interaction that's based in reality, rather than in the optimization of strongly emotive idiocy that adtech-driven social media demands.
I used to believe this but I don't think so any longer after enough time on the internet.
There's probably not more than 50k meaningfully unique sites with some notable amount of actual desirable information, after excluding all the SEO'ed sites, blogs repeating each other, etc... at least for the English web.
Manual curation is entirely possible since probably there aren't even 50 such sites being created per day on average. This is including every single forum still open to public viewing. There really aren't that many left (<10k).
How long do you expect that will remain the case in the face of such a flood of zero-incremental-cost garbage as we here discuss?
Especially worth mentioning in this connection is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39424688, as of this writing #1 on HN. I mention it here because what it says about moderation, and about centralized platforms being both the highest-value and most poorly managed targets, applies here also.
Well maybe it's just because I'm an unpopular weirdo, but I think "invite only" is cancer. In fact it's another head of the hydra killing the Internet. Whatever alternatives exist to the spam wasteland are strangled in crib being overly walled gardens, e.g. Discord. I also swear to god I think secret private club fetishism crippled piracy.
This is not how the good years of the Internet grew. I can't think of a single good or popular thing that started out as "invite only" other than I guess Facebook and Gmail. Both of which were actually more marketing gimmicks.
I swear my girlfriend relishes in reading me the entire, 300 words of SEO bait product listings on Amazon. Babe, I'm begging you please, you can stop at "xl dog bed" I don't need to hear the rest that goes "fluffy for best friend comfort for large dogs pitbull great Dane german Shepard..."
Accessibility to the internet to everybody in the world destroyed the hacker haven that the Internet once was.
But I don't think it's bad. Hackers/smart people "locked in the basement' or talking only with their friends in their bubble is not ideal. There are a lot of people out there, with their own opinions, ideas and understanding (or lack of) of the world. Internet just converges towards the average human being. If we want a better internet, hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser, rather than blame the SEO and bots...
> Hackers/smart people "locked in the basement' or talking only with their friends in their bubble is not ideal.
Sounds quite ideal to me.
> hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser
I'd rather hope for a future made by us and for us instead.
"Average" people just don't care about this stuff like we do. They don't care. I tried to get them to care, they refuse to care about all this stuff that we care about. That's fine, people like what they like and that's that but why should we care about their concerns then? We should not. And I do not.
Truth is I couldn't care less about such an "average" human being. Why is everything always about the "average" person? Why must all technology serve this mythical average human? Where is the technology that serves me? My programmer's computer system and network?
Isn't that why we all come to Hacker News?
People chase these "averages" because there's money in it. The money mostly comes from advertising consumer products to them. That's why advertising destroys everything.
I remember reading on the wikimedia stats post here a few weeks ago that for English at least, the average internet user is a 20 year old from India watching porn
Goodharth’s Law destroyed the internet. The constant game of chess between Google and SEO marketers has the turned the whole search product to crap.
It won’t improve since when Google makes a change, SEO marketers adapt. The websites that actually provide value and don’t really care about SEO suffer as well as the users looking for that exact information.
On top of that no sharing/@ing: no notifications for responses (there's probably an addon for that if you want it).
At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions.
I would say this site user design wise is about the same as reddit, so I don't agree with any of your points. What makes it higher quality is that it has a niche theme (hackery) and it makes it less popular. As in general online, the less popular a resource is, the higher quality communication it has. You can find the same quality of conversation in low population subreddits too, despite the aforementioned design.
Go and look at Reddit again. Every post has a little avatar of the poster right next to it. Some of them are quite funky and some are offensive. The text of the username is bold - bolder than the post content itself.
In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
It's true. But it's not what contributes to the quality of the conversation. Find a niche (non-meme) subreddit that has at best 10 posts a day and check the conversations on there. They all have flashy avatars, a modern design for their posts, etc. But the conversation is high quality at the end of the day.
There are user flairs on old reddit too. You can see the persons karma if you hover over their username. But even if that wasn't the case, Reddit (99.98% of the time) sucks, regardless of what UI you use.
with the experimental spirit of the site, the barebones look is enough for the "mvp". but for most of the web users today, it is not quite as engaging to use.
most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
HN requires no javascript and is accessible through Tor without
issues. It feels right for those of us who are usually marginalised by
a wish for better security.
Feels well moderated too, by people who care about the place, and
that's the core of a sustainable community. Care really matters.
In a world where AI can impersonate people to virtual perfection, how would one even KNOW who to invite?
I think proof of identity may soon become the only way to keep AI powered bots from trying to manipulate every forum out there.
And for those who cherish the ability to be anonymous, there is probably a market for a trusted middle-man/site that can verify that an account is being created by a biological person, but that doesn't provide the actual identity of that person to the site where he/she is setting up a new account. Kind of like CA providers do for ssl domains.
You can still (basically) create your own HN / Twitter using RSS—my favorite reader is NetNewsWire, but there are others—particularly with the rise of Substack. I have a couple hundred feeds in mine, and it's great.
On my own site, I routinely post lists of links to interesting articles. You don't have to rely on Twitter or other highly botted sources.
"More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one.
There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture."
The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good)
Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed.
And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users.
------------------------------
It's like how twitter was at the start, but better.
If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice.
You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.