I Quit Hacker News

I wrote this as a reply to 'icey and it got unwieldy:

The standards for what's germane to Hacker News have gotten looser. TSA is only the most recent example. What's especially toxic about this fact is that you don't notice it until it gets really bad. That's because most of these stories have nerd-structured narratives, involving tradeoffs and logic and subtext and affordances for contrarianism, which bait commenters. Having participated in a TSA discussion (for instance), you become socially committed to the idea that they're relevant to Hacker News.

Hacker News has become much more self-referential. All due respect to 'lionhearted and 'DanielBMarkham and 'jacquesm, but there have been many stories voted to the top of the site on content that wouldn't stand had they been written by an "outsider". There's a clear name-recognition bias. That's not the author's fault (it's their blog, they should write what they want), but it does make the site feel insular.

I'll go out on a limb though and assert that insularity is something 'pg cultivates. My most recent cue on that was his encouraging response to "Offer HN".

Like it did for Matt, Hacker News has killed any desire I have to write standalone content. I haven't blogged in over a year. A book idea I was tossing around has been dead for longer. Hacker News fills the same psychological place for me that Usenet did in the 1990s, when I also didn't write a lot of standalone content. Now, for me, this is actually a good thing; I dove into HN while fleeing the "blogosphere". But I can see it being a problem for someone else.

Having said all that: I get tremendous value out of HN. I've met tons of people running startups, I've done business with some of them, I get to carry on long-running conversations with people like Patrick McKenzie and Colin Percival, I've hired several awesome people off the site, and I'm still impressed by the newcomers (for instance, go read 'carbocation's backlog of comments on biology and medicine).

Perhaps I'd like to see people a little quicker with the "flag" button; perhaps I'd like to see the site tuned so that flaggers can more easily win the race against thoughtless up-voters. And it might be nice if we could take a break from blog posts by long-time contributors; maybe we can switch to a "best-of" 'lionhearted mentality, instead of a "today's" 'lionhearted mentality.

But, while it sucks to lose Matt (he seemed like one of the more no-bullshit members of the site), I'm not as alarmed as he seems to be about the decline of HN.

'Perhaps I'd like to see people a little quicker with the "flag" button; perhaps I'd like to see the site tuned so that flaggers can more easily win the race against thoughtless up-voters.'

What happens when the 'thoughtless upvoters' find the flag button as well though? I don't think flagging posts is the solution to this problem.

People are never going to see eye to eye about what content belongs on the site and what content doesn't. There's no amount of convincing or flagging you can do to change this.

This is a tech-centric community, there's enough talent here to come up with a good tech-centric solution to the problem.

Something as simple as being able to apply a subtractive filter to the main page could go a long way. I.E. '-TSA -scanner' or something along those lines.

The TSA posts are manifestly off topic:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The first TSA post was (marginally) germane. The TSA is now on the front page of CNN. Unfortunately, HN "blessed" the topic by spinning off gigantic discussion threads on early TSA stories. So, even though this is a current events topic currently being covered on network TV news, it still finds a place here.

I bring this up not to further the argument about the TSA on Hacker News, but rather to demonstrate a pathology that occurs when we accept borderline stories that end up breeding months-long narratives in dribs-and-drabs. I also say this as someone who has written many hundreds of words here in comments on TSA stories.

As for filtering the front page: you might as well suggest "sub-HN's", like Reddit. Part of the point of the site is that it focuses a lot of interesting brains on a single spool of stories and discussions.

PS: For what it's worth, this is actually not a tech-centric community full of tech-centric ideas for community building problems. HN is a deliberately simple site curated by a single guy who started it as a demo for his programming language and liked where it went. Very few of the technical ideas anyone has proposed for this site have been tried, much less adopted; that's just not how HN works. This is a community governed by norms more than by code.

I'm not arguing that the posts are on topic. What I'm saying is that you have no control over the so called 'thoughtless upvoters'. If you start flagging. They will start flagging, even if it's just out of spite.

I'm not taking sides here, and throwing the rulebook at me isn't helping to solve the problem.

The filtering suggestions was the first example technological approach to solving the problem that popped into my head. I agree that there's a danger of fragmenting the community with that sort of change, but filtering out '-TSA' is hardly the equivalent of having a 'TSA sub-HN'.

Regardless of whether the filtering idea is good or not, I'd like to see more suggestions on how to fix the problem.