Ask HN: What on Earth is Wrong With HN | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What on Earth is Wrong With HN

6 pointsArdit204 comments

Ok, there is some hyperbole there, but this is a competitive time :)

PG talks in some of his articles, well almost expects, that one day will come when the quality of HN dilutes slightly. I am not in any way suggesting that it has, but I am wondering if the rate of expansion is too fast for the "natives" to "assimilate" the new comers.

You might see this in the up voting and down voting of comments, which really is the currency of this place, not in the way that money is, but in the way that wrongly upvoted comments tend to attract more upvotes due to crowd behaviour and the opositive for downvotes.

The quality of submissions has remained intact however. The best do get upvoted. Some which perhaps should do not, but the difference is minimal. With comments however, maybe I am alone in thinking so, but, the atmosphere seems to be much different than it was a year ago.

Maybe this is the newbie delusion which PG talks about, but I am not a newbie. Maybe this is instead what PG follows after talking about the newbie delusion, that is, the real thing.

First of all, is that so?

Second of all, can anything be done about it, or should we just accept that so is the way we are?

Your motivation for this thread should be pointed out, for those that are taking this perhaps more seriously than it should be: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627749.

At any rate, you're a less productive amichail, which is saying something. Find something that will knock you down a few pegs, do it several more times, and try to acknowledge that your tongue does not rival Midas.

To reiterate: between the language barrier and your somewhat tumultuous thoughts, your message does not always come across as you intend it to. When your message is transmitted with full fidelity, you often still do not have any substance. You possess such an abysmal signal to noise ratio that it is laughable that you find yourself questioning the quality with HN.

Wow. That is brutal. To be absolutely honest, I would love that kind of objective, brutal feedback if I did not suspect motivations.

It is very silly however to suggest that my motivation for this is something which I would expect to get down votes, not least because the original post, the comments of which I echoed, got downvoted. I simply wanted to say it. Which is my very nature. Uncensoured thoughts. Be the results what they may. I care about the downvotes as much as I would care about the looks of any person down the street. A mere moment, here now, gone in seconds.

I have been thinking of making such a post in quite a while, not least because, and of course I might be much wrong hence the post, I think that this place will at one point become too big and perhaps loose the culture it has. My motivation thus was, to ask the brilliant minds that reside within these pages, to speculate as to how perhaps such fate does not need to become a necessity. That is, whether you can have a reddit like site, without becoming reddit.

But thanks for your comment in any instance. It does quite prove my original point.

Edit: I should add also, on a purely objective and inquisitive manner also, I do not quite see why you would do that. I have looked as far as I could in you comments, and I do not see any comments that I have made in reply to any of yours, let alone to leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

It frankly is sufficient to simply make me not want to have anything to do with this community any longer. I sought reason and I found it. Once reason vanishes, so indeed shall I.

Let me contribute my perspectives about the posts in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627749

mathgladiator's post: I would vote this down as being totally content-free. The words "late night orgies" do not make a comment hilarious, and other than that, his comment literally had nothing to say.

lsb's post: I'd vote this down as being a reply to a useless post that doesn't contribute except to scold the parent. I don't think we need reminding that AIDS is a serious problem. I don't follow why it has 7 upvotes.

Your first post: Downvoted. Again, no content. You just made the same off-hand remark about orgies that the grandparent made. Besides being pointless, it's also absurdly offensive and tasteless to respond to a serious comment about AIDS and rape in this tone.

Your second post: Downvoted. Why are you replying to yourself? Why would you open a comment with an insult to the audience? What makes you think we want to read an impromptu lecture about the joy of sex?

Look, all these posts have something in common. It's that they add absolutely zero value to the discussion. They aren't wise or informative, they don't clarify anything, and they're not funny. Elsewhere in the thread, although your posts were sometimes marginally off-topic, you clearly had something to say; e.g. your defense of paywalls on academic journals, and your back-and-forth about the value of HIV research outside of the human environment. Here, you have nothing to say. "Sex is great, everyone should have sex, it's nice if AIDS is gone" is not worth the time it takes to write or read. (It's ten times worse as a reply to a comment about rape.)

Taking issue with these things is just a matter of filtering spam, not a matter of personal grudges.

The good thing about losing sight of HN for a few months is, when you get back, it doesn't take long until someone questions the quality of comments and/or submissions and you recognize nothing really changed. Think about quality like tides at a beach.

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