Hacker News Reader

Comment by segfaultbuserr | Hacker News Reader

I'd just hope Hacker News never "upgrades" itself in the next 15 years so I can still find archives of previous discussions, including this thread.

Hacker News is the center of technology, just like the Usenet Groups were the center from the late 70s to the mid-90s, that must be preserved as computer history. Our generation can see how the Internet started and how 4.3BSD worked by reading the Usenet archives, the future generations deserve to be able doing the same, learn how the Silicon Valley in the 2010s worked by reading Hacker News archives.

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> Hacker News is the center of technology

Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard.

Okay, not the center, but possibly the largest general-interest forum near the center. Can you name another Internet forum where discussions are similar to general-interest Usenet tech groups, where even internal details or confidential information about tech companies such as Microsoft [0] or Oracle [1] leaks out from time to time?

Mailing lists? Well, yes, but there are all single-topic forum.

Twitter? Probably, but it's not a forum, and it's even responsible for killing the forums.

Reddit? Those programming groups are large, but they are closer to newsfeed where you can submit links than a forum (Hacker News is also a newsfeed, but it's discussion-orientated, some people don't even read the news). Although some communities such as r/bitcoin has plenty of important history preserved here, but not a general-interest tech forum.

4chan? It has some historical significant for Internet subcultures, but probably not in general interest.

Chatrooms? Yes. Freenode is still big, Discord has a lot of communities, but they are not forums.

My conclusion about Hacker News being the center was after a long depression that the social media has killed large forums where long opinions are elaborated. But Hacker News is still kicking around, like it was 1995.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689391 (original comment deleted, reposted here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

HN is just another slashdot. And slashdot looks like it's still going fine: https://slashdot.org/

Yes, but I think it doesn't replace HN.

The first difference is that Slashdot provides a summary of the news, so most Slashdot users do actually read the news, and makes a few points down in comment; unlike Hacker News, where many don't and just wait for a chance to jump in and post comments. Therefore, the contents are often of a different nature, HN is closer to a forum.

Also, the current Slashdot is truly different from early Slashdot. It seems to be more corporative and commercial. On early Slashdot, you can occasionally see interviews and book reviews dedicated to the community, you rarely see those post nowadays, if any. Also, in recent years, Slashdot implemented (or refused to implement) changes and created a strong opposition within a subgroup of users, and gave to birth of forks of smaller site.

While HN is still here and living well (I do know Lobster is a HN fork).

So both HN and Slashdot needs archives, and they should know better not to push for destructive upgrades that makes reading historical posts difficult. Both work well today, but I don't know what would happen in the future.

HN is pretty corporate for YC companies and stuff.

It still exists, I guess. It's a pale shadow of what it once was, and not even close to as useful or fun as HN.

And Slashdot looks like it's still going.

To me it's more of an very early reddit.

Slashdot has been a walking dead version of its' former self once it sold to SourceForge.

VA Linux, the company behind SourceForge, bought Slashdot back in 2000, so that kinda sounds harsh to me -- I mean, the site only launched in 1997. :)

I think it slid into gradual irrelevance in the following decade, but I'm not sure there was any one moment that did it. Personally, I'd date its decline to 2011, perhaps not coincidentally shortly after founding editor Rob Malda left.

I'd say it was the forced rollout of Beta. I haven't been to Slashdot since... Soylent News is high-quality and not too distracting.

I don't honestly remember much about Beta other than not having the impression it was an improvement. :) But I don't think Dice, which bought the site in... 2012, I think?, was a very good steward of the brand.

I'd never heard of Soylent News. I can't decide if I love or hate that name. :)

You give me to much credit, chipotle. Or perhaps I should call you... El Coyote!

Yep, I have a user in the 12000 uid series there and it has not been the same since Rob (CmdrTaco) left.

HN is the closest I can get to a replacement.

Au 'voir ma bien-aimée Slashdot.

I agree with the general sentiment that more often than not it seems like an “upgrade” in the user experience is actually an enormous downgrade.

However it is important to not romanticize anything on the Internet too hard, speaking from my own disappointment. Hacker News for the duration that it is here is a valuable resource. Exploit it while you can, and be prepared to move on when you can’t.

> Exploit it while you can, and be prepared to move on when you can’t.

I'll be fine for moving to whatever platform in the future, as long as it uses an open protocol, NNTP or HTTP, it doesn't matter.

My problem is when websites start pushing destructive upgrades that make reading historical posts difficult, for example, excluding them from index or completely screwing up the formatting.

Hopefully the Internet Archive Team will take care of it, if HN ever does it.

Nah my friend.

I mean you have to physically mine anything you want to save into an archive of your own. Exploit.

Sorry if this seems cynical, but if anything on the Internet is worth referring back to, it’s worth making your own copy or you should just assume that at some point you’ll never see it again. Fortunately it’s just text and hyperlinks. Even screenshots work if you OCR them somewhere down the line, though I don’t employ that method.

And Silicon Valley municipal politics and health fads totally unsupported by anything other than good feels.

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