Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to what I expected, Twitter has provided a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Hacker News for me. If you just jump into Twitter and follow people at random that’s not the case, but if you use Twitter intelligently and curate your follow and block lists, you can actually get much more productive discussions.

HN is also famously critical, cynical, and overall grumpy. You can find golden comments here (why I come back) but the majority of comments are not great and a lot of the frequent commenters are relentlessly negative and cynical.

Dan Lu already wrote a great piece about how “HN comments are terrible”: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/

Outside of HN and a few other circles, it's somewhat well known that HN comments are on average on the toxic side of the tech discussion spectrum.

View on HN

I often see it referenced as “the orange hell-site” and at times I can totally understand why.

The discussion here about Foone's preferred pronouns and desires for linking is pretty bad by HN standards I must admit, but frankly I've never seen it done better on any tech forum. Usenet was and is an endless hostile flamewar ground. Larger Reddit tech subs talk about the same topics constantly. Lobsters is stuck in a loop of evangelism, gatekeeping, and pushback against both. Mastodon in its more toxic parts is just as bad, often worse, than Twitter. The same personality ticks that makes people wrong deeper in the comments here repeat in spades on every tech news site I've been on. Dan Luu says as much on his page about HN comments.

Tech people are neurodiverse, have a long culture of being strident (Torvalds, ESR, et al.), and often tend to be in their own heads. That combination is probably just what all of this is. But one thing I try to remind myself of is that busy builders often don't have the time, or desire, to write detailed HN comments about what they build all the time. So comments here are probably, disproportionately, written by people not building things.

There was a recent point in time where I could feel myself getting a headache from passing over all the regular cynicism in the comments. Every bit of negativity I passed my eyes over physically felt like poison, but I kept coming back because I was addicted.

This kind of routine sounds familiar - it's the same kind that's brought up when applied to other forums on this forum itself. I kept thinking I could escape that cycle by finding the place away from "the other mindless information hoses". The impression I got from reading comments here makes me want to believe this, but I don't think it's true. And the false sense of superiority that got into my head from thinking I'd found the nicer place led me astray.

There are a lot of comparisons of this site to others, but regardless of what HN is labeled, I think that despite the engaging conversations that do take place, the comments are not always a comfortable place for me to return to. It's to the point where I've seemingly overestimated the many pronouncements of better moderation, or that it's less toxic than that other place, or that there's insight to be found in lots of places. The catch is that all those things might be true, and yet one can still feel worn out by everything in this place besides the unequivocal good. I can count on one hand the times in the past five years where an article or comment I read on HN meaningfully changed my life.

Additive firehouse sites can still house valuable information, and said sites are unlikely to go away in the long term from scores of people bickering at them from a distance. The world is far larger than what a single orange site can encompass.

Except for some very technical topics, I find myself skipping the comments more and more, despite the fact that was one of my favorite parts of the site.

More and more I use HN just for the links.

And even that seems problematic at times.

I know you're not trying to be dismissive, but the pronouns people use aren't a "preference" and framing them as such is extremely problematic.

I'm just using this as "term of art". I would never want to use a non-preferred pronoun, that would be hurtful. If I offended, I'm sorry, I can't edit it now.

I understand that, my point was to provide guidance against using a problematic phrase in the future.

Honestly there are a few bad apples that show up around here, but I think that's just a reflection of our industry as a whole. If you have open signup and light-ish touch moderation, you're bound to end up with whatever HN is.

I see "the orange site" phrase used a lot over at lobste.rs, and they obviously followed a different path - you need to be invited or somehow known to get on board. So they've got less of what they think of as toxicity and everyone's supposed to be pals with each other. Except little conflicts and tantrums do happen every now and then, and there's less activity overall (current top story has 26 comments on it, 10 of the 25 stories on the front page have no comments at all).

Invite-only selects for the other kind of insanity, the 1% who are actively engaged with sites, instead of the ~99% who mostly lurk.

You don't have to be invited to lurk though? I guess you mean you don't get the folks who just sign up to post a one-off or once in a while comment?

For me it’s a lot more than a few bad apples. It’s the general state of discourse and empathy from a reasonably large chunk of the user base.

HN was never perfect (since I found it), but it’s much worse now.

To be fair this has happened in general to a number of sites/thing in the exact same timeline. It’s not an HN specific problem, other than the degree to which such people may be attracted to the usual HN spheres.

Twitter's blocking tools are second to none. Specifically the ability to block words is pure magic. I used to see tons of retweets of political garbage, but with a block list of political words it's all gone and all I see are interesting technical discussions.

Any suggestions to try?

It is difficult to make such suggestions. We do not know who you are, where you live, what your political preferences are, anything on which to base suggestions.

So, no.

All I can do is tell you some of the keywords I block that improve my Twitter experience.

For instance:

brexit, brexit party, trump, maga, soccer, football, premiereleague

I have also blocked all the names of various celebrities when they "trended".

There are also some keywords that help:

suggestrecycledtweet_inline suggestpyletweet suggestactivitytweet suggest_timeline_tweet suggest_recycled_tweet suggest_pyle_tweet suggest_activity_highlights suggest_activity_feed RankedOrganicTweet ActivityTweet suggest_ranked_organic_tweet suggest_sc_tweet suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet generic_activity_MomentsBreaking generic_activity_Highlights suggest_grouped_tweet_hashtag suggest_activity suggest_who_to_follow suggest_recap suggest_recycled_tweet_inline

There are multiple sources of these, e.g.

https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...

Some do not keep working for long. :-(

Whenever you see a tweet you didn't want to see, pick a word directly from the tweet and add it to your block list right then. Don't worry about false positives too much because it's just Twitter, missing a tweet or two isn't the end of the world, and also I often only block words "from people you don't follow" so the blocks don't apply to direct tweets from people I know. Pretty soon you'll have a great block list and a clean feed.

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