Comment by MegaButts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MegaButts | Hacker News Reader

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The increase in astroturfing is what I see as the biggest change to HN over time that makes it more like reddit. As HN becomes larger it becomes a larger target for corporate interests. You don't see too many companies successfully promoting crappy products on HN, but I notice lots of articles that are negative towards corporations get flagged and/or swarmed with positive comments. I think this is just something that happens as you grow larger. And as you grow larger you have more people with a wider spectrum of opinions, and while you'd hope the discussions would be civil the mods seem quicker to shutdown topics they believe will lead to flame wars.

That said, it's easy to be critical and hard to be constructive. I still come to HN regularly so there's obviously something to it. I'm not pretending to have the magic bullet to these problems (some of which I believe are fundamental/intractable).

EDIT: I find it ironic this post has fallen off the first page of HN before I finished this comment, despite having many comments and being something I find interesting.

If you suspect astroturfing, the best course of action is to email the mods. They're very open about this particular topic.

That being said, this is a forum for VC and startup talk among other things, so it would be pretty surprising if there wasn't some astroturfing at play. Self-promotion comes with the territory. The mods are doing their best but to some extent it's in the game.

Finally, there's no irony about this no longer being on the front page. When I first clicked into this thread, I was surprised it was FP still, because it had twice as many comments as votes and that usually trips the flamewar detector. I think folks are generally unaware of the systems that make HN tick, and that can make the experience pretty confusing.

> Finally, there's no irony about this no longer being on the front page.

Sure there is. It's an interesting conversation to me and it's being pushed away from the front page. I didn't say it was foul play, I said it was ironic. The algorithms are so fearful of controversy they push away interesting topics.

Also, I've emailed the mods many times before. My experiences have been mixed.

> The algorithms are so fearful of controversy they push away interesting topics.

That's just one of the tradeoffs. HN optimizes for curiosity, which does sometimes mean using blunt automated tools to fend off negative subjects.

Fundamentally, I think over-meta-commenting on the state of HN is considered boring here (at least by the mods), since it's been covered so many times before.

HN prioritizes content with more upvotes than discussion. This is a very common "algorithm". Lobsters uses it, Twitter users call it being "ratio'd", etc. In my experience it works great. Most link aggregators try to optimize for good content, not good conversation starters.

I doubt it. HN has always been company friendly, just look at where it started from. If anything HN has become much more skeptical about corporate interests over the years.

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