Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)
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One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how Slashdot died. As a former heavy Slashdot user, it wasn't that it got "too big", it was a useless redesign that did it. The redesign that finally killed it for me wasn't as bad as the infamous Digg V4 redesign, but it was still pretty awful. Could tell that some designers who didn't understand how users actually used the site got control: the redesign was perhaps "prettier", but it made it impossible for me to use. LOADS of unnecessary whitespace made it hard to skim threads, and I don't remember all the details but they royally f'd up the sorting, so it became near impossible to find high quality comments bubbling to the top. I was a frequent daily user who basically stopped overnight because I found the new design so hard to use.
Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so much about so many things thanks to Reddit.
It's a real shame that their management seems to be interested in making it yet another "social media, but different" kind of experience.
If your income is advertising, engagement and users with little impulse control seem to be the thing that brings value. And there seem to be few other ways to monetize a site.
the major exodus from slashdot to digg after a redesign was in 2007
Then the digg exodus to reddit after a resdesign was 2010
Tbh I find new Reddit far more usable than old, but perhaps if I had a slow computer or didn’t run JS or something, I could disagree?
I'd say HN has overall declined in quality over the last years but it's managed to avoid a precipitous decline by having basic standards.
Soylent News was a nice spinoff that the refugees founded, and it is still going, but it does suffer from a bit of a dearth of userbase. The codebase is pretty old, but design wise, it's the old Slashdot you remember from decades ago, in red rather than green.
This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms? Twitter and Reddit centralized power in online media, pulling content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that influencers had real power within those platforms was always naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I misunderstood!
Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement.
Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange of ideas).
Judging by your comment though, I think we prefer very different levels of moderation, and I'd agree that culturally Masto trends towards heavier moderation.
I'm talking about the fediverse in general (activity pub protocol) and the paradigm of "basically following a block list" which, after seeing how mono narrative and US centric some online spaces tend to be, I don't find appealing.
In particular my qualms were comparing it to the likes of reddit, which is usually heavily moderated.
I appreciate the suggestion of co-op. Don't think it will solve the "as an individual I don't want to be bound by the majority's Blocklist when people are so prone to behave like mobs" but I do understand the appeal. It works as a small wrbbof trust. För very small communities, it can work. But not much chance to grow and be an interesting compendium of ideas and shared content.
Large instance sizes are definitely a challenge re: accountability and much ink has been spilled on what the optimal instance size should be. There is definitely a sweet spot where one has strong representation but also belongs to a larger community that is capable, among other things, to maintain operations.
maybe all the lemmyverse instances share an identity chain, and all the mastadon instances share an identity chain, and they are both cross compatible with any other instance variant that supports the standard.
We have keybase, all your base belong to keybase
I have accounts on 5 separate Mastodon instances, and on none of them is the experience as you describe it. You also seem to believe that if you get on an instance run by a reactionary martinet that you are somehow forced to stay there or stop using the Fediverse. Of course, a lot of people seem to believe this about Twitter.
You're comfortable with whatever you're doing and that's fine but for someone who is looking for my usecase ,which is more akin to Reddit and being able to pick the subs I see for myself, it's absolutely limiting.
I don't care about mastodon or twitter but that's beside the point.
My points stand. If you want to address them make sure you read them again.
I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
Moving instances is unnecessary friction. I don't care if you qualify it as tremendous or not
> and it seems like your main beef, about some admin limiting what you can see by capriciously de-federating left and right seems to be primarily hypothetical.
What a disingenuous comment. You went from "have surveyed the 200k instances" to "it's hypothetical then".
No. It has already happened in a few of the instances recommended on Reddit. It happened in the first 2 I created accounts for.
> Why wouldn’t one start out on a pretty open, well-connected instance, follow whomever they want (‘constructing what you want to see’), and defer worrying until/unless some actual admin actions bother you?
I was following one that I thought was more open than the initial one I found myself in and suddenly it wasn't and the argument of some users was "of course the admin can defederate at any point for vague reasons"
> Second, users absolutely can run their own instance for full control over federation decisions, which is, while out of reach for normies, well in the capability of most HN readers such as yourself.
I'm also capable of hosting my own email and plenty other things but it's unnecessary effort for the value. It really is amazing how after disingenuous takes I get a ridiculous appeal to geekdom or something.
> I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
You're puzzled because you're unwilling to read them for what they are and instead produce strawmen in order to deny they are a reality.
Mastodon works for you. Great. But my points stand and are in no way rebuked by your "it's hypothetical", "wait, it's easy", wait, it's not easy but a HN type should do it.
Anyway, clearly the "Fediverse" doesn't work for you. Okay. All these platforms have downsides, and unless one's willing to go all the way to DIY kind of stuff, yup, we're going to be subject to the whims of someone we hope will be generally benign in their actions. LMK if you discover a way around that.
Interestingly, it turns out, free speech by far benefits the poor more than the rich.
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-economics-free-speech-benefits...
So I'm willing to accept a few mean comments.
You can always run your own instance for yourself. Also in practice I’ve not found it hard to find instances who’s block lists I agree with.
The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down (having already fragmented the communities unless they self host their instance, again, creating burden on the user for more Accounts)
I think you forgot this is HN where the standards are a bit higher and you get exposed to arguments that you may dislike. Account of 17 days too, so ironic.
You went with an ad hominem and double down on having no arguments.
This isn’t saying anything other than your not a fan. Which as I said is fine.
> My point is that the model of Blocklist from others is not enticing for any individualistisc user who values diversification of ideas and the fact that the default makes it a bad burden for the user who wants to try that, means that communities won't be formed that don't have that blocklist mindset, one way or another. The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down.
This was unspecific/vague and not an accurate description of the fediverse. It’s a very diverse (unfortunately so in some cases) group of communities that interact with each other. Or don’t if they choose.
The value in allowing each instance to handle their own block list is that it scales and allows you to choose a server that shares your perspective. And basically if you disagree that this is the case, you’re free to change that and that’s the point. You have all of the choice.
The choice I have is it to love or leave each instance and pay the price of fragmentation and user registration per instance, plus having to switch.
In any case, you've unwillingly agreed with me by explaining my "choice" after calling me uninformed and now vague.
It's funny how you also see diversity as an unfortunate. Says a lot.
Fundamentally, it's not putting the true power of granularity and easy choice on the user but forming small very narrow minded communities at the whim of an admin, with a high cost of transfer (unlike a sub where you might disagre with a mod decisiom).
Funnily enough, feels less free choice than Reddit in some aspects.
Of course, anyone at all who cares about money would have been a fool not to force him to buy it once he screwed up by bluffing in a way that made him contractually obligated to execute the transaction! So in practice, since even super-rich people love getting more money and non-rich people really want to become rich, good luck in practice spinning a hypothetical where Twitter owners would have said no, especially considering what a dog the company was already in terms of making money.
The problems with centralization were mostly theoretical for twitter and reddit ....
Obviously it’s not turned out that way and hopefully federation saves us all, but I don’t know if protocols will ever win over marketing.
Is it to much to expect the average user to continue dialing in their scopes? Maybe not.
How about the below average user?
Point being, people have been complaining about HN "turning into" reddit for at least the past decade - yet I guess it never quite "gets there" because people still make this complaint all the time.
(edited for typo)
ps. Hi Rob.
My understanding has always been that it's because slashdot sounds really funny when you say the full URL out loud the way they used to on TV:
h-t-t-p colon slash slash slash dot dot org
the new llm craze should make moderation and metamoderation even easier. i think we will see a resurgence of some slashdot inventions, albeit more automated.
collect votes from power users. extrapolate how they would have voted on stories they havent seen. feed people stories based on similar voting patterns, to test if you predicted their votes correctly. maybe a synthesis of two random voters accurately predicts a power voter.
id like to see something akin to a reverse subreddit. instead of having posts, i add 50 people to a list and turn them into a voting block. then i follow multiple voting blocks. i can follow other peoples voting blocks. my feed tells me which voting block elected to show me a story. let teams of people build voting blocks together, collaboratively. different voting blocks can have different purposes, like populism or expertise. being able to stumble into well made, premade blocks solves discovery and initialization problems, without having to bootstrap a feed from a low number of my own votes.
despite having a lot of blogspam, https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-sitcoms... ranker has a some good reranking ideas (like being able to rerank the list by bbt fan votes.)
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Circa_News?lang=en is another idea that will pop back up. Stories being composed of smaller elements, stitched together, and appended.
https://modo.org and https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news have some promise.
there are so many building blocks of good ideas, of which metamoderation is still one of the best, that it leaves me both exited for a future where somebody picks up the baton, and disheartened that somebody hasnt yet. is it time for a slashslashdotdot?
How can you have actually been there and at all believe this?
...or for making money?
I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot moderation system is too hard to implement. It also requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how many moderation points to dole out to users based on their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in principle.
Slashdot's mod system is not complex.
I think I remember my username, I wonder if it is possible to log in and find what I was posting about in high school... aha
Cheers to you sir.
On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by increasingly-obnoxious ads.
The primarily text-based Internet that I really enjoyed using seems to be getting smaller and smaller (or harder and harder to find). Can't say I'm surprised, though. The bill was going to need to be paid, eventually.
Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
He also seems to have had the weird notion that HN was rotating front page posts every five minutes so he would need to see the 10 best links every day.
But I don’t recall that ever being the case, and it certainly is much less so these days.
The only thing that has changed is that yes, many places (including HN itself) now aggregate popular stories into various formats but fundamentally, HN is exactly the same as it ever was.
Within the past few months, I've started to see more low effort comment posting, submissions way outside of what many thing HN on-topic to be, and I've flagged more submissions/comments in the past handful of days than I ever have.
HN is becoming something like a proto-popular reddit.
EDIT: Since the above sounds like doom-and-gloom for HN, I want to say it's great that more people can enjoy HN. I hope it stays (close) to it's original intent.
The main page tends to get some cool, oddball articles that you wouldn't otherwise see, but also gets clogged with very, very niche stuff that you're statistically unlikely to care about. Also, articles rise and fall from the main page too fast IMO, especially the ones that get overheated.
If you visit HN once a day, and want to see the 10 articles that probably affect you in some way, you can't beat /active. Just put on your fireproof suit before visiting the comments.
No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm.
I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become entirely useless.
The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning - it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is useless.
I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.
Clearly it's not. Not sure why I have to repeat myself though. ;-)
The passage you quoted is the following:
> Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.
The statements that could have been interpreted as the subject of your "at the time he was completely wrong" sentence:
1. Hacker News is awesome. 2. It's getting too big. 3. The value of reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. 4. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. 5 A digest of the 10 best items from Hacker News would be a really good Slashdot.
Hey thanks for following the guidelines despite my "ignorance", but you're basically telling me that if you could, you would be insulting me right now.
I'm not typing all of this to be snarky or to do a "technically..." gotcha. I also didn't know which statement you were actually talking about when I read your comment.
Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 - Aug 2013 (246 comments)