I'm glad to see that HN as a whole sees flaws in SO. I've avoided using SO as much as possible for years now and it seems like other people are coming to the same conclusions as I did. Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers and the downvoting beginner's questions and the "THIS IS A DUPLICATE" answers when the "duplicate" question is totally different and the "deleted as off-topic" on every interesting question, I find it really painful to support the site at all. The site has so much potential, but I find it less and less useful these days to the point where I can't justify ever checking the site out.
In this thread are dozens of people complaining about something they would never use, ie going through a billion results. It’s really weird how hateful HN can be for no real reason.
The way I see it, HN has lots of people who jump on and off of bandwagons, even before standard developers have the opportunity to use them. These sorts of negative comments are a sign that the tool is becoming mainstream, which is a good thing.
I also want to add: HN is an especially bad place to validate this type of product because HN has the exact same interface as reddit. This post is popular because of its novelty, there is an incentive to upvote this post and say whatever OP wants to hear in order to get him to keep working on this project. Because "having alternatives never hurts". But it hurts the person developing the alternative. He already lost 4 years of his life to this. Hopefully he wises up and pivots before he wastes another 4 years.
Really? I like n-gate, but it changed nothing for me. Yes, not everything said in the comments section here makes sense, and some of it is ridiculous, but so what? We need to be critical and use our judgement whether it's HN or any other site (including n-gate!).
I'm tempted to chalk that up to HN being, essentially, a pet project implemented in a toy language as a not entirely open source[0] forum maintained by volunteers. Of course, I don't know but that's my guess, that pg just didn't work very hard on polishing up the parts he didn't find personally interesting. For some reason, people seem to be weirdly elitist about HN's layout, and act as if any slight change to the UI is going to allow the barbarians of the internet to storm the gates, until Hacker News is aught but cat memes and ashes.
[0] The language and original forum are, obviously, open source. But AFAIK you can't make pull requests against the code HN is actually running, which has had tons of modifications made to it, because that's special sauce. There used to be a repo for making bug and feature requests but that seems to no longer be active.
Of course, you could roll your own minimalistic threaded forum, but getting people to move from HN anywhere other than lobste.rs[1] (if they want more moderation) or reddit (if they want less) might be difficult, unless you're serving some specific niche like DataTau[2].
There was a HN thread on sqitch just yesterday [1], and a lot of people seemed super frustrated with it. Not that this is necessarily any better, I don't have experience with either.
Then I’d suggest you need to pay more attention to the meta discussions on HN.
Sanctioned downvote misuse creating an echo chamber has always been a huge complaint.
For the case in hand it doesn’t even matter: HN is not open source, you can’t install it yourself so you can’t expect to mirror the algorithms for ranking etc.
Ha are you joking? This site is exactly the place I expect to see that kind of sentiment. It precisely matches HN’s reputation; it’s been a cliche since Dropbox launched.
HN is "good" (debatable) because it's backed by Y Combinator. The tech involved is the bare minimum needed to solve the problem, and isn't a good model for "how to successfully build and run a community".
Without the support of some of the most powerful people in SV, and the people who follow those people, this site ceases to exist, and quickly.
Replicating HN's simplicity/tech stack is like painting stripes on your Civic because the F1 car you like has them.
I fucking loathe the attitude that HN should be anything other than what it is. If you like it, use it. If you don't like it, don't use it (and hopefully make something that you do like).
But don't, when someone has spent a few hours tinkering to fix some stuff, complain about unprofessional. Or do, but don't then complain about the downvotes.
No, I don't think HN is very smart in this regard. Holding an opinion that is seen as devaluing the state of software on HN will get you knee-jerk downvotes and subsequent hellbanning.
HN definitely has a toxic "shoot it down" mentality when new things are presented. As an example, I recall a post where someone posted a browser-based implementation of some very nice airplane cockpit instruments, and I was not at all surprised when the top comment was about how stupid and dangerous it is to try to implement flight controls in a browser. The controls were intended for training purposes. It's as if the prevailing attitude often starts with "your idea is wrong and stupid and I know better even though the first thought I've ever put into the topic was 30 seconds ago."
I often just shake my head at people's inability to sit back and appreciate what's interesting about something, rather than try to find things that are wrong with it.
Maybe it's interesting to you since HN is your baby and it's fun to watch people use your creation in unexpected ways, but for us, it's lowering the value/utility.
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