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Goodbye, Hacker News. I'm going back to Reddit.
It was worth putting up with the sycophancy of many of the commenters here who seem to participate only to impress PG, their would-be benefactor...for a while. It was worth it while the stories focused on the niche we are all interested in, startups. The change to more general-purpose news, the attempt to re-create the Reddit of old, seemed to be made without first asking the overall community for input (unlike the way that Craig Newmark makes all changes to Craig's List, for example). Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw. Yes, Reddit has been overrun by the unwashed masses. It has become messy in the way that democracy itself is messy. But this site is getting the feeling of an artificially sterile place for tech elites as defined by PG and his minions. So I'm going back to the unwashed masses, even if it means having to read a few more titles about cat pictures. Best of luck, though, PG, and thanks for the great information this site has given me thus far. I will continue to follow your impressive career and your essays with great interest.
PS, Editors, feel free to change my title to "Hacker News Rocks!"
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- palish 19y agoWait, what? Dude, a story that's submitted should be titled the same regardless of who submits the story. The only variance in titles should be mere semantics. Any extra information in the title only adds bias or spelling/grammar mistakes. Therefore, editing a title to its correct form is just fine. Relax. But if you can't relax, goodbye. If this thread title is any indication, you produce great Reddit/Digg titles. I hope Paul changes "title: " to "suggest a title: " on the submission page so people realize it's not their title. They didn't produce the content, and if they did then the editors aren't retitle it.
- aston 19y agoI actually think this is sort of a dumb argument to get into in the first place, but you have to admit that not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own the resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent. Ultimately, though, this sort of user revolt is bound to happen whenever you make major changes to how a community works. I think news.yc'll make it with or without the people who are pissed.
- palish 19y ago".. not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own their resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent." I don't see how a user owns a title to content they didn't produce. If they produced it, the editors won't change it. You get karma for bringing quality content to other people's attention, not for calling the content something it isn't.
- aston 19y agoWell, I've personally had titles edited, all for stylistic issues (none for bias, innaccuracy, or anything I'd deem worth editing). I don't really care, but I would prefer that unless my submissions were clearly in need of correction that they were not changed. They do show up under "submissions" clicking from my profile, so I think they ought to reflect what I submitted unless it harms the site.
- budu3 19y agoYou make a good point. Do we really own the titles? If we don't own it, then who does? The hacker news community, the editors? I guess if we don't then we need to change our mindsets. Is that why we can't delete the submissions we make?
- dfranke 19y agoWha? You can delete your own submissions. Just yesterday I submitted the RMS earthquake story before nickb did, but then deleted it after reading the Reddit comments on the same story and seeing that it was inaccurate.
- rms 19y agoYou can only delete/edit them for one hour after submission.
- motoko 19y agoWow, and suddenly I realized how much it must suck to be an editor...
- motoko 19y agoWhat's the expression? The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low?
- jsnx 19y agoA bikeshed (from a discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list -- see http://www.bikeshed.com/ http://www.bikeshed.com/).
- sbraford 19y agoYES - this is my favorite new dev meme. So incredibly true it's painful.
- dfranke 19y ago"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small" --Henry Kissinger
- nostrademons 19y agoThing is, Reddit really sucks now. I was just visiting it today and was amazed by the number of ignoranuses (ignoranus = someone who is both stupid and an asshole) on it. I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit. The curious thing is - in at least one case (HP fandom, and possibly the C2 wiki), I kept the friendships that I formed in it. Maybe that's the real point of online communities - form offline friendships, and keep those. Looking forward to the Boston meetup on Sunday...
- ashu 19y agolove the newly coined word and its etymology :)
- nostrademons 19y agoIt's not actually mine. I read it in some newspaper article about neologisms, and it appears in several places on the web (including 17 urbandictionary references).
- ivankirigin 19y agoemail Safire stat. Gotta get him on the case.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- amichail 19y agoHot links are great for discussion as many people will see them. But perhaps not many will interest you. Personalized links (assuming personalization works well) would come closer to your interests, but there may be few people to discuss them with. And so one might consider a way to allow users to pick some point between these two extremes that they would be happy with.
- damien 19y ago
- zach 19y agoAlso, Reddit doesn't have as much meaningless drama. As of right now, anyway.
- dfranke 19y agoJust wait until the next impeachment petition.
- twism 19y agoIt somehow felt a lot better IMO when it was "Startup News"
- Laurentvw 19y agoTrue. I'm going to miss all those startup submissions. I think he might have ruined the site this time, but we'll see.
- mangodrunk 19y agoWhat are you guys talking about? Can you list more than 10 sites in the past few months that were that informative. Yes, startup news is important, but we can't have submissions like "how to start your company" every day, because they tend to be the same thing. I enjoy this new take on things, starting the company is the easy part. Having the knowledge at the right time is the hard part. This is also a good way for people to get connected. I possibly need a partner for my startup (based on PG's advice) so maybe I'll find my partner here.
- jsnx 19y agoI don't see any reason to choose between ynews and reddit. The level of technical dialogue here is better, no question -- and for awesome lolcats and social interest anecdotes, like http://politics.reddit.com/goto?id=2g6mu http://politics.reddit.com/goto?id=2g6mu, there's reddit.
- Keios 19y agoAh! technical dialogue! Now where did you see that here? ;P
- dawie 19y agoI really liked the fact that YCombinator news was a niche site and I often wonder if the future of these sosial news sites is not having every category on a different site to deal with the signal vs noise factor...
- mhb 19y agousenet?
- vikram 19y agoWhy not create www.startupnews.com? If you want the code, google 'reddit clone'. I think the lisp community wrote atleast a dozen reddit clones after reddit switched from lisp to python. I say this because a lot of people have a problem with the change from a startup focused to a hacker focused site. Since you already have a community which is united around a common vision, it's probably worth acting now and create another site. The lisp hackers did a similar thing when reddit moved from lisp to python. For some reason they thought that reddit was only for lisp hackers. BTW, I don't think that worked as most lisp hackers were already active on cll or #lisp
- Goladus 19y agoI have two recommendations: 1. Have patience. 2. Be a part of the solution.
- bigtoga 19y agoAre you suggesting that, if I'm patient enough, they'll change the focus of this back to startup news? 'Cuz I can get "hacker newz" at reddit/digg/slashdot/a-dozen-other-places... And what "solution" should I be part of? The one that makes YC more money? Or the "sense of community"? I care squat about the YC community; I used to come here to read the startup articles. I can get arstechnica/lifehacker/etc links elsewhere.
- Goladus 19y ago1. "Have patience" means that you should avoid jumping to conclusions about what sort of content you were looking for out of this site, and to let "the dust settle" before leaping to conclusions about whether the new site suits you. If it's really that bad, you'll get bored and won't come anymore. 2. "Be a part of the solution" was really only half of what I intended to say, the other half being "stop being part of the problem." Being a part of the solution means voting up the articles you like, contributing knowledgeable and insightful commentary, and submitting the sort of stories you want to see. Being a part of the problem means throwing a temper tantrum without including any interesting or startup-related material.
- fleaflicker 19y agotalk about sycophancy
- budu3 19y agoIs PG butt kissing the "elephant in the room"?
- mynameishere 19y agoThe number of typical comments for a post determine what kind of people want to/are willing to comment: 0-10 comments: People who want to talk about the post per se 11-50 comments: People who want to have a conversation. 51- comments: People who want to join a mob. Obviously, ynews is moving from the first to the second, and that changes the types of comments/people commenting/overall community.
- danw 19y agoAny idea on how traffic trends for news.yc are since the relaunch? Was traffic dropping before the change? Has it gone up after?
- pg 19y agoTraffic was climbing slowly before the change, at about the rate it always has. Then there was a huge spike when we changed the focus. It's impossible to predict yet what the real trend looks like.
- danw 19y agoThanks for letting us know. Any chance of posting a traffic graph in a few weeks time to see?
- pg 19y agoSure.
- dfranke 19y agoIs the increased traffic more due to new users, or to existing users becoming more active?
- pg 19y agoMore users.
- Leon 19y agoI was very much hoping for the response to be a more active user base. At least then the community would still be some-what close to providing the wanted dialogue, as most users have been here for a few months already and there is some sort of community agreement on what constitutes a 'good' post. With a greater influx of new users the posting quality will probably go down, if not for the time it takes to grow accustomed to the social agreements on communication on the site. During this time, will we lose valued, long term members of the community? What is a decent solution to the problem of online community degrade?
- Caligula 19y agoI am very disappointed at the editing. I understand if the user includes profanity or hate speech but nitpicking? It just seems like censorship when it doesn't need to be.
- Hexayurt 19y agoI think the art would be to stop people joining the site when it reaches an acceptable level of coolness. Isn't this how Metafilter survives and maintains its excellent quality?
- pg 19y agoIt's the final straw that we fix typos and abusive punctuation in submission titles? That seems a bit melodramatic. I'm surprised to think anyone didn't already realize we did this. Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?
- fallintothis 19y ago"Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?" Sure, shatter the illusion why don't ya? Kidding aside, I don't know why people are flipping out. One should think the editors are carefully chosen to not be power-hungry jackasses out to destroy a story's integrity. It's not even like they're editing comments. Some people are quick to jump on the drama, I suppose. I share in the same sentiment expressed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43650
- trekker7 19y agoAs opposed to caring about the specifics like fixing punctuation, I think that critics don't like the authority (and potential for abuse) implied by administrators messing with user submitted text, no matter in how trivial a way. At some point users have to decide if they're willing to sacrifice a purely democratic community if it means an increase in quality. Is the point of a social news site to make a political statement, or is it find cool stuff to read? Edit: Maybe the admins should just be 100% transparent about everything they do; document their actions in a FAQ.
- rms 19y agoTransparency makes this a non-issue. Admin actions like editing titles should automatically show up on a log page.
- pg 19y agoYou're probably right. No one complains when whole submissions are deleted as spams, presumably because you can see them if you want by turning on showdead in your profile. So maybe I'll add something to preserve original submission titles.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- axod 19y agoI know this isn't the right place to ask this, but why is there no down arrow for submissions/comments? And why when you upmod something does the arrow disappear! Where's the undo?
- jsg 19y agoundo: none available--this is a design choice downmod: a user must develop a certain amount of karma before the down arrows appear. additionally, you may not downmod direct replies to your own comments or stories.
- surya 19y agoDemocracy has a weird tendency of favoring idiocy. Just take a look at this discussion: http://reddit.com/info/2ga89/comments http://reddit.com/info/2ga89/comments
- nirs 19y agoI think it is a great idea that a human editor is involved, and site content being edited. A similar process happen on a good wiki, and I always enjoy when my prose is translated to English behind my back :-)
- vlad 19y agoTo be fair to Paul and the moderators, the title of this submission used to be: Goodbye, HACKER NEWS!!!! I'm going back to Reddit. I don't think this site was meant for everybody to post whatever they want. There should be respect for other people's resources; while Reddit and Digg want as many users as possible, there is no such leverage here. I think the mistake is that users start thinking they can do whatever they want just because a social site is free.
- sabhishek 19y agoBTW nobody is posting porn here .. "whatever" is posted, is somehow related to startups/pragramming most of the times.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- taeeb 19y agoCaaa iOaass
- alex_c 19y agoI'm starting to feel like we need a meta.news.ycombinator.com, for all this meta-discussion... I'm sure the politics are fascinating, but they feel the same as those of every online community since the dawn of the Internet... :p Ah well, I guess I could just not click on them in my RSS.
- toemaz 19y agoA good alternative: http://www.dailyhub.com/ http://www.dailyhub.com/ from the owner of http://www.onstartups.com/ http://www.onstartups.com/
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- steve 19y agoeh, I'll always use both. Maybe I'm just that big of a slacker.
- dpapathanasiou 19y agoAlthough it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw. Wow, I was just complaining about something I found annoying; I didn't mean to start a revolt.