Im just taking a wild guess, but here's a summary of a few bad behaviors here that have kept me from posting projects im proud of before...
most of the time someone posts something here, you get:
- this is wrong, they forgot to pump the xyz modulator in line 18
- I dont see why they didnt do it exactly how id do it
- why do this? so and so already did it, and its in rust
- you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
and my favorite:
- this reminds me of this awesome startup xyzmodupump.co, it doesn't really do anything similar to this, but the name is similar, oh and by the way im the CTO full remote bay area free lunabars and dog sitter.
My experience of my stuff (rarely!) getting posted here was not nearly as bad as you describe but yeah this certainly exist. My suggestion would be to learn to ignore/brush off these parts.
Well this would not do the shattering-ago amount of damage but after repeated exposure I would probably get burnt out and quit.
Here is an anecdotal analogy: Friends repeatedly call me Internet Explorer every time I share any Tech article that is > 2 weeks old. After a month I just stop reading tech news altogether.
Are they joking ? Yes. It is serious ? No, but it just kills all the fun.
Well this would not do the shattering-ago amount of damage but after repeated exposure I would probably get burnt out and quit.
Here is an anecdotal analogy: Friends repeatedly call me Internet Explorer every time I share any Tech article that is > 2 weeks old. After a month I just stop reading tech news altogether.
Are they joking ? Yes. It is serious ? No, but it just kills all the fun.
Exactly. You can always ignore HN (or any other community discussing your creations) if you don't like what they have to say - much easier than making angry comments about them.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
1. Every time someone posts one of Foone's threads to HN, a Twitter bot that just reposts HN links will link to the thread, which notifies them, which is annoying. They always block all of them, but there always seems to be a new one. They've speculated that there's a "how to build an HN repost Twitter bot" tutorial out there that they're all copied from, and that's why there's so many identical bots.
2. People keep complaining that they write Twitter threads instead of blog posts, and they're tired of it.
People misgender them, or complain about their pronouns, and complain that they use Twitter instead of a weblog (which they do because they have ADHD and Twitter is the only platform they have the focus for.) And then eventually people get mad at them at having the temerity to complain at all.
Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different? No, they just have a preference for publishing information in an inefficient way.
> Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different?
It's a very bold assumption to expect the exact same structure in a blog post (which can be edited at arbitrary places within the entire document) than in a twitter thread (where tweets can not be edited once sent). Editing - or not being able to edit, for that matter - has a massive influence on the eventual resulting text.
In fact, the incremental nature of twitter threads kind of caters to the ADHD brain because it completely defeats self-sabotaging perfectionism by removing the opportunity to revisit and rework previous sections of the text. If you follow Foone for a while, you'll see that they tweet their thoughts and works as it happens. They don't sit down and prepare the entire thread beforehand because doing so would make it a lot harder to finish, if not entirely impossible.
> Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different?
Yes? A blog post is a commitment; you write out a bunch of text, and then you have the option to polish and edit it, so there's generally the expectation that you'll polish and edit it. But you don't want to do that, so you just write the blog post (or half the blog post) but never publish it.
On Twitter, you can just write half an unedited blog post, and then stop; and people will still derive value from that.
They were writing the twitter thread in real time as they were reverse engineering the program. In fact, when I clicked the link, they weren't even done yet.
Twitter is a better medium for this kind of thing.
Curious that you think blogging is more efficient than tweeting.
Writing many short pieces of content asynchronously and being able to GC them from your mental stack whenever you need is objectively a very efficient way to publish.
It's important to remember that not everyone's brain works the same as yours - for some people it's quite transformative to be able to document thoughts atomically.
