That was my first thought, if this is an embedded system without an update path this will be super hard to solve. People usually are not even aware of what OS their appliances run under the hood and whether or not they are updated automatically and how to update them if they are not.
We had a soccer player in NL that was wildly popular and he had these funny remarks every now and then which got him nicknamed the most well known dutch philosopher. One of these was 'every advantage has its disadvantage', I guess this is one of those.
Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time. And once your business is banned from here there isn't really a way back in.
I've been here for a while and that's not a pattern that I recognize, could you point out a few examples? I am fairly sure the mods would love to hear about this as well.
4 upvotes in 26 comments, also on spot 10 after refresh?
Still zero comments for both! If all you need to end up in the top 10 is 4 upvotes within 30 minutes I could start selling hacker news front page placements right here, right now.
Is the value of an upvote karma based? Is the ranking view based? Are view by high karma accounts worth more? In any case, those two posts are pretty sketchy. No one cares enough to comment on them and they are still on the frontpage.
It’s always amusing to see a topic that’s so esoteric no one can toss off low effort drive by comment on it. Let alone have insightful input on the subject.
I’d believe it’s the mods juicing it by hand, but perhaps there’s an algorithm filtering for subject distance from the core hn oeuvre?
HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.
The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.
The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.
Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.
[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.
That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.
> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.
> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?
> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.
Not everything has to have an explicit purpose beyond “this is a good and valuable thing”.
Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.
She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.
“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.
I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.
First two sentences are key. The reason why HN is so much better than other fora (IMO) is that the mods don't allow lever-pulling and astroturfing to overtake regular contributions. Yet it's also popular, so you're bound to get some activity on most posts.
Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.
Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.
I can't know for sure. For me, it's just the "eyeball method" of comparing HN and different subreddits on Reddit.
As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions:
1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially oriented, and there's the "Show HN" option, so it reduces the incentives for astroturfing.
2. Alternatively, how much controversy is there around the specific type of forum? For some subreddits, for example, you'd be able to see counter-subreddits popping up when participants feel the mods are abusing their power to promote one type of opinion.
3. Is a certain type of political/brand-related opinion or interpretation always at the top of your comment feed? For example, if upvotes determine the order of the comments, do you consistently see fewer critical comments on things that you'd expect the community to react to in different ways.
4. Do you consistently see some contributors having more power in discussions over others? Other than the mods, obviously. If this is the case, karma (i.e., number of upvotes) often has more value.
That’s a handwave trying to dismiss a host of valid concerns by lumping them together. It reads like “you probably want to game HN; stop doing so”.
Just a random issue that has been repeatedly brought up for at least a decade: HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies. It doesn’t use semantic HTML elements, it doesn’t use ARIA tags, its fonts and colors violate WCAG standards (which your browser’s dev tools will be happy to show you in detail), etc.
If the site is so blatantly unfriendly towards a significant minority of its potential users, apparently due to sheer negligence or “works for me” elitist attitude, I see no reason to believe that other aspects of the site are the way they are “on purpose”.
Accessibility is a problem and assuming it is as bad as you say it is it really should be addressed, agreed.
But that's completely orthogonal to being hard to game. And the concerns the OP brings up are unrelated to accessibility and indeed read more about instructions on how to game HN more successfully, otherwise why bring the VCs and the 'levers' into it in the first place?
While there is a lack of semantic HTML, "completely unusable" is an inappropriate exaggregation. At least I am pretty happy that HN is one of the last places on the internet that still work pretty well with a text browser like Lynx. I wonder, do you rely on accessibility, or are you just parroting things you read elsewhere?
Fighting spam is a benefit for everyone and it’s most definitely done on purpose behind closed doors.
Yes accessibility would be nice, I agree, but if I’m understaffed, provide free as in beer service where being on the first page is worth millions in marketing spend and being top 1 for a few hours is worth tens if not hundreds so I’m constantly under attack from everyone and their dog who have anything at all to sell, it’s going to be hard to prioritize other things.
…yeah I agree they should hire an intern or something to just fix this on slow burn.
HN is backed by very, very wealthy people, they could easily afford to fix this going on the assumption that it is as big a problem as the GP says, which I would rather ask the community than make any statements on.
> Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
> Reportedly looking directly at the NCPPR representative, he said, "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
It's all about balance, in the end. If you do too much of one thing your business will fail. If you don't do enough of another, your business will fail too. And they're the same thing...
The trick then is to do just enough of everything to avoid disaster and to move as fast as you can to get to a realm where you can actually afford to do it right. Most start-ups initially cut corners like it is crunch time at the circle factory, which then usually catches up with them at some point either killing them or forcing them to adapt a different pace. Knowing exactly when to put more or less attention on some factor is the recipe for success but nobody has managed to execute that recipe twice in a row without finding things that no longer work, so it remains a dynamic affair rather than one you can ritualize.
And that's where checklists shine: repeated processes that are well defined and where change is slow enough that the checklists become 'mostly static', they still change but the bulk of the knowledge condensed in them stays valid over multiple applications.
Your comment makes me realize that I consume HN differently than many others, because I've never seen a post with comments disabled and I've been around here for at least ten years. It's not that I don't think they don't exist — they obviously do because you're mentioning them. I've just never encountered one, primarily because I don't casually browse HN, ever. I subscribe to a pushbullet channel that notifies me when a post hits 500 up votes. That's it. The list of submissions on the home page (even on reddit) is just overwhelming to me so I use the pushbullet channel as a sort of community curated "best of" or "trending" signal.
Not to say that I don't procrastinate or waste time doing other nonsense. I can definitely spend a lot of time reading HN comments, as I'm doing right now.
Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
> Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. Just pointing it out. Aside from any more speculative benefit to YC for running the site, the site does run outright ads.
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