Hacker News is a masterpiece

I value the community here as I feel I’m getting thoughts and opinions that are not being filtered to suit my desires like Reddit and Twitter can.<p>For example I’m a long term Cryptocurrency user&#x2F;investor&#x2F;advocate and Hacker News is one of the few places I read negative discussions on Cryptocurrency that are well reasoned and anchored in reality.<p>Most discussion I see on other sites is either negative out of bitterness (and it shows) or positive for no reason other than misplaced hope.<p>There are other topics too I find insightful and the comments section often valuable even though it’s a topic that makes me feel not so good. For example topics regarding getting old, ageism, what we spend out time on in life.<p>Often confronting but helpful to see and read, sometimes causing me to change trajectory.<p>Again I rarely find a similar level of confrontation on websites to my wants and desires outside Hacker News.<p>I have a healthy group of friends that will confront me with similar levels of unease, never letting me get to comfortable.<p>Just wish more websites offered a similar experience.<p>Twitter and Reddit I find are time sinks with little return other than a place to burn time.

I love Hacker News because it&#x27;s a place people share their expertise. People usually don&#x27;t get away with b.s. because other experts will correct them. So many times I&#x27;ve read an interesting article and then checked the comments to find out why it was flawed and or conversely, why my interest was well placed. HN can be a tough crowd for your medium article or weekend project, but it wouldn&#x27;t be interesting or useful if it wasn&#x27;t. Diversity of thought is encouraged but personal attacks are not. It&#x27;s a good balance. I&#x27;d like to thank dang for his hard work in making HN what it is day in and day out.

Sure is the first and last website I check every day. I don&#x27;t know of any other website which is so straight forward, hasn&#x27;t shafted itself down to hell and has been as consistent as this.<p>home page, cmd+click article, cmd+click comments, repeat.<p>Because the comments are often as insightful if not more insightful as the article linked.<p>I still miss the count of upvotes since they removed that though, it helped sift through the comments quicker. :)

The genius is in the revenue model. It isn&#x27;t hard, in theory, to build a website like HN (well, in practice it probably is - but not outside the top 10% of web coders). The tricky part is why should people like pg and dang sink so much time into growing the garden and keeping it pruned.<p>The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to.

HN is still the best tech news site for me and discussions on what I consider general topics on HN are better than on any social media site.<p>Unfortunately it is consistently getting worse. 10 years ago a message would only be mass-downvoted for tone, but never for specific opinion expressed or defended. So HN would be a place for interesting discussions without flamewars.<p>Not anymore. Now I seldom bother posting opinions on touchy topics that are against the &quot;SF bay mainstream&quot; view -- no point of wasting time it the post gets hidden in minutes. On other topics it is still a good discussion place where one doesn&#x27;t have to fear expressing a minority opinion. My 2c.

My wife grew up in North Dakota where the brutal winters make life miserable for many people. I once asked what the benefit to living there might be and she repeated the oft-given reason the locals usually say - &quot;It keeps the riff-raff out&quot;.<p>One of the reasons HN has a really good signal&#x2F;noise ratio is that its simple design and lack of &#x27;flashiness&#x27; does not attract the usual Internet crowd. Only people who really care about technology and the details of how it all works stick around here for very long. Those who want cat videos and meme discussions quickly move on.

&quot;What I like most, though, is that the news doesn’t make the front page based on your interests, but instead the interests of others.&quot;<p>When internet websites started getting &quot;smart&quot; and feeding &quot;my interests&quot;, I stopped using internet websites. Hacker News and Wikipedia are... the _only_ sites I use with regularity.

In fact, when I first opened HN, I couldn&#x27;t read the comments very well. Because the font is too small, the layout is dense, and there are no pictures. But when I started reading the comments carefully, I was really surprised by so many people being active on it and so insightful most of the comments are.<p>Now I&#x27;m actually getting used to reading these text-only pages.

I think HN has found its perfect niche and business model, and has the level of simplicity required to never get old. Even if it has a dark « false productivity » side, i think its purpose goes towards progress of mankind. PG, YC and its administrators take way less from it than they create. A true inspiration for any project.<p>And there are even settings to limit your time on the website and avoid unproductive rabbit holes.<p>« Simplicity makes me happy. » Alicia Keys<p>(For a lack of a better quote without being cheesy)

There aren&#x27;t even thumbnails of images present in articles, which nowadays are flooded with irrelevant stock pictures that mislead users into think the picture is really related to the event. No pictures means you can&#x27;t just let your lizard brain take over, you have to read titles, I think I skip over many interesting articles on news sites because flashy images trick my brain.

So what makes Haker News great is a lot of &quot;features&quot; that it doesn&#x27;t have. How ironic that others spend so much resources adding features that are ultimately detrimental.<p>But I guess it&#x27;s a matter of who the audience is. If you want to appeal to the masses, some of these &quot;features&quot; probably do help.

HN being text only is the number one reason (imo). I think the shift of internet content going from text-&gt;images-&gt;video has pulled the internet away from it&#x27;s original purpose, communicating text and the written word. And HN still has that original essence.<p>That and the community ofc

HackerNews susceptible to flattery, as evidenced by this submission!<p>That said, I agree whole-heartedly. HN is the start and end to most of my days as well.

It&#x27;s the better reddit &#x2F;r&#x2F;popular to me.<p>People here are less mentally mainstreamed, homogenized and lobotomized.<p>And since this page doesn&#x27;t have to fulfil any user interaction metrics it can simply stay the way it is (almost perfect) without having to support new media, getting redesigned and filled full of tracking JS, A&#x2F;B testing JS and other trash.

I love Hacker News, the community here even being known to be harsh sometimes in opinions but I appreciate the strong opinions even if I disagree with them. It&#x27;s an amazing community and I relate to it a lot. I check it everyday and mostly have a ton of interesting advice&#x2F;news to share with family and friends.<p>Thank you HN!

Like all things internet, if its history isn&#x27;t being curated and cataloged, yesterday links eventually break and old content is lost. This is the only weakness in an otherwise solid technical and professional atmosphere.

The things that make HN so good are the clean no nonsense design. The extremley good moderation and the level of knowledge and expertise of the posters, especially in relation to technology.

Gotta thank @dang et. al. for keeping the quality of Hacker News (both submissions and discussion) so incredibly high.<p>Browsing HN feels like what browsing Reddit felt like back in 2012. There are a lot of great viewpoints on here from all sorts of people (though it is a bit of a monoculture being that most of us are in the tech industry). Meanwhile, outside of some niche subreddits, an increasing number of submissions onto Reddit make you wonder &quot;is this real?&quot;, and top-voted comments are often called out for misinformation by much less popular replies.<p>A lot of this, I think, comes back to motivations. Hacker News doesn&#x27;t need to chase growth above everything. It&#x27;s run by a super successful VC as a kind-of side project that also doubles as a funnel for applicants into YC. From what I understand, Reddit makes almost all their money from ads, so they absolutely need to grow the site and increase per-user engagement, which makes them take several pages from Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram&#x27;s playbook, and none of those pages have &quot;quality text content&quot; as a leading KPI.

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Hacker News is in absolutely no way a “masterpiece”; it’s a site, one of many, that aggregates articles, sorted by popularity. Because it’s run by the largest startup accelerator in the world, it attracts people other sites don’t.<p>The only special thing about HN is its association with YC. That’s it.<p>But people have this inherent need to worship just about anything, so we get self congratulatory articles like this one.<p>Maybe the fact that this article does well here will make a few of you see through the bull crap? Probably not, but a girl can dream…