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PG: What I've Learned from Hacker News #681

Open nelsonic opened 5 years ago

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210923

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

"so many previous communities: being ruined by growth"

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

"Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa."

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

"It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic."

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory The broken windows theory is a criminological theory that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory thus suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, public drinking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes.

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

"The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.

Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.

Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense of being very short, and also on topic."

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

"The good things in a community site come from people more than technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad things that technology comes into play. Technology certainly can enhance discussion. Nested comments do, for example. But I'd rather use a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than a more advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls."

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those —and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

Overall a good essay, with insights on online communities. It's from 2009 and a lot has changed in the world. HN is still a good place to discover and discuss interesting and useful ideas. But one of the comments on the original discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053 Summarizes how I feel about the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496783

"Despite all the time I have wasted here....it was worth it"

"This sentiment is very common here, but I strongly question it. I also wonder why people don't label their time here a little more honestly: as procrastination. We all justify it as "oh, but I might learn something useful for my future". And some of us might have indeed tangibly improved their lives (though I'm sceptical). But surely whatever benefits you gain can be reaped by visiting say once every 3-4 days, vs 12 times in one day?"

I feel that most of the time I visit HN it's not because I need anything specific, It's procrastination. Sure I have learned a few things from interesting threads, But if I were to accurately track how much time I've spent on the site it's probably more than I've spent working on my own ideas... 🤨 I need to be more deliberate on focussing on what I want to get done, not on reading what others are doing/writing.

I think I need a once a day "timebox" or a daily allowance to spend on HN.