Does HN have conflicting interests?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149248

by yters • 18 years ago

6 14 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

A) HN users want in depth, rational discussion.

B) HN users want a pro startup environment.

B means users will favor optimism and discourage anything cynical. A sometimes requires what may look like cynicism.

These two interests are therefore in conflict and will cause irrational behavior:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148830

xLnt has raised a valid issue, but most went with a knee jerk response. I am surprised that this happened, especially since pg's article is on the front page.

So the question: what is HN essentially about, startups or discourse?

This is an important issue. If it is not dealt with, the community will default with B and discourage the users who come here for A. However, HN's lasting value lies in a community that can converse well with each other. Otherwise, I fear HN will become a guru culture and lose the ability to buck the system.

In short, it will no longer be worthy of the name Hacker News.

xlnt2• 18 years ago

I don't think my comments were cynical. I'm optimistic that not being romantic can work even better than a status quo life.

yters2• 18 years ago

"look like cynicism"

Significant discussion happens around the "nerve points" and questioning their legitimacy can look like cynicism.

xlnt2• 18 years ago

To me, the other side looks very pessimistic. They say: so what if it hurts people? Life would be even worse without it. No optimism that life doesn't have to hurt.

wheels• 18 years ago

All news sites are biased, moreso if they are community maintained. It's not devious; it's just sociology. Communities tend to reinforce values that they agree with or validate what they are doing, especially if it's risky. I think the sollution is to just factor that into your reading.

icky• 18 years ago

I think you're grasping at straws, here.

Got a better, more relevant example?

yters2• 18 years ago

Yeah, that one example isn't enough, though it is interesting. It's a trend I've noticed and the point is valid, but I don't have a lot of good evidence I can pull.

davidw• 18 years ago

I've often made contrarian arguments, and at times pessimistic ones. Not about people's individual undertakings, as that would be against what I consider the spirit of things here, but in a 'general case', I think it's perfectly healthy.

cmm324• 18 years ago

The catch 22 is that if everyone agreed and if everyone came here for one type of discussion, then it would not be diverse and interesting. If everyone here had shared the same points of view, things would get boring quick.

It is one of the first facts about teams... dynamic and diverse teams have a higher probability of success, I would think that could apply to a discussion based community.

dcurtis• 18 years ago

When the front page of hacker news is filled entirely with questions about hacker news and its community, will it still be worth coming here?

This is obviously an exaggeration, but the number of reflective question-based Ask News.YC posts has become somewhat discouraging.

rms2• 18 years ago

Discouraging of what? The idea of this community is to make a community that doesn't suck, which is probably going to require continuous meta-discussion. One day we'll take the meta discussion to a sub tag.

joshwa• 18 years ago

That's one thing (of many) that metafilter got right.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

I tend to agree with you, but I don't think there's any way to change it.

HN naturally attracts the sort of people who can't resist twiddling the knobs, making grand proposals to twiddle the knobs, putting up charts and graphs depicting the results of their knob-twiddling simulations, and (of course) complaining that the current setting of the knobs is responsible for all of the evils in the world today.

This is how many hacker personalities work, and you're not going to drive out this kind of meta-discussion without driving out many of the hackers, which would be bad.

I just try to ignore it to the extent that I can. Which is not very well -- it's kind of fun to watch people propose 1,001 variations on the moderation system. I'm particularly fond of the genre that involves turning those of us with hundreds of karma points into all-powerful demigods. I don't think that's a good idea at all, but, like the One Ring, it is hard to resist. :)

rms2• 18 years ago

I think it would be good to have a sub.news setup here, where submitted stories were classified and users could choose how much of each type was on their home page. If users liked lots of general discourse, they would only see the highest rated Startup/Hacker stories. If users only liked hacker/startup stuff, they would never see the general discussion, except when the other ones went off topic. I think the core hacker/startup culture would still survive in such a setup.

This drastically improved reddit, but it was already too late to save reddit. I think implementing sub.news.arc roughly as implemented on reddit would only improve news.ycombinator.com.

brk• 18 years ago

For starters the comment you cite does not look like "raised a valid issue", it looks like "silly 13 year old comment", and I think it was modded appropriately. Had he provided some other thoughts or datapoints to back up his position, or even just stated his case in a more normal manner ("No, I think romance is dumb. It takes valuable time and money cycles away from my building my company"). I did note that he provided a little more data further down in the comment stream.

But, to answer your question, I don't think there are conflicting interests here. People who favor "B" will (hopefully) learn over time that their interests are better served by considering all arguments. Provided of course that those arguments are actually well-reasoned and presented, and not just "No, u r dumb".

"Pro Startup" does not have to equal "sugar coated happy you-can-do-it" comments. In fact I would think most true hacker types would have gotten enough of that bullshit in school and would crave honest feedback.

Does HN have conflicting interests?

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