Been banned on HN

There is that website, called Hacker News. It’s not something like hacker-news.org, hn.org, hn.io or whatever you would guess it could be. It’s news.ycombinator.com, which is not news from ycombinator (a startup accelerator), but just a link-aggregator, where a community of registered — and not banned, like I am now — users can post whatever links they think relevant.

Relevant to… tech? Or what techbros are interested in?

E.g. Navalny death, totally relevant, right?

That’s not their blog either. That one lives at /blog.

That’s what they themselves call it on their about page:

HN is a news aggregator where users can find and discuss the latest news and submit content on anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity. YC alumni also post engineering, product, and design jobs on HN.

Basically that’s just saying ‘we created this community, and our alumni also a part of it’.

Cool, okay.

While the idea of a ‘comminuty that share links with each other’ is great, it isn’t new and isn’t unique to ycombinator and Paul Graham, obviously. Basically the entire Reddit is built on this premise, with sub-reddits being specific communities of interest.

Lemmy, is the modern-days alternative you should consider.

Hacker News is just a kind of a techy sub-reddit, having a weird text-only based format. Which is kinda okay for most tech folks out there.

Me too, if the people implementing it are slightly more competent in what they do. Trying using that crap on a mobile. And why would you use that on any other device is beyond my understanding.

I’ve been there for a while, some 4 years. But progressing through the war Ruzzia wages on us, that experience made me unwilling to interact with the community.

Possibly, the worst thing about it, becoming too popular among some folks.

Things I don’t like about the community:

• It’s used to promote YC-stuff.

  Fair, but for me it feels like ‘we’re gonna keep that weird community for you, and use it as our personal advertising platform for our needs.’ Still fair, but I don’t like the approach.

• While the gold is in the comments, some commenters are just straight manipulative or stupid

  Still fair, for a large community. Again: I don’t like it still.

• Moderation: not the first time I see the dang guy wtfing me for no real reason, and just ignoring some other comments. There’s no moderation log to evaluate whether they’re biased or not.

  For the context, here’s my last interaction with the dang-mod. You have to be logged in to see the end of the discussion, since he straight out banned me right after that interaction.

• Well, and: technical realisation is just plain shit, from every possible point of view. I don’t know, possibly that’s ‘if it works, don’t break it’ approach, possibly some regards to Paul’s legacy, possibly something else, but the website is just not usable. Search is from a third-party, the website cannot remember my scaling factor too.

  If you think that’s minimalism, you know nothing about minimalism, don’t you? It’s fucking incompetence and the cult of the leader who wrote that. It’s a miracle they rewrote that shit to some common Lisp or something. It’s just a shitty website someone made in 00’s (2007, actually), and as someone turned to become popular among some folks, the website accumulated some cult-like status among these weirdos too. I have no respect towards ‘designs by programmers,’ but I think it would fail even at that measure. I see nothing to be impressed here. The only thing I’m truly impressed with is the influence, money, and status PG and his tech-bros accumulated. That’s a true achievement, but this website… it’s just a byproduct of all that. It’s not worthy any attention.

It’s just a website, no more, no less. It accumulated some community, that’s an achievement, but it wasn’t difficult in the early days of the internet. Popular does not equal quality. But it’s popular out of the inertia, plus a great piligrimage of wannabes.

Those are just my personal subjective thoughts. Fuck it. Whom am I making this excuse for?

I don’t have anything against any of the parties, by the way¹. YCombinator is okay, Paul Graham is okay, the community is okay, if you are okay with some stupid kiddos, some old farts, some far right politics — basically a real society in a nutshell — you may be OK with the site too. I’m not.

As I don’t want to participate in the HN community any longer, I’m seeking for better alternatives.

These days, I’d recommend lobste.rs. I find their community much healthier. Possibly because it’s just less popular, but I found myself enjoying it much more.