Articles by individuals about self discovery are my favourite. "Here's something I learned. Here's how I learned it. Here's how things are different because I learned it." Especially when it's not cutting edge stuff. Especially when it's by individuals who aren't serial bloggers.

Honestly, everything else feels like an unfulfilling facebook-like time sink. Current events, advertising, new libraries of random languages I don't use, echo chamber issues, self-serving content where "experts" sell you their perspective for ad revenue.

A major pet peeve are downvotes on perfectly polite comments from people who have different opinions about the topic you are commenting on. If downvotes were merely used to order comments, I could understand trying to deprioritize unpopular or factually incorrect views.

But if downvoted comments are effectively hidden away, a downvote becomes a tool of censorship, a political weapon to punish and banish opposing views. It turns the community to an echo chamber and discourage me to contribute any view that might offend the mainstream groupthink - which is not a unique emergent spirit of the community, but heavily influenced by the demographics of the site.

Many of my votes are upvotes to unfairly downvoted, high effort comments.

It hasn't. Declined a lot over past five years. There are days now not a single front page article is motivating enough for me to click on it.

I'm sure HN has grown audience and in general appeal over same period

Both that wider appeal and my loss of interest is due to subject shift of content. From mostly high s/n, tech and startup articles to human interest, "life hacks", and long form. From stuff that is directly useful (to a niche audience), to generally applicable entertainment.

I find the converse of the observation is true as well. I often post things about potentially controversial topics (Rust advocacy, undefined behavior, the suitability of Electron for UI), but I am always very careful to avoid provocative statements. In fact, I usually send around a draft and reword anything that is at risk for being misunderstood. As a result, I often see lower engagement in comments than I would expect for comparable material. Like probably about 0.01% of content creators, I take that as a positive metric.

I also have a very good experience on Twitter, being careful only to tweet constructive things, and curating my feed. (I'm interested in political news, and find that following only Kyle Griffin gives me all the signal and none of the noise).

That said, though I can tune my personal experiences in these ways, I feel like I'm pissing into the wind. All of the digital content business is relentlessly optimizing for clicks and engagement at the expense of everything else, so I think it's increasingly difficult to filter for quality. I try to spend more time with print, but I find it hard to resist the immediacy of digital.

My favorite posts are the ones about passive-income, and anything science related. Especially in the latter I'm amazed by the diversity of the people commenting in here. You can pick the most advanced and niche topic and there will always be an expert here who can elaborate on the subject. There's no other place like HN in the entire web.

> If you want to blame Facebook and YouTube for allowing the spread of wild conspiracy theories, it’s hard to also blame calmer forums like Hacker News for moderation.

This. I would love to see more sites experimenting with transparent, interrogable but impactful moderation schemes that actively shape conversation.

My favorites are the Show HN. I get to see something that someone else built and read about how they did it.

They are often about things that I have long forgot about but have/had an interest in (e.g, programming on TI-84s).

I can’t work on everything that I want but at least I get to read about others doing it.

What I’m most interested in is knowing how moderation works behind the scenes. It can’t be that dang and sctb (and other mods I don’t know about) read every single comment. Yet they rely to comments that violate the guidelines and warn users.

There must be some software analyzing comments based on different parameters (length, downvotes, scans of problematic words/phrases, and more...machine learning/AI too?) and flagging them in a queue for attention.

The internals of how HN does this are pretty interesting. Is there a write up about the back-end somewhere? Maybe with screenshots or walk-throughs on what it means to be an admin on HN? I would find that interesting.

Peer pressure, pure and simple. Yes, there are tons of people who talk loudly and rudely about topics they don't really understand at all. There's plenty of stalking and brigading that people get away with. But there are also just enough people who are informed and articulate to make it worthwhile anyway. The karma/vote/flag system is, similarly, just good enough to make their comments more visible most of the time.

It's sort of the worst possible tech news/discussion site, except for all the others. It's also a bit fragile. If a key hundred or so of the top commenters (not highest karma because karma grossly overweights submissions vs. comments) stopped participating here, I and probably many others would no longer find it "just good enough" to bother. It's really only a matter of time before that happens.

I think that was a bit of a weird conclusion. The "flame war detector" is terrible. What is does is cave to the will of the flamers and create a positive feedback loop for them. They will then go on to post on other topics, which why even the most benign posts will have crap comments. It is what it is, but certainly not even close to ideal.

Good to know

"More comments than its score" looks like a nice indicator, though there is probably a threshold, otherwise any new story would probably trigger it.

The hard part of the website it seems is not just the "CRUD" part but all the intelligence to make it feel "seamless" (because without it it would be a spam and flame fest)

The challenges of course keep evolving and I have my worries about some of those (influence by 3rd parties mainly and some discussions that maybe should be allowed but aren't - though that's more on the editorial line of the site)

IMO it works because the moderation keeps things civil and polite. It's not just a question of saying things that are true, the tone of how things are said seems to matter. People get tired of debates where there's a lot of sarcasm.

This is actually the only forum I bother with, having tried a few over the years.

My favorites are the highly rated and vetted learning resources or canonical resources for a given topic. It’s gem hunting for knowledge and it pays off frequently.

Hacker News is really good! I consider it like a pre-buyout Slashdot in its golden era.

What else is there?

I‘m looking for publications with medium to highly technical articles about practical technology, esp. material science, manufacturing, IT, automotive, robotics, clean tech etc., but without all the product placement, cultural and political topics and alarmist trends.

HN used to be very close to optimal for me, except for the (logical) focus on programming, but recently there‘s just too much politics, climate, „look at my amazing 100 line project“ and self-help stuff to weed out. Any recommendations?

I'd argue this is how HN hits a glass ceiling. Somehow the moderators of HN think the community is mature enough to have meaningful discussions, but completely immature and unable to handle topics that the mods don't consider kosher.

There's no other place online that would actually attempt an honest discussion about "non-kosher" topics, and the mods are killing that chance by shadow banning

I feel like one mandatory rule on HN should be explicit : Don't upvote because you agree the post, but because it add value to the discussion.

BTW, I consider the quoted moderator response to be very well-written itself.

I've often wondered if well implemented shadowban works.

>Thanks to moderation, when I open news.ycombinator.com right now, I’m pleased to see interesting new posts about C, Chopin, and concurrency; and no new posts about fake news, anti-vaxxers, or Flat Earth.

We only like strong moderation when it enforces our biases and political leanings.

By shadow banning and hide comments. That's how hacker news work today.

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maybe you have become blind to the torrent of posts about facebook.

Meta.

See a post you don't like? Somehow manage to make it have more comments than upvotes and it's gone. I don't see any potential for abuse here /s

The stories that generate flame wars don't go away as long as they align with Dang's and other moderators political views.