For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet

28•DenisDolya•2h ago

For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet. It’s not like others. Take Reddit, for example: at first glance it seems better, with tons of subreddits. But for a beginner, there is no real main entrance. With a new account, it’s a challenge - first you wait 5 days, then you need to earn karma just to post or comment in popular subreddits. On Twitter, you have to spend a long time building followers, or buy a checkmark, just to get access to recommendations. On Hacker News, everything feels right even if you are a beginner. Your post appears in the “new” feed, where everyone can see it. Karma is not so limiting here. At the start, you can make one post a day and a few comments, and after reaching just 10 karma, you become almost a full user - free to participate, contribute, and enjoy the platform. Hacker News is a place that survived the revolution of the modern internet and remained true to itself. A place without subscribers, paid boosts, or artificial promotion. The most important thing that keeps this world going is our elders people who preserve this spirit with discipline, guiding others who may have strayed from the path. HN is where the good, clean internet has survived after all these years. And I truly hope it will always stay this way. Thanks, HN.

Comments

labrador•2h ago

I agree for the most part but I've been getting bored with HN, mostly because anything controversial is censored by the mods and by ideological fans of certain people, especially Elon Musk whose fans will flag and downvote anything negative about him. This thread is a good example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592827

toomuchtodo•1h ago

I’ve been an HN participant for ~14 years, the vibe ebbs and flows. You can hide and ignore the folks you mention, what’s important imho is that the mods continue to aggressively cultivate a specific community vibe. Nothings perfect, but this is as close as it’s going to get to perfect imho as it relates to intellectual curiosity and understanding how the systems we exist in work.

ranger_danger•58m ago

> You can hide and ignore the folks you mention

How?

Bender•48m ago

The addon uBlock Origin has an option for rules to change HTML and could be used for this [1]. Replace Username with the persons Username. add to My Filters. I encourage people that dislike or often find themselves disagreeing with or being activated triggered by me to do this for my username.

[1]

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing.comtr:has(a.hnuser):has-text(/\bUsername\b/)

AnimalMuppet•1h ago

As far as I can tell, censored by mods is quite rare. It's almost always for violating the site guidelines (repeatedly and/or extremely flagrantly), rather than based on the ideology of the content. Most of the "censorship" is downvoting and/or flagging from users, not from mods.

But you can post almost anything here. You want to post Marxist stuff? You can, but you need to be more than just a propagandist. Actually thoughtfully interact with opposing ideas; admit when the data is against you.

You want to support capitalism? You can do that too, but again, be more than a shill (though being a shill for capitalism is more accepted here).

You want to criticize the US? Many of us do, from time to time. But again, don't just be a propagandist or ideologue. "USA is only evil! Down with USA!" gets censored. "The United States is acting like a bully in international relations, and has a long history of doing so" is (mostly) accepted as a reasonable and accurate statement.

You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.

constantcrying•53m ago

>You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.

This is not true, which is the worst moderation decision about the site. This site would be greatly improved, if this actually was how it worked.

If you post any actually extremely anti-consensus opinion here you get one or two down votes, your post gets flagged and everyone ignores it. This is obviously an anti-trolling measure, but obviously people will just abusively flag anything they really do not like.

LaurensBER•56m ago

In all fairness there's enough Elon Musk spam in the media and on X.

I'm quite happy that HN seems to stay mostly free of Musk (irrespective of positive/negative posts).

labrador•45m ago

There's are some interesting AI issues with Grok. How do you edit an AI so it says the opposite of the training data because you want it to agree with your ideology? Can a AI image generator which was trained on tons of porn, which Grok was since it was trained on X, ever really be considered safe? Is Grokipedia a fair replacement for Wikipedia which it was derived from?

But alas, we can't discuss any of this without being flagged by Musk fans. Someone commented on the thread I posted that the mods could unflag if they wanted to.

bigyabai•1h ago

It's still a YC property, at the end of the day. HN is more open than a lot of sites, but it has to be. HN's lifeblood is advertising for YC jobs and YC-affiliated startups, without free admission the site would be a self-defeating meritocracy.

Once you land the YC startup job and lurk around here for a few years, it starts to feel like the same links and comments regurgitated over-and-over. It's a valuable resource for brand-new tech workers that want to sharpen their mind a bit, but also a tarpit of backwards thinking once you reach a certain level of seniority.

DenisDolya•33m ago

It's not true, but nothing is perfect anyway, and in any case, the HN is more beautiful than the others.

throw20251220•1h ago

It’s too easy to downvote and flag someone. It also became extremely difficult to have a substantial discussion here due to “being off topic” and non-transparent post quotas.

There’s also an astonishingly high number of people who supposed to be smart and educated but are in fact just a bunch of idiots with hurt egos rolling on karma.

Havoc•1h ago

It helps that downvotes are limited to -4. Can’t have your entire profile obliterated by one misstep comment like on Reddit

LaurensBER•58m ago

Plus on Reddit people often delete their heavily down-voted comments (I dont know if this actually matters for a users karma but people sure do think so) which makes it impossible to follow the entire discussion and see what was actually going on.

Nothing as frustrating as finding what seems to be an interesting and engaging discussion but then finding several key posts missing...

anttiharju•1h ago

Tangentially; I keep finding I flag things accidentally due to mainly browsing on mobile.

smokel•51m ago

Assuming that modifying the minimal user interface is unwanted, a simple confirmation interaction could fix this.

vunderba•35m ago

It's always kind of drove me nuts that the "Hide" and "Flag" buttons are right next to each other. The number of times I've fat-fingered Flag by mistake and had to go to my Flagged Submissions and remove it...

Havoc•1h ago

Yeah definitely still the best.

Lately I’m seeing more comments though that interact with others like a LLM. Curt demands/instructions as in “show me a source” / “explain this aspect”. Makes me wonder about who the site is attracting

LaurensBER•54m ago

Given that there's very little benefits (that I'm aware off) of a "high score" HN account it does seem that there's little benefit for people to do karma farming.

I'm sure that there's still some people who try (and/or test their pet project) but it seems far less of an issue than on Reddit.

fullshark•55m ago

Hacker news is good for one particular use case: reasonably informed discussion of technology industry news.

I don't view it as a community and every time a topic goes outside that space (e.g. society, culture, economics etc) I'm frequently horrified by some of the comments I see here.

gjvc•54m ago

pretty low bar

Apreche•51m ago

There is some good stuff here, which is why I am still here. But if you look at the comments on certain topics you can see there are truly awful human beings here that are not being banned. That keeps it from being the best.

DenisDolya•43m ago

Well, if you could complain about these commentators to the moderators.

vunderba•37m ago

I’d say it’s the best large community. My experience is that the best communities that I’ve been part of have always been pretty small with no more than a few dozen people. (usually in IRC or Discord).

labrador•13m ago

This post disappeared off the front page in record time. I now can't find it on the first 4 pages. I think my point about censorship has been proven correct.

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