HackerNews and Dart stories

[James Wendel]

A story about Dart appeared on HackerNews about 13 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747961

I feel like this story fell off the front page pretty quickly, and I have a feeling it may have to do with a comment from a recent techcrunch article, specifically:

Another subtle [HackerNews] feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page.

If I had to guess, the flame-war detector may be as basic as the number of comments compared to the number of upvotes.  I say this because as of now, the Dart story is #67 on the list with 99 points and 127 comments  and 13 hours old.   While at the same time, story #39 has 97 points, 62 comments, and is 16 hours old.

I bring this up because I feel like a lot of people from within the Dart community (be it people on this list or Google employees) were jumping to defend every criticism in the comments.  And I feel this ended up leading to a lot of discussions about Dart, which is a good thing, but it is not good for the ranking of stories.  I know I was quick to correct anyone that misspoke about the language, so I probably didn't help any.

I just wanted to say, when stories do appear on the HN front-page, we as a community should definitely try to get a clear picture of the language across for those that read the comments (and I think there was some great discussion in the comments of this article).  But at the same time, we should make sure to not go completely overboard correcting people.

[Alex Tatumizer]

I stopped reading comments section of HN a while ago upon learning that the site has a number of commenters on payroll. This implies a lot of things, but objectivity is not one of them.

Comments in most cases are either 100% positive or 100% negative, which makes reading a waste of time (noise/signal ratio is too high)..

In case some news falls into category of 100% positive, there;s so much honey there that the thing is just not believable, and may work against the intentions of editorial board.

Maybe the reverse is also true., 

They are just not professional enough to implement more subtle policy.

[James Wendel]

Oh, I am very well aware of this, but they still have some pretty decent discussion about various topics.  But any community is going to have its set of prejudicies and impartiality.  Tell me about a large programming community that doesn't have a slant and I'll pay to join it. :)

How I know HN is slanted: a friend of mine works for a company that is an AirBNB competitor (well, they were around first and do things a little differently) but his publicly traded, larger company is never really talked about on HN (even in stories where it would be relavent).  But AirBNB (which is a YCombinator funded company) gets all kinds of love on the site.  HackerNews is very San Francisco and NewYork City focused, and is also very startup focused and anti-big-company (lots of Google hate from people there).  I would say there is still a lot of good discussion on the site, just don't let it be your only source of news for programmers.

[Mike Watson]

The situation for Dart on HN has improved dramatically in the last 6 mos. thanks to improvements in Dart, changes in the JavaScript landscape (people are looking for solutions) and efforts to educate, a lot of which happens in comments sections. I think it is helpful to correct untrue assertions and not let them sit there unchallenged.

The ranking system on HN is unfathomable and subject to the whims of the moderators, so I don't worry about that. As to your point about heated discussions and flame wars, the recent brouhaha about Dave Winer on the front page involving comments from Dave himself would seem to contradict that.

Mike

[Justin Fagnani]

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 8:17 AM, Mike Watson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:

The situation for Dart on HN has improved dramatically in the last 6 mos. thanks to improvements in Dart, changes in the JavaScript landscape (people are looking for solutions) and efforts to educate, a lot of which happens in comments sections. I think it is helpful to correct untrue assertions and not let them sit there unchallenged.

The ranking system on HN is unfathomable and subject to the whims of the moderators, so I don't worry about that. As to your point about heated discussions and flame wars, the recent brouhaha about Dave Winer on the front page involving comments from Dave himself would seem to contradict that.

That's my thought too. Have the discussion and make replies you think are appropriate and don't try to game or figure out their ranking system. Of course, true flame wars aren't great, but I don't the comments on that post went there.

-Justin

 

Mike

On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 7:40:49 AM UTC-7, James Wendel wrote:

On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 9:22:10 AM UTC-5, Alex Tatumizer wrote:

I stopped reading comments section of HN a while ago upon learning that the site has a number of commenters on payroll. This implies a lot of things, but objectivity is not one of them.

Comments in most cases are either 100% positive or 100% negative, which makes reading a waste of time (noise/signal ratio is too high)..

In case some news falls into category of 100% positive, there;s so much honey there that the thing is just not believable, and may work against the intentions of editorial board.

Maybe the reverse is also true., 

They are just not professional enough to implement more subtle policy.

Oh, I am very well aware of this, but they still have some pretty decent discussion about various topics.  But any community is going to have its set of prejudicies and impartiality.  Tell me about a large programming community that doesn't have a slant and I'll pay to join it. :)

How I know HN is slanted: a friend of mine works for a company that is an AirBNB competitor (well, they were around first and do things a little differently) but his publicly traded, larger company is never really talked about on HN (even in stories where it would be relavent).  But AirBNB (which is a YCombinator funded company) gets all kinds of love on the site.  HackerNews is very San Francisco and NewYork City focused, and is also very startup focused and anti-big-company (lots of Google hate from people there).  I would say there is still a lot of good discussion on the site, just don't let it be your only source of news for programmers.

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