I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Look past the VC tech blog shine everyone puts on their comments here and you’ll find it’s just as bad as Reddit, if not worse.
What are some comparable or superior subreddits? I know the history subreddit doesn't permit jokes, and the askscience sub doesn't like jokes as parent comments.
Every time I say HN doesn't permit jokes, someone pipes up and claims it does, but then often I see a joke it results in downvotes, flags and tedious lectures about how jokes aren't allowed here. I honestly don't think humor is the cancer a lot of people here seem to think it is - the most brilliant minds in our fields often had a sense of humor and it's been a part of hacker culture since the beginning.
That said, any technically focused niche subreddit (like /r/askhistorians) is likely to be better than HN on average because it will attract more actual experts on that subject, and the more specific you get, the more likely you are to find actual experts on Reddit than HN . Also many of those subs don't allow jokes or memes anyway. HN is too broad in its mandate, "anything good hackers find interesting," and tends to be spotty outside of anything related to Silicon Valley startups and web development.
I've gotten plenty of upvotes (ok, something like 3 at best) for joking here. The ones that need to go are the unoriginal repetitions of reddit-style "jokes".
Mostly agree. Hacker News has a stronger signal-to-noise ratio, but I wouldn't say it's immune to enshittification. It just manifests differently. And it feels anecdotally worse to me than it did 5 years ago. Some of that is all the posts about LLMs (which I would expect HN readers to be scientifically critical about, but the community is (mostly) not), but I don’t think that’s the only reason.
The author's website design is insufferable, here's a fix for the horrible font and scrolljacking that's worse than the reader mode of your browser in case you are reading comments before the article:
There's no comment I could make that isn't already in the parody.
Why are we regurgitating the past? How did it even make it to the home page?
(And why is this the top comment?!)
ok, that's pretty good - three things not on the parody.
(I find it interesting that the parody logo Y upside down looks like lambda)
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/244/
all the parody jokes aside, I still think hacker news commenting is so much more informative and solution oriented than reddit.
I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Look past the VC tech blog shine everyone puts on their comments here and you’ll find it’s just as bad as Reddit, if not worse.
Depends entirely on the subreddit and the subject matter.
What are some comparable or superior subreddits? I know the history subreddit doesn't permit jokes, and the askscience sub doesn't like jokes as parent comments.
Every time I say HN doesn't permit jokes, someone pipes up and claims it does, but then often I see a joke it results in downvotes, flags and tedious lectures about how jokes aren't allowed here. I honestly don't think humor is the cancer a lot of people here seem to think it is - the most brilliant minds in our fields often had a sense of humor and it's been a part of hacker culture since the beginning.
That said, any technically focused niche subreddit (like /r/askhistorians) is likely to be better than HN on average because it will attract more actual experts on that subject, and the more specific you get, the more likely you are to find actual experts on Reddit than HN . Also many of those subs don't allow jokes or memes anyway. HN is too broad in its mandate, "anything good hackers find interesting," and tends to be spotty outside of anything related to Silicon Valley startups and web development.
I've gotten plenty of upvotes (ok, something like 3 at best) for joking here. The ones that need to go are the unoriginal repetitions of reddit-style "jokes".
Mostly agree. Hacker News has a stronger signal-to-noise ratio, but I wouldn't say it's immune to enshittification. It just manifests differently. And it feels anecdotally worse to me than it did 5 years ago. Some of that is all the posts about LLMs (which I would expect HN readers to be scientifically critical about, but the community is (mostly) not), but I don’t think that’s the only reason.
I have stuff to say about JIT.
You've made a shortcut that's subtly wrong in some very obscure way concerning some yet to be actually seen obscure edge case and you should feel bad.
I saw a pattern and figured I'd stick my neck out ;D
Font sizes are pretty spot on. The up- and down-vote arrows need to be smaller, though, at least on mobile. ;)
Speaking of Hacker News parodies, I wonder what happened to n-gate. They stopped updating their site around 2021
I miss them so much.
There's an n-gate bot posting to Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@ngate
It's an insult to call that n-gate style... That's just sassy AI style - a horrible read.
The author's website design is insufferable, here's a fix for the horrible font and scrolljacking that's worse than the reader mode of your browser in case you are reading comments before the article:
dang comment with links to other parts of the discussion
Someone please create something similar about AI slop and comments about AI slop in an article. That will be more 2026 HN. /s (partially)
I still miss n-gate so much. I wonder where that guy went. Hope he's okay.
It’s missing the new comments after 2015
- an archive link to bypass paywalls
- someone self promoting their similar tool/blog
- a wild paid shill
- kagi guy, he brings kagi into most discussions
- the AI slop
- an archive link to bypass paywalls
Not all heroes wear capes
The closest hacker news parody would be this https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148