I think comparing a discussion on HN to liking photos, and notifications on Instagram. Is a bit far fetched. You can easily argue about the addictiveness of an online forum, and social interaction. We are social creatures after all. But social media sites like IG, Facebook, Twitter, specifically target those weaknesses in our brain.
There are good and really useful comments on here. But there's also a lot of fluff. Beyond that, the way things are set up encourages compulsive behavior. If you take several hours to comment on something, there's a good chance your comment will get buried. Wait a few days, and there's a good chance no one will read it. After making a comment, there's a certain urgency to check to see who's replied to you, because if you wait too long chances are the person has moved on.
You'll also notice that people start making the same comments and having the same conversations over and over again. Instead of having an ongoing conversation about, say, space exploration, you have the same beginning of a discussion happening whenever the topic comes up, and then stopping before it really matures.
That's not to say that the comment section here is bad, but it's still worth paying attention to some of its drawbacks. Particularly because it shares the urgency and compulsive aspects that permeate a lot of current sites.
HN certainly isn't a utopia, and a lot of the problems mentioned are just inherent to online forums.
The only real addictive bit is the points system on HN. I'd be fine with that just going away. It wouldn't be the first time I've refreshed posts I've made repeatedly to see the tally go up.
> HN certainly isn't a utopia, and a lot of the problems mentioned are just inherent to online forums.
The old style of forums didn't have the same kind of compulsive pressure, since you could always respond the next day/week/month and the topic would bump back up to the top of the post. If you don't respond on HN or Reddit quick enough, no one is going to see your comment. I frequent some sites that has the older system, and I'll find myself occasionally saying "This isn't that important; wait a few days and see if you feel like responding." But that's not really much of an option here - how many people are going to read your comment if you make it several days later?
And it wouldn't be hard to devise a system that actively discourages compulsive posting behavior. If you, say, had a web forum where everyone could only post once a week, you'd have much less of that urgency (and you'd get a discussion with more users, not just the fraction that habitually post everywhere).
Yes, HN and Reddit are very-high-traffic forums, so it is mostly read-once--write-once--do-not-come-back. Not only the comment go by hundreds on each thread, but the threads themselves have a life expectancy of 24 hours only, 48 hours max, before they are buried and reject to the infamous page 2 where no one goes. So there's generally no point in coming back.
The fact that the 'shape' of the threads changes all the time does not help either (the way the messages are ordered, depending on the upvotes, the freshness, and whichever mysterious other criteria may be involved).
Conversations at a depth higher than 5 or 6 levels is also difficult to follow, so I think not many people read them, let alone take part in them (on Reddit, such deep threads even suffer a penalty twice, and the second one, which requires opening a new tab or window if you don't want to have to reload the whole page once you come back, is probably fatal to almost all of the readers).
(I won't tell how much I miss Usenet and newsreaders once more, I promise :-D )
Do you think it would help to have a comment reply notification built into HN? Most of the time if I decide not to add a follow-up comment it's because the user I'm replying to has no way of being notified that I did. Or do you think it would just exacerbate the urgency issues?
That might be somewhat useful, but the thing is after a few hours your conversation with the other person is going to be no better than a private message (since no one else is going to see the topic). Web forums bump the topic back to the top, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the "news" angle. It might be interesting separating the two - have the submissions act like they do know, but have the comments for the submissions be in individual threads in a separate discussion forum.
>It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations
It's been implied that this is an intentional means of keeping engagement low, as the quality of comments tends to diminish over time, while the likelihood of flamebait and spam increases as comment distance diverges from the root. This is also apparently the reason there are no notifications for new comments. I don't know if it's true or one of those features the community is reading too much meaning into, which only exists as it does because pg wasn't interested in expanding on it.
In any case, I really hope they consider adding more ways to sort the threads - sorting by time rather than karma would be very helpful. They could even keep the karma sort the default so no one else has to complain about the layout changing.
It's not completely far-fetched, at least not with Reddit. Part of facebook and instagram is social, sure, but Reddit and HN has that with their comments sections too. Another really important part of these sites is novelty seeking, which all of these sites do well.
Yeah whatever damage (if any) HN does is child's play compared to the big players. Being explicitly about technology and related news rather than yourself makes a huge difference already. With consideration to the lack of aggressive personalization/click manipulation makes it hard to claim its even in the same game. It still is a social network at the end of the day though, least how I see it.
Providing a feature designed to make you use a product less is the antithesis of what the major social media sites do. Really inspires confidence in HN's motivations being pure.
Just as different kinds of processed food vary in how bad they are, so do different social media sites. I think HN is like pizza: yeah, it's not perfectly healthy, but which of us is going to live a perfectly healthy lifestyle, and pizza still contains a good deal of nutritional value. It's certainly a lot better than cookies.
I've completely quit facebook and noticed that I just replaced its usage entirely by reddit. With facebook I usually just saw what my friends were up to; with reddit, I just see a bunch of strangers and recurring figures, and threads where everyone is an keyboard comedian. I think my reddit usage is extremely unhealthy because I just browse the same things over and over again in my free time. But most of the time I feel like I just don't know what to do (or don't have time to do what I know I should) on the internet anymore.
Reddit is horrible, I gave up on that a while ago for the exact reasons you stated. It's a massive time sink, with zero benefit. Fast food of online forums.
