Why is Hacker News so much more successful than Slashdot?

Slashdot had a strong community and good stewardship when it started. Eventually it got bought (and I think changed hands many times) and became a thin commercial shell of what it once was. In the mid 2000s when I used to read it, there were some (many) good technical discussions that would be similar to what you would see here. The two sites are just different places on their arcs. Check back on HN in 20 years.

To add in response to the post, there is clearly a sweet spot of how many users a site has. At the beginning, fewer genuinely interested people can work, and it can get better as the number grows and more people contribute. At some point, you have too many people, and the combination of eternal September effect plus not being able to please everyone plus trolls and people looking to get upset about something means the quality goes down (that's where a lot of reddit is I guess). Then when numbers go down again, a lot of the quality users leave and you're left with the trolls etc. so that even if active users is higher than at the beginning, the quality is gone. That's where slashdot is.

> Hacker News has so many people on it everyday, which makes me wonder why Slashdot fails in comparison. I also hear that the community at Slashdot is less than pleasant, but I'm not sure as to the validity of those claims.

> Why is Hacker News so successful while Slashdot has become a relic of internet history?

Dang, ruthless moderation and community effects.

People underestimate the degree to which peer comments encourage and discourage behaviors in the rest of the participating population. Civility and on-topic-ness are central values of hacker news. The top 5% most active users religiously follow this, and this establishes a clear personality for the platform. This implicitly discourages new users from contributing in a way that strays from those values.

There are 2 possible events where this system goes haywire. Slow takeover and viral events. Slow deterioration happens through complacency. Viral events are when there is an overnight migration of new users to your platform, replacing your culture wholesale. Dang's remarkably consistent culture reminders curb the slow deterioration. For the 2nd point, HN has likely never had a major viral event, but culture war threads are often locked quickly and deprioritized.

HN is the way it is cause of painstaking effort to keep it the way it is. Don't take it for granted. I try my best to be an honest participant. It is one of the few places that still remind of the old internet. I'm willing to be a obedient child if that means it can stay that way.

HN is well moderated however I am getting bored with questions such as

"Why am I not more successful?"

"How do I make money fast?"

"Tell me your ideas?" (so I can be successful and make money fast)

Simple; The Page layouts.

There is nothing else other than relevant content and the density of information per page is very high. Hence no distractions.

One of the things I got tired of was the same jokes always upvoted to +5 funny, whereas tired memes are discouraged here.

1. HN community typically frowns on fluff, jokes and loose comments. Its a good thing. The discussion stays to the point.

2. No commercial algorithm boosting a topic over other. Plain upvoting. This helps a lot. It becomes matter of the community's collective choice.

3. Unlike reddit for e.g. the mob down voting is reduced to an extent because the hard limit is -3. (Fun fact: I had reddit account a while ago where a popular sub's mod got personal and his cronies downvoted me everywhere. I was shadowbanned on several of the subs. My max karma drops was ~300-400 points in a single day. It was due to a thread which wasn't even fluff or lame/ funny/ sarcastic, but because I had questioned the moderation morals. The post was sick and hurtful & the crowd gets murderous. If slashdot is snarky, reddit is outright toxic.)

4. No amount of praise is enough when I mention @dang. The guy ruthlessly keeps everyone in line. Hats off to him. HN is much better because of his untiring efforts to curate.

I think people get bored with a platform and move onto next.

Examples - Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit. Hi5 -> Facebook -> Tiktok.

There'll eventually be "new HN".

While they both target the tech audience, they focus on different parts of it. Slashdot attracts a lot more of the detail focused folks who are implementing tech "in the trenches" but have a greater tendency to obsess over minor details (often very important to implementation). The quite visible scoring system tends reward hive thinking and a sense of self-righteousness. Places like HN, consciously or not, appear to have learned from the worst of Slashdot's forced consensus model and made adjustments to weaken that tendency. Of course it still happens, just look at how the lab leak theory was handled here. HN is still quite susceptible to hive thinking and resulting poor moderating (sorry Dang, but you did fuck you there, hope you learned from it) but it is nothing on the scale of places like Slashdot.

The above is in addition to all of the meta problems the site has had with change of ownership, management, catering the advertisers, etc.

I think in a way Slashdot is still a "Web 1.0" site. The way it works was more adapted to the way of thinking of the time

Of course now the users are completely different from the time it started, and the level of discussions there is much shallower than what it was let's say, 15 yrs. ago.

Slashdot always struck me as snarkier and snippier and sarcastic compared to HN. There were some pure tech topics (my interest was in the Linuxy and systemsy stuff)... but I remember the snark. However it's been so long my memory might be tainted.

Hacker News is a marketing campaign for a VC fund. Slashdot is a business.

Different motivations give different options and lead to different outcomes. Personally I find HN a worse community because the motives are hidden/glossed over.

Probably because HN has no direct commercial interests. Just keeping a good community.

HN has also learned from Usenet's, Slashdot's and Reddit's issues, e.g. how to avoid the eternal September effect.

I've never used Slashdot, but I have just looked its homepage and its content is more like The Verge, Wired, or similar websites, i. e., generic tech articles, but more oriented to techie people.

HN is a lot more niche in different kind of matters, like finding obscure problems with a compiler, how a company is using some technology and why, or simply articles about work/life balance and what to do and what not to do to achieve a fulfilling life.

Slashdot was great before user accounts.

The comment scoring put the final nails in. It took a while to die after that but the screaming and thumping were pretty good indicators of where it was headed.

I think slashdot is simply too old and younger millennials+zoomers went elsewhere.

I remember reading it as a teenager for news, but felt completely disconnected from the community and never even created an account. Jokes about Micro$oft from the 90s. My subjective impression was that the average age of users was about 40.

Similar fate awaits HN eventually. I don't see alpha gen coming here, the culture is going to feel too old - like mingling with their parents

I was an early low user-id user on slashdot (friends and family IPO for those that remember those days).

The key for me is are folks willing to have a conversation and does the site support that.

The ideological people (apple is evil, masks don't work (now turned into they do work), the lab leak theory is misinformation (now somewhere in between?), a fair bit of anti-racism stuff) can really drown out the conversation. When a site gets more popular that seems to happen?

Someone is definitely keeping some of the politics out of here which is a relief.

I find the comments in Slashdot very confusing so I never opened the site. I checked it right now and I still find the comments confusing, HN on the other is easy to understand.

I honestly don't think it's a relic, it's a staple at this point. Yeah it's been around a while, but slashdot is doing much better than you're assuming.

HN didn't kill Slashdot - it was Digg.

The chain is for practical purposes:

Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg > Reddit -> HN

(Yes, I know that HN predates reddit. Talking about the where programmers hang out, though.)

Is it even fair to say they have similar goals such that relative success could be compared? I'm not convinced this makes sense.

How are you measuring "successful?"

wider range of subject matter ? Maybe us nerds/tech heads like other subjects ? Could also be the comments, but I don't comment very often and rarely read the comments except to be sure I am not repeating what was already there

It's not quite the same (not a hacker hangout, as such) but another good community is Metafilter. Not only do they moderate relentlessly, but there's a charge $5 to join...just enough friction to make the trolls think twice.

It probably comes down to quality moderation.

The interface is MUCH better for one.

First post

TBH HN is a milder Reddit but it flows on the same river.

Whenever you create an unpopular post your karma goes down. I have no adblocked the karma display because I will not be judged for my posts. Should I get shadow banned I'll create a new account.

Why HN? Being an old Isonews member I like the orange. And even if the quality has degraded there are still some interesting posts here. I'm also not a "slashdot" I'm a "hacker", well I don't call myself hacker but commonly hacker is synonymous for creator, developer, entrepreneur. Slashdot never mattered in my world. The internet is a tool, a means to and end, not the center of my life. I don't even remember when I first stumbled upon HN. Was it on Google+? I miss Google+ and the spirit and people it had. I felt right at home. Unlike Facebook where is never really fit in. A platform for consumers and their producers but more consumers who have no clue about the creative spirit. How I despise Facebook. Then Google+ became more like it instead of continuing with doing its own thing. The final UI changes made it as terrible as Facebook. The post was the main attraction and comments and discussions were no longer wanted. And when it died there was Reddit which was and still is the worst Troll-infested... platform of stupid. And there was HN, which I always viewed as being too much ivory tower/first world problems, but compared it has the most interesting topics. Twitter then is a platform for the permanently "how dare you" crowd. Someone always has something to bitch about. And while many seem to like it, I never could, smartphone stupidity.

And HN then, old school, low effort design. Not the best input methods. But interesting enough and more positive than reading mainstream news, which in the last 2 years and nowadays especially is unbearable. That's also why I strongly react when I see a propaganda post for either side of the war, which doesn't really concern me. Idc about it. It's all lies anyway. What's the relevance for a IT tech news site? None. Ok if it gets IT techy but a ship sinking? idgaf. If you ask me, the Ukraine is being used so the "west" can sell weapons. 1000 million € loan and more from Germany alone... anyhow not on topic.

HN without karma would be an improvement. I will not change my ways or truth just because someone with a larger pot thinks they have more power or the right to judge.

Why is there no Google+ replacement? A social network for devs, artists, businessmen, but not big businesses, where you can stay up to date on the latest in tech and directly talk to people without having to "friend" them and where you're not judged and censored via "karma". Not owned by big tech. Where the focus in on discussion and meeting people and not POST BIG comment small but all equal.