HACKER Q&A
📣 hnveteran88

What do you like/dislike about Hacker News?


What do you like/dislike about Hacker News?


  👤 mouse_ Accepted Answer ✓
Echo chamber factor is off the charts. Sometimes it feels like I'm talking to the same person here every day.

👤 eternityforest
I like discovering new random things and occasionally having more in depth discussions than reddit tier shitposterie.

I don't like that it's just as much of a time hole as any social media and 99% of the content isn't actually relevant to my life, but I might read it anyway knowing full well I'm wasting time.


👤 jrepinc
Way too much parroting of corporate propaganda. I miss the days when HN was more anti GAFAM/BigTech and did not help them with their propaganda but was more critical and more pro free and open technology and promoting that.

👤 hnveteran88
Something I find so specific to this website

There will be a long really in depth article about a topic and then the discussion in the comments will be about something totally irrelevant to the article, like the font/formatting of the article/website


👤 arbol
Not being able to down vote until you reach 500 karma!

👤 Doctor-R
Want to prohibit links to sites with paywalls.

👤 jerrac
Like: The interesting tools you find when people "show" their tool, and then everyone mentions a bunch of other similar tools in the comments.

Dislike: Down voting. Down voting just makes for an echo chamber (as someone else already mentioned.) It's a terrible, nasty, way of punishing people who's posts don't fit the popular cliques viewpoints. It should be replaced with either a mandatory "this is why I down voted" comment, or flags that everyone can see. Like "off topic", "insulting", "spam", or things like that. At the least, it should cost karma to down vote. Oh, and if you down vote, or flag, and it gets reversed, you should lose karma.


👤 hnveteran88
Like: the lack of joke comments, I've noticed that lazy one-line puns/quips don't get much traction here

That's one of the main things I don't like about reddit


👤 bediger4000
Like: the mix of tech topics mentioned. I'm interested in a lot of things, computer science, foundations of math, space exploration, paleontology. Best site for a mix of tech and science.

HN loads fast and has next to no ads.

Dislikes: sometimes overwhelming pedantry, and recurrent culture war garbage masquerading as Libertarianism.

Inability to delete your account.


👤 meristohm
I like the level of thoughtful discourse, The sometimes-interesting sidetracks, and that the dopamine drip of upvotes is minimal.

I don't like downvotes (in part because it makes upvoting difficult on mobile), and would prefer a flag-for-review (to further tax the mods, I assume), but if the fade-out from downvotes helps reduce spam and low-quality responses, I can live with that.

I also don't like that there's a dopamine drip of upvotes at all, and find the number near my username distracting. This is the only social media platform I use, and most of the time I'd rather be reading a book but this is so easy to browse.

Posts like this are a helpful kick in the pants to go away and read a book.


👤 pestatije
dislike karma: its a kids game, its not appropriate here