Just seems like everything is “this company did this to their employees” and less about “this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons.” Or similar
And yes, I could post things, but I’m referring to what hits the top, 12h.
Can anyone rec communities with less of a biz and politics and wfh vs in-office vibe?
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Please stop reporting this as “not tech related, rule 2”, we welcome the feedback.
Our stance has been, if it’s in a gray area of “tech” such as tech business related, and users upvote it: that must be what the majority wants.
We will be discussing this more, as it seems some people want strictly tech related content and none of the gray area content.
I think users of this website tend to upvote whatever sentences they see which have keywords in them that they think are good.
I agree with op here, and I say forget what the upvotes are saying. they’re nonsense.
I’m a fool ruled by my amygdala. My upvotes are often nonsense.
would you like to come to my house and upvote my wife
Nobody wants to do that
Didn’t know how to make a meta post, or similar, thanks
But if this community community isn’t flooded with tech business articles, where are people going to post insightful comments like “fuck Google” and “switch to Firefox”?
My bugbear is all the Linux circle-jerking. I get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious. Yes, Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity that the equivalent commercial data-harvesters offer in a more readily-accessible UX, but the vast majority of users simply don’t care.
This old meme couldn’t be less appropriate on Lemmy.
Edit: Not wanting to poke the bear, but the accusatory phrasing in a couple of the responses below (“you obviously haven’t used Linux in 10 years” and “you don’t really understand the motivation behind FOSS”) go some way towards emphasising the point of this comment.
Since when do people need to take into account if anyone else cares when posting to social media? They’re not content creators serving an audience.
I get it’s obnoxious sometimes but people are going to sound off about the things they care about on social media. That’s the whole point.
i get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious
I genuinely don’t understand why people think this is odd. Think for a second about what the fediverse is and what it represents.
Why are we here? Why are we on the fediverse and not reddit or twitter? They both have more content, more intuitive systems, and more mature (if terrible) UXs. So why are we here?
The fediverse represents the same basic thing as a Linux OS for the average consumer: an escape from corporate controlled, locked down, and increasingly bastardized ecosystems. An open source alternative that, while taking a little more effort, rewards the user with relief from the bullshit they want to escape.
Of course it’s popular here. How could it not be?
You’ll also find early adopters tend to be more willing to put in the effort to learn new systems, and we’re barely out of the early adopter stage for the fediverse.
Since when do people need to take into account if anyone else cares when posting to social media? They’re not content creators serving an audience.
I mean, this whole post is about what content is preferable in this specific community.
IMO it’s not the “switch to Linux” sentiment itself that’s so tedious, it’s that it’s just so damn oversaturated. It’s like that guy who posted “if buying isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t stealing” like 20 times in one thread the other day. I 100% agree but OMG we get it, kindly stop saying the same damn thing over and over. It’s just annoying that every post even mentioning Microsoft or Google devolves into a sea of privacy complaints and FOSS evangelizing to the point it’s difficult to have any real conversations.
Completely agree, hence the reply to lolcatnip’s comment originally. It’s to be expected I guess, given where we are (as deweydecibel said earlier), but that doesn’t make it less annoying.
Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity
You obviously haven’t tried Linux for at least ten years. It’s really not like that.
You obviously haven’t tried Linux for at least ten years. It’s really not like that.
This is the standard response I’ve heard from Linux advocates for the last 20 years.
I know it’s easy to assume off the back of my initial comment that I might not have, but I assure you, my frustrations with Linux are not borne out of inexperience.
I am not a programmer or anything and I’ve been using Zorin full time for a while now after trying it as an experiment. I would go so far as to say it’s on par with Windows or Mac in many (not quite all) respects. Assuming you’re not dependent on some proprietary software the only switching cost these days is… learning to navigate a new system.
Just as an aside, I find it interesting that people using LEMMY of all things for social media would perceive FOSS systems as inferior. I guess that’s a testament to how far along ActivityPub development has come.
I wouldn’t disagree, and I’m not saying FOSS is inferior, I’m just whinging about the Linux evangelising.
There is no perfect OS that can have universal approval. However if I’d I said “Windows is a data-harvesting nightmare” or “Being locked in to Apple ecosystems is constricting and expensive” then I’m sure I’d see the upvote button hammered on Lemmy. But to seemingly question the validity of Linux as a silver bullet for the vast majority of desktop users is borderline heresy.
I won’t dispute that fanboyism is thing, but also I don’t think many evangelists as it were view Linux as a “silver bullet”, just as the most ethical option given the alternatives. And their feel very strong feelings about this come across as Weird and Scary to people not used to seeing software treated with the same enthusiasm as politics.
Also, I should add that many view open source software as having the potential to one day be the “silver bullet” in a way commercial software can never be due to it’s structure.
I’ve been reading about its potential for a long time. Maybe next year will be the year of Linux ;)
If your barometer for “potential” relies on market share, then you don’t really understand what motivates a person to contribute effort to a FOSS project in the first place.
I mean you are trying to poke the bear. And you’re pretending that people don’t constantly make recommendations all the fucking time. They do. Everywhere about everything. That’s how marketing and grass roots campaigning works. What I think is more interesting is why you’re doing these two things - is your shame of being nerdy so deep that you prefer to try and shame others for not being ashamed?
is your shame of being nerdy so deep that you prefer to try and shame others for not being ashamed?
This response couldn’t be a more perfect example of what I’m saying. Thank you.
It really isn’t. I’m not supporting or promoting Linux, I’m not discussing the subject matter at all and I have no skin in the game. What occurred to me is why you needed to identify as a nerd and then drop trow and proceed to shit on nerds.
Your response is precisely the reaction I referenced by the edit. Why is it personal? “You don’t understand FOSS” “You clearly don’t use Linux” and now, beautifully, “You’re ashamed of being a nerd”.
I called out the behaviour you’re exhibiting. That’s not personal, it’s observation. Please clarify why you are allowed to make observations about people but they can’t make observations about you. Calling something “personal” is meaningless.
Nah mate, you can have this one. This is where I drop off. Jumping into a topic with “you must be ashamed of being a nerd“ is never going to provoke a worthwhile discussion.
My bugbear is people constantly complaining about the Linux circle-jerk. We get it, you’re the cool unpopular opinion holder in the place where the foundation of the site we’re all utilizing shares the same philosophy as Linux and FOSS. We get it, you’re so brave having such a spicy individual opinion.
Which is it? Are you seeing this complaint constantly, or is it a spicy individual opinion?
I’d probably say my preference to have fewer default knee-jerk recommendations for Linux within various tech posts about other systems isn’t particularly unpopular, if only going by the up/downvote count. Even if it was the other way around, I’d stand by it, however antagonistic you might find my “bravery”.
software tech – the whole programming.dev instance
We also have impeccable uptime as you’d expect.
Not to mention most of the commenters just hate on the technology too, every article about any type of transportation that isn’t trains people just shit on it in the comments. “How is this gonna save the planet?” “Why does this need to exist?”
Hating technology should be its own community.
Quite candidly, it’s not articles selling the spiel of tech bros that is going to help us. I’m one of those commenters and I also wish “Technology” was about technology instead of trying to sell the latest gadgetbahn or a solar road or self driving cars.
EDIT: It’s not technically about “helping us”, but more specifically about the kind of spiel those “articles” are trying to push. It may very well be about technology, but it’s misrepresented as something that could help us and save us in the future while in reality, it’s just marginally interesting, Think about how many articles there has been about bitcoins, NFTs, AI and crap like this, coming from techbros and their simps. That’s why you’ll see the sort of comments you complain about. It certainly is tech, but it’s more like tech they’re trying to hype, misrepresent and sell.
I love tech. I work in IT. But I can also smell BS and will not hesitate to point it out.
Well said. I like how the communities on Lemmy have a lot of tech and FOSS people who are able to recognize (and call out) a repackaged sales pitch. I understand most mainstream publications have to pay the bills, but so many of the “journalists” are just caught up in the hype cycle.
AI isn’t anything like NFTs and Bitcoin, it has an actual use case and is being leveraged by a significant number of white collar workers to automate small tasks and take the sifting out of search engines.
But it is like crypto in that a lot of the attention it’s getting thinks it’s something that it isn’t right now. It might be that in the future but AI has a long way to go still.
Crypto never will be anything, that’s the point I’m making.
AI is a tool, a good one. It can’t take your job anymore than the cotton gin took the job of textile workers, but the professional can make plenty of use to help shorten their workdays with it. As it gets integrated into private companies data environments you’ll see more in house models trained on company data that will assist cloud engineers and data engineers in getting things straightened out.
Crypto is a invented currency that was only good for buying drugs and NFT’s are literally a scam.
The annoying thing with these reductionist views is that they miss the potential applications.
“JPEGs in the blockchain” is indeed a pointless use case and were so hyped because of greed and a ZIRP world. This doesn’t mean that all applications built on top of NFTs are worthless. For example, one could see a well-thought ticketing system based on NFTs that could destroy Ticketmaster.
No it couldn’t, it provides nothing that a few database tables couldn’t. NFTs themselves are essentially just pointers to things that can be traded, you are always going to be entirely at the mercy of whatever system is deciding what is being pointed to.
nothing that a few database tables couldn’t.
Transparent consensus about the data can not be achieved with a few database tables.
You could make the argument that this does need a blockchain and it could be built on another decentralized consensus protocol (like Paxos), but then you’d lose the permissionless aspect of it and such a system would likely end up being control by a monopoly or oligopoly, like the whole ticketing industry is controlled by Ticketmaster today.
whatever system is deciding what is being pointed to.
The ticketing use case could work precisely because a ticket is just a pointer. Access to the actual venue/seat would still need to be verified in person, but the issuing of tickets and transactions in the primary/secondary markets are the nasty parts that are exploited by Ticketmaster and gives them so much moat.
Totally agree!
“Here’s some incremental progress that is a possibly interesting technological improvement.”
" Omg it isn’t literally perfect and exactly aligning with my interests. Literal capitalist trash, zero value, no one wants it"
In my experience it’s been quite the opposite. The press release will be “here’s some shiny new big deal” and the comments in this community will point out that it’s not only nothing new, but often actively working against users’ interests.
Like Meta totally joining the Fediverse or Apple ““fully”” adopting RCS despite both those companies having a long history of anti-interoperability practices. There’s a lot of BS that comes out of silicon valley, and there aren’t a lot of good journalists able (or willing) to rightfully understand what’s being said, so they repeat the big claims without proper context.
You forgot to call it fascist. That’s a word people with that attitude tend to throw around a lot.
I think this is a flaw in the current state of Lemmy. There’s so few posts compared to Reddit that random people will find your 3 upvoted post in all. This leads to people outside of the community dominating the discussion.
You can also see this with other communities. Everytime I see the conservative one in All it’s a non conservative OP being insulted by other non conservatives, because they assumed OP must be a conservative to post there.
There being an anti tech community won’t solve this issue. I think the most accessible solution is moderation.
Check out Ars Technica. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that the are more technical than average news sources. For example, when they report on a software security vulnerability, they’ll actually go into the command line and try it for themselves. Pretty good reporters which more than basic tech knowledge, if you ask me…
I liked them until they started posting clickbait.
Some of their headlines can be shitty, but I find that most of their articles are great once you dive into them. Except for their Wired cross publication stories, those mostly suck.
Eric Burger’s space articles are fantastic. Well minus a recent article of his where he hand waved away Elon being a shitheel. On a technical level they’re great.
Ars’ quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.
Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.
They just aren’t good anymore. And haven’t been for a while. The science/space articles are nice to read on the technical side but they fall short on anything traditionally tech related.
A number of posts are sensationalized to the point of almost being incorrect. For example, their Okta post about the breach update affecting everyone was portrayed as if it were a third, completely unrelated breach. While Okta’s security practices were shown to be terrible this year, writing misleading articles makes it hard to follow news.
They’ve leaned hard into the “Twitter news gets us clicks” problem, they’ve leaned hard into that for clicks.
For years they’ve made it a point to have some kind of Tesla-bashing (or least Tesla related) article every few days — even 5 years ago Tim Lee basically said it was to drive traffic to the site.
With that said, obviously traffic plays a role. We’re a primarily ad-supported business and so we write more about topics that will generate more clicks. Articles about Tesla generate high click-through rates on our home page. Google News, our primary source of external traffic, also sends us a lot of traffic any time we write about Tesla. So do I write about Tesla for clicks? Guilty as charged.
Eric Berger is a SpaceX fanboy. He is knowledgeable about rockets though.
Great, now I just read an article about no printers and am so enraged
And they’re on the Fediverse! @arstechnica@mastodon.social
It would be nice if there were separate Tech Industry and Technology News communities.
Totally agree
There is a “Business” community, ideally the mods should remove any links that are “company a lays off workers” or “Elon Musk is stupid again” and re-direct them to Business, where the business decisions belong.
Honestly, we need tech business news vs technology in general, but technology also probably should be split between hardware and software. Or maybe computer vs the rest.
Computer vs the rest.
I’d love to see posts about new materials, manufacturing processes, waste management, engineering techniques, mechanical designs and tests.
But nope, it’s just computers computers computers. If you can’t do it on your PC at home it doesn’t count as tech, apparently.
I sometimes read ieee spectrum for that stuff
There was a r/HardwareNews on Reddit.
We could implement it but I have not the time nor the will to moderate a community.
I bring this up all the time when I can be arsed and people always rebute with “but it’s about a company that makes/uses tech”, completely missing the point I was making saying that shouldn’t be the criteria for content here. It’s exhausting.
HackerNews(ycomb) is a veritable gold mine but I find the community to be a bit caustic at times.
There is a HackerNews mirror on Lemmy here that I like but not too many people comment. If I saw more activity I’d probably comment more.
But HN is also mostly tech biz.
I really don’t find that to be true. I see lots of toy implementations, general philosophical discussions, hell even just man pages.
That’s just not correct.
17/30 articles are not business related at all (ie “A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes bacteria causing tooth decay”, “How many hobbits? A demographic analysis of Middle Earth”, “Goodbye, clean code”, “Show HN: Homebrew 16-bit CPU…”)
2 posts for finding jobs
1 post about a teardown of the Fairphone and assessing its repairability, which does mention a company but isn’t that much about business
but I find the community to be a bit caustic at times
I find the same can be true around here too, though.
Wayyyyy too many libertarians on hacker news who have experienced a lot of personal success in their life and have transformed that success into an utter lack of intellectual maturity or ability to empathize with others less fortunate than them.
Good info, but wow I have read enough hacker news that I have almost zero interest in talking to tech people in real life at this point, they can be so aggressively naive and are always focused on incredibly narrow visions of the future that as a rule don’t center humans as the most valuable part of society/economy. If aliens came to earth and offered them a new algorithm in exchange for enslaving all of the planet, they would shrug their shoulders and say “We can’t stand in the way of progress, I might as well do it, somebody else will if I don’t!”. It makes me thankful a physicist developed the nuclear bomb not a tech person or I am sure we would all be dead right now.
Good info though and fun to troll libertarians if you are into that kink.
Repost it here if you find something interesting. I read a little ycomb but it’s a firehose and discussion is typically bad as you said.
Lemmy needs more reposting from other blogs. Filtering content is useful. Not everything needs to be original.
There is a HackerNews mirror on Lemmy
Mind sharing?
Https://news.ycombinator.com is the gold standard, there are some Lemmy bots following it as well
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it’s filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you’ll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.
One of my hats os interviewing senior engineers, one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.
Hacker news is a very, very, common response.
In fact I don’t have a better news source to offer you.
I worry about dismissing the discussion as tech bro and businessy… As real engineers use the site, I also worry about dismissing people as tech bros, it’s not a great term, and I think unfairly applied to engineers because they are often not neural typical.
one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.
How important is this to you? If they say they don’t make an effort to keep up with tech news, is that a red flag? Is your company/product really so much on the cutting edge that you need the team to be keeping up with the latest tech news.
Doesn’t seem very important to me, but it’s one of the first questions you ask.
its a warm up question, its not a requirement, getting to know you.
But, someone in industry who doesn’t make an effort to stay up to date in the industry, somehow, would raise an eyebrow… FWIW nobody has ever not had a answer to that question.
I certainly don’t want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they’ll ask themselves questions like “Why do we need privacy?” and everyone else in the room will agree that they’ve never needed it eitherand then they’ll found Google.I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don’t completely miss the ball on what users actually need.
And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.
I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you’ve ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?In fact I don’t have a better news source to offer you
Have you taken a look at lobste.rs? Not saying it’s better, but there are alternatives.
I like hacker news but have had trouble figuring out how to actually like…follow it. There is a shitty Android app. They don’t have an RSS feed best I can tell. How does one actually consume it?
Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don’t really surface that anymore I guess?
They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.
Maybe that’s what it is then. I don’t see it on the main page and their FAQ didn’t list it either.
Regardless, thanks for the link! I’ll drop that into my RSS reader.
They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don’t really surface that anymore I guess?
There’s a Firefox addon to fix that. It’s called RSSPreview, but besides providing previews it also adds a little button to the address bar on sites that have tags like that so you can find the feeds in the first place.
You could just use !hackernews@derp.foo
I know it’s a bot driven community but somehow they actually pulled it off. Lemmy users are actually leaving comments and voting over there.
There’s also !hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans but it seems like a less active version of the same thing
You could just use !hackernews@derp.foo
Do you have a link to the bot’s account please? I’ve blocked it at some point, but don’t know what it’s called to unblock it
@haxor@derp.foo
Brilliant, thank you :)
Check this one - https://hnrss.github.io/. It has urls with different topics.
I use Harmonic It has a pretty decent ui, but i use web version if i want to search something
Good call I’ll spend more time there
- Hacker News – https://news.ycombinator.com/
- Lobsters – https://lobste.rs/
- Two Stop Bits – https://twostopbits.com/
On Reddit we had r/hardware which was great for this
Here we have !hardware@lemmy.ml but I haven’t checked it out much yet
Looks like it’s mostly PC hardware
And there was r/gadget . Funny thing, I went from r/technology to r/gadget for the same reason : r/technology was 90% business news
Blogs are really the only way now. At least in my life, it and RSS are making a big comeback. So if you know of any good blogs let me know
RSS has been coming back for me big time too. Which blogs do you follow?
my list:
- 'Coon Cave on APK Downloader
- Songs on the Security of Networks
- Ajay Ramachandran’s Blog
- Arya’s blog
- Blog | Pablo Berganza
- Cadence’s Weblog
- David Revoy
- Drew DeVault’s blog
- Intuitive Explanations
- Luke’s Webpage
- Ryan Dahl
- Ryan Mulligan
- TheFrenchGhosty’s Blog
- Vidar’s Blog
- Zibaldone
- garrit.xyz
- jeena.net
- meyerweb
- shaky.sh
share yours now :)
Here’s a link to my OPML export
wow, that’s a really big and cool list. I’ve imported it all. thanks!
I also am curious about this.
RSS yes. I love it.
Blogs…eh. the only time I read a blog is if it contains a solution I’ve searched for.
We need webrings to come back for better discoverability. Also, how do you consume RSS?
Bleh, consume sounds like an icky word here. But if you want to set up an RSS Feed, get an RSS reader (I personally use NewsFlash, but use whatever you like) and then simply add feeds to it. You can find them on quite a few sites, the icon looks kind of like a wifi symbol. Optionally you could also just install a plugin like Awesome RSS, which automatically finds feeds on the site you’re currently on, which can be useful if it’s kinda hidden on the site itself
I meant “Consume” in the technical sense of downloading and parsing. And yes, the RSS reader is part of what I was looking for (I don’t think I’ve heard of NewsFlash, very excited to look into that).
I’ve been using RSS for a long time, but I find that Feedly is odious, self-hosted alternatives are unnecessarily hard to operate, and the middle ground of paid alternatives doesn’t seem to exist.
RSS is awesome and it’s one of those generic technologies I am talking about on my blog. I already covered RSS, PGP, FTP and F-Droid, and there are plans about SSH, git, KeePass and Delta Chat.
You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We’ll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.
Could you please take a look at https://fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?
It can definitely happen. This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.
It degrades to the lowest common denominator. This was seen across reddit, constantly.
It happened on lemmy in record time due to a lack of default outlets for the low quality content.
I was on reddit for a very long time. And this is why I started to bemoan when communities would celebrate that they passed some number of subscribers.
/pardon me as I yell at the clouds. Stop now unless you want to read a completely unnecessary rant.
Two of my favorite niche subreddits were absolutely ruined by getting big: mindfulness and foodporn. The former was primarily a discussion about practicing mindfulness, there were even a couple of buddhists who actually deeply studied the tradition that provided very good non-western insight. It was a good place to go get help, albeit occasionally got a spattering of stupid memes, but you could easily get past them. As it grew it turned more and more into just memes, and then was just over-taken by new-age nonsense and pseudointellectual quotes over pictures. Food porn (while never exactly what I wanted) went from often having well-done pictures of good food, to shitty cell-phone shots of oversized hamburgers, half eaten food, and plates of food sitting on counters with all of this shit in the background.
I know that is a big ask, but would you be interested in helping bootstrapping these communities here? I recently created https://healthy.community/c/mindfulness and https://sfw.community/c/foodporn as part of my fediverser project, but these are not communities that I am not personally invested in. It would be a lot better if someone already helped to shape its general direction.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !mindfulness@healthy.community, !foodporn@sfw.community
This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.
This is just another way of saying “having mods enforcing super strict rules”, which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.
Unfortunately, the way to avoid “lowest common denominator” issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.
If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into “deteriorate fast” territory.
That’s just not universally true. Hackernews is a probably the best example of a site with strong moderation (going as far as editing user’s post titles) and a fairly interesting set of posts mixing news with cool tech stuff.
You can have strong moderation that works out if mods enforce the rules for the sake of quality content, not for the sake of being an internet hall monitor.
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Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.
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HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power
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HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.
Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.
…huh? It leaves discussion threads intact while fixing titles to be more reflective of the source material or more reflective of updates to an event. How is this not quality control (and, in turn, moderation)?
HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power
Please take a moment to read the comment you’re replying to. See the last statement where I call out “You can have strong moderation that works out if mods enforce the rules for the sake of quality content, not for the sake of being an internet hall monitor.”
HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.
The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.
The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.
The discussion started because OP wants to have “more hard tech” and less “tech biz news”. How do you think you’d enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?
On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.
On Reddit or Lemmy, it’s quite easy to “fork” a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don’t end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a “popular” /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific “/c/hard_tech” or “/c/true_tech”.
I agree with your assertion that above a certain size you need strong moderation but disagree that it has to be toxic.
There are two components to being successful at strong moderation: you need mods that are opinionated but work to the benefit of the community (I think dang does a decent job at this) and a community that trusts the moderation.
Comparing HN and Lemmy, HN generally trusts their mods while Lemmy does not. As a result, dang on HN can prune low-effort threads and it doesn’t cause much of an uproar, but doing this on Lemmy would probably be much more difficult.
As far as enforcement, I’d just remove the fluff threads that get the same, repeated 5-6 comments. We already know everyone’s opinion about Elon Musk, the potential perils of AI, and the occasional string of threads over 2-3 weeks when $bigtechnologycompany doing $unpopularthing with a new article that rehashes information for clicks. People may disagree, but that’s okay. The goal should be to try to judge content on it’s discussion merits, not the user who posted it or personal beliefs. There will be screwups, but the community will need to assume good intent and the moderator will need to own up to mistakes.
On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.
HN doesn’t try to cater to everyone and that’s their greatest strength. If my theoretical approach causes people to leave, that’s OK.
A lot of communities/subreddits/forums prioritize a growing user count number instead of fostering insightful discussion. I think this is what causes the huge communities to grow bland and foster an environment for abusive mods. It’s one thing to want to claim “I moderate a forum with 500k people”, but it’s another to say “I learn something new from my community every day”.
I’m content with c/technology and think the mods are doing a good job. It scratches the itch I want for being a general-purpose place to chat tech-related things but I would be elated to find a community that has a much higher bar for discussion.
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are they paid ?
Whether they’re paid doesn’t matter. You can have poor/inconsistent/overzealous moderation from both paid and volunteer moderators.
Look at the inconsistency by Facebook content moderators and Reddit’s (formerly Anti-Evil Operations) paid moderation team that sporadically intervenes to remove some bad reported content/users but leaves others alone.
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The problem is all the s*** we really want to hear about all the companies are keeping close to their breast.
Then, when something actually novel and interesting comes out it ends up being polarizing. We can only consume so much Chat GPT Gemini Bard crap.
We should start a tech community on the federal verse about technologies people are passionate about. Get some people to talk about cool s*** they’ve done with Wyoming, Piper and whisper. Maybe have some people talk about their local mini installs of LLMS, for how they’re getting the most out of stable diffusion. Maybe some people looking at Obsidian or Anytype, maybe some NixOS
There’s lots of cool stuff out there to cover there’s just not a lot of news about it these days. If it’s not AI they’re afraid people’s eyes will just glaze over.
You are allowed to say “shit” here
Voice dictation. I need the censorship on for some places, but the setting is buried enough that turning it on and off is arduous. Unfortunately that means that gracing the world with my profanity is only for a times where I can be at the keys.
I don’t agree with your first two phrases but strongly agree with the later ones.
Fair
