I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.
Yup. Pretty much everything seems better when you're being nostalgic. And that is singularly due to the human tendency to forget the bad parts and remember only the good ones (it's a solid self care strategy).
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
Y'know, the thing which you did is probably the best way to make use out of nostalgia.
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
I've read your comment before visiting the site, and it got me wondering -- how bad can it be? Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.
I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.
I did the opposite, I opened the website before looking at the comments and thought it was like a beautiful art gallery too. Then I read the top comment, and thought 'What are they talking about??'. Had a complete opposite feeling.
The issue is that it's beautifully designed for a portrait phone-ish-sized screen. Try viewing it in 16:9 and it's a mess. I'm not saying this to criticise; the author owes me nothing, and if I shrink my browser window down then it looks lovely. But I think this is where the confusion is coming from. Half the comments are from people looking at it on a widescreen and half are on a portrait monitor or a phone. "What this website looks like" can be two very different things and nobody bothers to ask which we are talking about.
Wow. I had (just now) made one comment on the bad layout. As you might guess, I'm on desktop, and looking at the site in a window wider than it is tall. I saw your comment and shrunk my window to be half as wide as it is tall, and the layout corrects itself and changes -- dramatically.
Surprisingly, I had the art exhibit impression opening it on 16:9 desktop. It's sparse, as a gallery, or a luxury boutique, where free space accentuates value of content. It looks OK on mobile, but on desktop it's the sparse, but non-monotonous layout, that guides attention and provides a second layer to the content.
I too thought it was a beautiful art gallery, and not an article. Mainly because all I could see was art. Apparently there was an article too but I couldn't read it. I assume it was made for 21 yr olds with perfect vision and not intended for people over 40yrs old.
When I saw the article (which, for some reason, I had no trouble finding) I felt the same way, but then remembered I could adjust the font size myself with a few keystrokes.
There's an assumption, that people sometimes state explicitly, on HN that the discussion is more interesting or valuable than whatever's on the end of the posted link. Sometimes that's true - often even - but sometimes it's not.
That's not necessarily a value judgement on the discussion though. From me, at any rate, it's more often a personal perspective: sometimes I'm just more interested in or charmed by the thing, and in digesting and coming to my own conclusions about it, than I am in reading other peoples' thoughts and perspectives on the thing.
But, yeah, to me it felt almost like an old magazine: the typography, the layout, the way images are used. A lot of the discussion about web design in the 90s came about as a result of people coming from a traditional publishing background and really struggling to do what they wanted with the web medium, so to me it sort of hearks back to that a bit, does a good job of embracing some parts of that older aesthetic, but works well with modern web capabilities. Mind, I'm looking at it on a desktop browser, and maybe the experience on mobile is less good (I can't say), but overall I like it. It has some personality to it.
To some it felt like nothing as they couldn't render the content.
The challenge when tackling difficult problems is to bring in solutions to those problems.
Subway offered an alternative to junk food. By offering custom flavors of choice, giving consumers more control over what they eat. I don't see any fresh food at subway. Does it mean what they did is futile? No. Can't we point out this is another type of junk ? We better do.
The site is wonderful when rendered with JavaScript. A web to aspire to is one where the system font is set by default, at least could be chosen.
All valid concerns looking at an endeavor discussing a better web. The author may even take note and iterate, there was no claim it was definitive work.
One of the most frustrating and perhaps thought-terminating clichés on the internet and social media at large is alluded to in this reply:
“I personally could not view this page [because I turned off JS], therefore I will dismiss it out of hand as it didn’t cater to my needs.” A choice made by the consumer somehow makes the author accountable for it.
Or more succinctly, “but what about me [or people I’ve anointed myself as spokesperson for]?”spoken by someone not the intended audience for the piece, trying to make the author responsible for their need.
The answer to which, I think, is either, “it’s not for you then so move on,” or perhaps even “misery is optional, just enable JS ffs.”
The idea that the creator of a work must bend to the will of those that consume it seems to be highly prevalent, and is pretty much at odds with creativity itself.
I have found that HN is, ironically, a horrible place to post experimental work on, with a few exceptions - e.g. things "written in Rust" etc. I think it's because the majority of the commentators here haven't really made anything from scratch.
I too think it’s a beautiful website and really refreshing in its simplicity. Too often “good design” means “needlessly complex.” The design of the site also nicely fits the argument being made in the text.
I thought the same when loaded it on mobile. When I went to the desktop version, it is kind of glitchy and the images overlap the text: https://i.postimg.cc/bJgjcDD1/desktop.png
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more. I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind. I also dislike animations that seem to be made for a certain scroll speed.
Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary on the arguments being made. It's just not my cup of tea.
> I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind.
But the images are a part of the work, not separate from it, no?[0]
You might have a preference against that, which is absolutely fine, but I think you're making an artificial distinction.
[0] There's obviously a separate conversation to be had about how much that part contributes or detracts with any such work, but the point stands that I tend to view such works as all of a piece including all constituent parts.
> My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more.
TFA works with iOS reader mode, which is all that matters to me. I use it instinctively as it makes style more or less uniform and lets me focus on the content of the article.
I think when you make such strongly opinionated design decisions on your website, you're deliberately inviting strong criticism. They could have used a readable vanilla bootstrap theme and HN would be actually discussing the actual text content instead of the design, but they didn't, and here we are.
The idea that opinionated design is intended to court controversy or criticism is, itself, very cynical. The corollary to that is that all design should be vanilla to make it as unobjectionable to the widest audience possible.
Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.
But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.
Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.
Actually, HN wouldn’t be discussing it at all, most likely. At least not this much. The design is not only good, it has also successfully incited a passionate response from a bunch of people who don’t appreciate it. Win-win!
is one of the issues of modern web as it's optimized for quick most efficient reading, but something like this website is more optimized for slow thoughtful experience. Like some of the books about art history where you not only trying to get extract meaning of words but trying imagine how that time felt and try look on things from different perspective or different values.
Right. I was also pleasantly surprised; it looks great, reads fluidly, and is clean on the page. It is somewhat artsy, to be sure, but nothing complaint-worthy in comparison to modern websites.
Depends on your age. I remember being warned in my 20s that older people couldn't read 10pt font, 12pt was a stretch, I didn't really believe them.
Now I'm in my 40s, oh wow. Small, illegible, font is everywhere. Instructions on food is especially bad for this. At least on the computer you can usually force 125% font rendering.
Point being, the site is probably quite legible to people in their 20s.
You could scale it to 120%, font would become more readable and it would even remove the text overlap with the tilted image in part three. At 100% font looks similar in size to the one on HN, but a bit less readable, I agree.
I don't think it's a bad analogy but I think there's some tension between the visual interest and making a design that makes it pleasant for someone to actually read your article through. Though even if you format it optimally for that few people bother so maybe this guy has the right idea.
> Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
I think people are nostalgic for the social environment that enabled people to create websites of all fashions, may they be well or poorly designed. We simply hold up the poorly designed websites as an example of how accessible content creation was ("hey, anyone can do it"), though perhaps we should hold up the better sites ("hey, look at what we can accomplish").
On the one hand, the pages were kind of ugly. Nobody likes autoplaying music. On another hand, they ruined their own site with a (separate) series of boneheaded decisions. On the other hand, Tom didn't seem quite as odious as Zuck (Myspace had a visible wall, you otherwise knew what you were dealing with with the privacy settings, and the wall was a good way to have network effects and connect with people). On another hand, Myspace worked (there was Friendster too and apparently their problem was the servers only worked half the time) because in 2006 relatively few people were online, so you knew you could find people on there
I don't know how it would have evolved if Murdoch(?) hadn't ruined the site; yes it was always a bit messy, but still. (At the same time, they completely lost all user data in some 2015 (possibly 2016) database incident, so so much for that)
MySpace has a special place in my memory for being the place I learned HTML and Flash (my profile was a flash embedded in my page) in high school, and carried on that love of creation into my engineering life.
I'm looking at the article now, and where I am in it, the header "The Invention of the Automobile," the image of someone driving, and the first paragraph of that section are all overlapping each other. I came here to type the above, then went back to that tab to find the layout had changed without me doing anything, so now "Part two," the title, and the picture are overlapping, but not the first paragraph. And the title is cut off.
That's just one complaint, but it's not me, it's the site.
I think it'd be good to keep in mind that Hacker News is mostly populated by a demographic commonly referred to as "Tech Bros" who, for the most part, are here as part of their journey in creating profitable businesses.
Profitable (very) was Thomas Midgley Jr. when he introduced lead petrol for cars, it took 75-100 years til the «profit» was stopped. What did we learn?
The definition of “Tech bros” is “tech people you don’t like”. There’s no agreed upon definition (just like how people disagree about what is/isn’t a “grift”) because it’s not meant to be descriptive, it’s a rhetorical device.
No, it's tech people you don't like for a specific set of reasons: it's mostly hubris and its implications like downplaying the damage the tech does to society and environment.
perceived downplaying of the damage. Popular soundbites (including "don't solve social problems with technology") have it generally backwards, and most people don't go beyond them.
No, this is too dismissive. There was a large shift in the culture of people over the last decade or so as the bay area money printers started printing faster than finance firms were printing. Eg tech money attracted a culture of people wed normally label “finance bros”. Patrick Bateman types but without the explicit murder. Status, money, often born outstandingly privileged.
This is the tech bro people speak of. It is that psychopathic desire for status at all costs which sadly is learned, emulated, and exalted. Ironically, yc is the poster child for breeding this culture over the last 8 or so years and the place it is most often complained about outside of reddit ofc.
I think that social networks are not meant to be moderated at scale. We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks': we occupy the same infrastructure but see content filtered to the style that befits us. Most social networks have the notion of friend symmetry, but I think that read-time filtering needn't be like that.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.
I designed an extension with a roughly similar aim that filters based upon various phrases and characteristics rather than the poster of the comments themselves. It collapses comments (via automatic triggering of HN's built-in collapsing feature) and adds a "reason" tag to the comment information, so I can choose whether or not to read it anyways. I feel the features with the most positive differences are the capitalization detector (hides all caps or all lowercase) and the character requirement.
That is very cool. It would be cool to see what you decided to filter on (other than the same-case filter and the char limit). I had a similar idea where I would run comments through a fast cheap LLM to evaluate whether they could be tagged in a certain way. I originally tried just pure word-stemming and phrase-based blocking and found that I couldn't tune it well for my uses. I also found that collapsing comments lead to my opening them out of curiosity.
Thank you for sharing what works for you. I think it's great other people have been doing this style of read-side filtering. It's a pity that there's no way to inject code into mobile apps safely (i.e. this is an easy path to app-store rejection). Perhaps there's no option there but to push `shouldFilter` out to a server where you can run the logic. My use of my phone is the weakest link in my filtering strategy.
> We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks'
As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates:
“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.
Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.
I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.
I think the problem really is more of: Beware of being actively trapped by deep dossier leveraged algorithms, in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable, created by corporations that are expressly farming you.
People talk about social media is if it were passive, when its deep intel, deep analysis, manipulation. Where everything we do, is not just used to manipulate us, but in aggregate, improves manipulation overall.
It is amazing what toxins people will accept, if the toxins become baseline familiar.
I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.
that's an interesting point. A echo chamber could lead to fatigue and boredom.
Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.
The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo
My blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham radio” has received the most hits out of all of my other posts. It got me an interview with IEEE Spectrum and basically cemented my name as a ham radio influencer.
Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.
I finished reading this comment wondering what should I take away from it. Is it better to include alarming titles and be read? Or the other way around? Or what would be the sweet middle point?
Hm. I read the title differently - that we create "A" personal website to break the monopoly of the "All" websites like the social media sites he mentions.
These are people who don't understand whimsy or other forms of contrast enhancing rhetoric. Designed to make reading interesting, points extra clear, etc.
Not designed to fool anyone into some random extremist view.
It may be that people who don't pick up on subtext humor, post more than average.
It's beautiful to be sure, I wanted to actually read what the author had to say, and stuff kept flying around my screen, so I did not get far.
Maybe if I printed it out...
Edit: Half joking with the printing (although I do find it much easier to read printed materials), but it definitely seems to me it that the author was trying to make a magazine and not a website. (A magazine where everything moves while you're trying to look at it!)
Actually they could turn on reader view mode if they use Firefox, because this is website, all content present as the W3C standards, users could read the content as any form as they like.
I thought the point is to pass along the message, though the one that is brought up quite regularly: sharing the joy of making websites, and such making as a way for anyone to contribute a little to the overall construction/improvement of the Web. Besides, it does seem to work without JS, though the layout is quite broken: header texts overflow (whatever is the window width), the text column is 45 characters wide instead of occupying the window width, all of which demonstrates the possible downsides of such diverse websites. That is not to say that they outweigh the benefits, but such downsides are not necessary to include, either.
The real trend is toward personalization on the user’s side of things. Instead of interacting directly with a website, your web-browsing agent will extract the parts of the website you actually care about and present them to you in whatever format, medium and design style you prefer.
Where is that a trend? It really doesn’t work in most cases because often the information and the design are not separable. One needs the other to convey the intended meaning.
Yeah, not everyone wants to just write .md files and push to github webpage :) . I know that's what I personally like doing, but others have a more artistic flair and I try to just let things "be" the way they are. I think the message of the webpage was sincere and that's good enough for me.
The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations.
Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiring manager when your candidacy is considered for another job.
Some people are fine with that, and just enjoy the process of producing content, and seeing it published. They are a minority. Most people come to consume more than to produce, and to get quick feedback.
The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web, like Reddit, or Xitter, or, well, HN. A few dozen people will bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.
It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.
> It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.
That’s exactly what the article says. Seems like you made assumptions about the argument based on the design instead of actually reading it.
I sort of missed this idea in the article, reading it more like "we can still thrive in the shade of the skyscrapers" than a call to a symbiotic existence.
> The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web
This is what the article / indieweb mean with POSSE
POSSE is a great principle, but I'm talking about a different phenomenon: being voted onto the front page of HN, /., or featured on a huge subreddit, a tweet by some influencer with 100k subscribers, etc. The 15 minutes of fame, which hopefully leave a bit of a lasting audience, connections to sister sites mentioned in the resulting threads, etc.
The biggest problem of any indie publishing is obscurity; not that nobody cares, but rather nobody has an idea, and has no way to have an idea.
You can only be blind for things you cannot notice.
What you cannot notice is what shapes your "noticement" ability.
The best design is the shape of your perception.
The best design is already implemented in your reception of reality.
The quest for "good design" is a game.
On the other hand, your aesthetical culture and the shape of your perception create a system in which elements are more or less "understandable", "readable", "accessible".
The game of design does not have stable rules and is inconsistent among world populations.
"No design" is impossible, the nature of reality is such that entities are embodied. To be embodied is to be rendered in the game of design.
Ideas are not embodied OR their apparent embodiment in the game of design (electrical information ?) does not contain their content for the observer.
Sure, the medium is the message. But if the medium distracts from the message it means they are not aligned well
(side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology.
That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD
Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.
Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.
Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed
Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.
The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/
We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest
Seriously for my part, LLMs incarns exactly the only type of person that can break my nerves. Far too often I spot an hallucination, some bullshit rambling, sycophancy, or ----hughhhhh----- rethorical elements of language that makes me go mad :(.
examples for ---hughhhhh--- inducing stuff :
"I'll be blunt !"
"Here's the ground truth, no bullshit"
"Bottom line : <UPPER CASE EXPRESSION>"
"No fluff, technical, precise, no bullshit, devoid of unnecessary rethorical shapes, <etc..."
Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".
Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.
I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;
now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.
But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !
We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.
My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).
I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.
I think you are stepping in the same trap as the author. In search of uniqueness you end up doing the same thing over and over.
The author starts with "we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed." and continue with a web page that dooms scrolls emphasizing on big titles with pictures out of context, hard to read layout etc. There is a lot of valid criticism in the comments.
Of course uniqueness and beauty is probably subjective thing but I think about this often about the web. For example if you spend some time in websites like awwwards, dribbble, framer gallery you are going to end up with same design over and over.
I am not sure when exactly but probably in the early 00's graphic prints started to get into web, and sure it does seems cool, and different but I don't think the web should be a graphic print.
I am really struggling to find unique web pages, websites these days they are all the same, and in search of their "uniqueness" they often fail big with the user experience.
One website that is unique in my opinion very well taught is - https://usgraphics.com/ everything about it makes sense, the pages, the labels, colours, buttons at every step on the website you know why are you there you know purpose of everything it is hard to get lost, and not understand the purpose of the page. It looks very simple but the design is sophisticated.
Just saying... you actually don't need JavaScript. I run NoScript, and unlike a lot of sites my HN client opens in-app without the ability to interact with the extension, I could read the site just fine. The only thing 'missing' were the fade-ins, which I found after your comment tempted me to open the site in the full browser and allow scripts from the site I want actually missing. Lovely design, just slightly lovelier without the js.
The funny thing about comments about that - the browser is the most HACKED thing. If you were to compare a web page using HTML/JS/etc... to any app from the 80s/90s/00s/etc... it is light years beyond those technologies. So for people that complain about JS/font sizes/etc.. why haven't you all migrated to some form of browser that works for you, or plugin combination that makes things work for you - so you can just STOP. We have all the COOKIE ACCEPT/OPTIONS MADNESS because of people like you.
I mean for f-sake we even have agentic tools that can summarize the thing for you so you don't even have to visit it.
I don't know when this retcon happened, but this was never actually a site for hackers. People here complain because they like the modern web, because it pays their salaries. They get fabulously rich because of the steady enshittification of the web.
I can't take HN seriously, I just can't. It's where I get a lot of information but the naval gazing is endemic here. It's a certain type of culture, mixed in with the genuinely good posts and people who work in the industry
Welcome to the web. It’s this behavior that has led me to pursue more analog endeavors. I still need it to work but when I’m not working, I’m not online.
> Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments
Reminds me of on interaction a few months ago where I mentioned the left-right spectrum in passing and someone accused me of making HN a worse place, only to call me a "snowflake" in their very next response! As usual, "things shouldn't be so political" is often uttered from a highly-political sense of discomfort. The quintessential example for me was its usage in US anti-desegregation rhetoric in the 1960s, alongside its resurgence in the anti-DEI movement today -- demanding that no one discuss our shared institutions is too often an endorsement of them, rather than an honest effort to focus on something else.
"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.
Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...
Genuinely curious: would you mind please explaining to me how your contributions are more productive than the person you are responding to (read: attacking)?
It reads like you are upset at the poster using "DEI" and projecting your own behaviors onto them ("tedious and unproductive political discourse", "immune from critique or any burden of evidence").
I promise you Hacker News was exactly like this back in 2011.
> It has become political (toward the left)
I wonder what you're talking about - your definition of 'political' or 'left'.
Tech and politics are so deeply intrenched. More than just "is DEI evil and there's no such thing as algorithmic bias". Should Apple be restricted from collecting its Apple Tax and locking down its devices?? Should the EU be able to regulate American companies? Should governments demand encryption back doors in devices? Should Australia ban teens from social network? Should there be a Right to Repair for our devices?
Honestly one of my biggest gripes with HN is that it does seem to be a place where pretty regressive social viewpoints seem to flourish.
It would be informative if, when someone complains that XYZ is "to the left" they define exactly what they mean. Is the person they are complaining about really advocating for the proletariat to seize the means of production?
It is not in the interest of “people who complain about things being too far left” to get specific. To do so can only increase the number of people who realize they disagree with them. The vagueness is purposeful.
Most times i read political things on HN it looks like visiting a comment straight from ayn rand's delusions, but that's to be expected of the country with two right wing parties pretending to compete.
HN is so depressing, but at the same time so Im addicted to it. It’s like tiktok but for people who enjoy plain text and hacking related stuff. When I first visited HN more than 10 years ago (without account) like, 90% of the content was exciting and you got to learn something. Nowadays it’s about 40-50%, and the rest is crap (including comments). I have been trying to leave HN, let’s see if I can do it in 2026.
particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
I mean, I'm not saying I think it's some sort of bastion of intellectual superiority, just that "have people been saying this place has been going downhill for a long time" is true.
It's still really early 2000's! We have over 900 years left :)
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On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.
Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?
Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)
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I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.
Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.
I don't get people who use "you say [thing] is getting worse but someone X years ago said the same!" as an argument that somehow proves [thing] isn't getting worse. Things can become progressively worse over long periods of time, it's not an instant change that can only happen once.
Another context where I often see this "argument" is major Windows versions. People rightfully say they want to stay on Windows 10 because 11 is objectively worse in many ways, and someone jumps in to say "you said the same about 7 to 10" as if it's some sort of gotcha. Both complaints can be right, each new version can be worse than the last.
Right now, we have at least one aspect in which HN has become objectively worse in the past years: AI-generated content. It didn't exist a decade ago, so good luck using that "argument" there. Thankfully, its prevalence is still nowhere near as bad as on Reddit (it's impossible to browse that site for 10 minutes without noticing bots posting blatant ChatGPT responses everywhere and getting hundreds of upvotes), but still.
I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%
HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.
I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)
Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.
Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.
Their UX is not steamlined. They seem to also opt you in by default to every conceivable category of notifications. It feels like a clown website. If they fixed some of this it could genuinely be enjoyable though of course I get the point that it's employment networking as opposed to a social media 'connect with friends' site
Its alright, were not all like that. I found the site cute, at least there are people standing up to the bullshit. I have been blogging about it on my site to https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/
We've seen the same kinds of discourse arrive here as is common on other social media sites, where too much political discourse is just signaling what tribe you belong to and vilifying anyone outside it.
That's true of the US population in general too. Their quality of life has been decreasing due to accelerated globalization (sans the top ~10% of asset holders).
I will even go as far as stating that it is one of the only few places left on the Internet where you can see differing opinions interleave in a not-completely destructive manner. Really no idea what OP is talking about because it has not been at all my experience.
It's useless without describing concrete, practical solutions to those problems.
What do the voters want? Zero taxes, no crime, world peace and infinite benefits.
It's easy to identify things as shitty because the above doesn't describe the world yet and thus it's a banal observation. Implementing real, practical improvements is really hard and requires much more thought and consideration and introduces the possibility of failure. Which is why that part isn't discussed as much.
Why don't people that perpetuate the current system defend its existence? Why is the onus on us to develop a new realm of government when the current system never had to do this?
Your comment is "but you live in society too!"
Society acknowledging the shitty things is the first action in rectifying them.
God did not create the current system of government on the seventh day of creation. The current system had to defend its existence (or rather, creation) at the time of its origin.
The thing about criticism is, we're a long way from "the worst possible outcome". That is, there is a lot that the current system gets right.
That's why the burden of proof gets put on the one proposing changes. The wrong change could make things worse rather than better, and we really don't want that.
So it's not enough to note that society is broken in some ways. Yes, it is. Yes, we notice too. Now, what are you proposing? Let's take a hard look at your concrete proposal, and see whether it's an improvement or not.
Oh, you don't have one? Yes, it's still valid to point out that there are problems. It's valid to demand that we not become complacent with the current problems. That's not wrong.
Not every complaint needs to have a goddamn essay attached describing some utopia. Sometimes you just need to kvetch, and I'm sick of getting tone policed otherwise about it.
Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow?
Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible.
And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)?
Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.
You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
I don't think I misinterpreted the condescension you dished out by blanket labeling a trend of mostly valid critique as psychological compulsion and performative misanthropy.
Mainly I wanted to suggest that the folks you're diagnosing might have valid reason to complain. I could have done it more tactfully, but that's what came out.
Your post reads to me as a complaint that people who complain too much have a problem.
comment from account created ~4 years before the supposed noticeable decline: Here's a content-free opinion post designed to trigger more of the negative comments I really hate, but I'll keep coming back.
I am not sure, I would say I just joined hackernews for a year so I don't know the whole situation.
but the way I see it, If I assume you are correct, hackernews is in a bit of rough spot because there was this one comment which did some analysis and it feels like hackernews is definitely saturating a bit/(peaked?)
From my personal experience, I feel like we all just use reddit (as the article says) and so we just deal with the annoyances with it and not look for anything else. Or perhaps we join some discord communities.
If people who are within Hackernews are resonating this statement, its in a tough spot because people say such things.
Perhaps, its that Hackernews grew too big for some people and its too small for others. Perhaps one side's currently on reddit not even knowing about it and the other's complaining it on hackernews
And perhaps there's also a middle sweet spot where people aren't complaining but nobody hears them either because they got nothing to complain.
But from the outside what people see are other people complaining about hackernews on hackernews. Same goes for redditors too I guess.
I checked your comment and it says 5 months, I had been assuming you were here for years from the tone but perhaps I was wrong.
I don't know but to me hackernews felt like an information arbitrage of sorts which had these tid-bits of info which made me feel better if I ever were to do somethings like this or gave me confidence in myself in finding the right tool for the right job
If you are tired of hackernews, I would suggest you to open up a fediverse lemmy instance about anything related to hackernews because of the masses perhaps, then you would have less people but more signal since clearly someone would be interested if you create a lemmy instance about similar topics to hackernews but the problem then becomes is if that thing stays idle.
I see your concerns but do you have any suggestions, I see dang and others around here, I am sure if they could do something about it, they probably would?
Lmao sure. Every comment I make about unions gets downvoted, and every comment about "maybe it's okay to destroy the planet for one more solid quarter" shoots into the stratosphere.
More projection here than a drive-in movie theatre... This website sucks, but not because of any (incorrectly) perceived leftwing bias.
Once you understand this, you realize maybe it's not that something is wrong with LLMs, crypto, Google, Apple, Windows, Amazon, the US, Rust, not-rust, JavaScript, Israel, copyright & VCs. It's just a negative place.
