This is mistaken, sort of. The first day was prior to this by many months. The “past” link doesn’t let you get to it unless you manually edit the url. Think of it like a secret Easter egg.
I’m on mobile but maybe I’ll do it later. Or one of you could claim the honor of discovering and sharing it.
Initially I suspected that all the people on the actual-first-day weren’t actually people — that pg seeded HN during its early days, much like Reddit, with multiple personas that only seemed real at a glance.
But now I think pg emailed a link to all@ycombinator.com and those initial users were the people from the 2005 batch. Then they collectively lost interest (which accounts for the multi month gap) at which point pg made it public as Startup News.
I would give a hint on how to find the real first day, but I think I like leaving it as an open puzzle. As a hint, pay close attention to the URLs on the page that this submission points to.
The casual conversation between pg and sama on the top link is interesting. Also neat that Sam was like 17 at the time.
I didn’t know the “HN didn’t exist yet” error. That’s neat, because it implies that this page was intended to be a secret Easter egg, rather than it being a bug.
The last interesting tidbit is to go forward starting from that day, and pay close attention to how rapidly organic interest in the site went to zero. It’s astonishing that Startup News didn’t suffer the same fate; it’s the hardest part of launching something like HN.
I still 40% suspect that lots of the early activity was artificial, and that real users eventually supplanted the artificial activity.
pg once alluded to a “secret sauce”, and I think it was as simple as “keep the front page fresh and interesting each day,” which absolutely requires manual intervention. So the secret sauce seems likely to be something along the lines of “have a big backlog of interesting links, then automatically submit them and give them a few artificial upvotes each day.”
I’ll admit, I’m probably more obsessed with HN’s early days than I should be. But it’s such a pleasing example of Lisp proving its value that I can’t help it.
I see 18 posts and 6 unique posters, if I've counted correctly. It's probably easy enough to get 6 of your friends to post for a day. After that is when it gets hard. Skip ahead a month and see what the post volume is like.
It's easy if you have access to a big list of users from somewhere else.
I used to run a stack of private torrent trackers. The first one I made came from the fact that the admin of another site ran off with all the funds and abandoned the users. I moved them all to my site. Then every time I set up a new site I had thousands of users I could message to let them know. On the final one I had 100K+ active users - a message to them was like having your own private army to do your bidding for you.
Supposedly there was a page 2 of the article, but even though the first attempted capture of page 2 by the IA was only a few days after the article was pusblished, page 2 was returning 404 to IA.
For people who don't understand: What changed is that Youtube acquired such startups, and started developing automated censorship based on copyright which has both a lot of false positives as well as venues for manual abuse when someone claims to be a rightsholder when they're not.
Turns out Youtube was right in the first place: this can't be an automated process, unless you accept more than half the videos that will be deleted have nothing to do with copyright infringement.
No, it's impossible. AI-based algorithms are fairly bad at recognizing copyrighted works. It's hard to strike a balance between what is an original composition and what's a remix/cover/copy:
- if you make it too strict you'll just find bit-by-bit copies: reencoding or slightly altering the data would pass screening easily
- if you make it too lax, you will find that many "original compositions" are in fact very similar to or inspired by other works (oh really that bird singing i just recorded is copyrighted?!)
Beyond that, when there's an actual copy involved, an algorithm is fairly bad at determining whether this copy is legal:
- if it looks very similar to another user's video which claims to have copyright on the content, however what proves the copyright is owned by that other uploader and not by a 3rd party? how can you make sure the license was not copyleft or public domain in the first place?
- how do you know whether the content is used in a context of lawful criticism? parody?
- how do you know whether the usage is tied to an education or accessibility exception to copyright?
- how do you know if the usage of the copyrighted content is legal in the uploader's country? in the copyright owner's country? in the host's country? how do you decide which is more important?
If censorship is bad, automated censorship is even worse. There's no way to make it right.
Quickly browsing through leaves me with the impression that HackerNews has really done a great job of preserving the culture of the website. Meanwhile, Reddit has gotten so much worse, so much more political, even in the last ~7 years.
Jokes not being welcomed is one of the reasons I love this site.
When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information.
There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.
This is it - if you want humour, there are already a million places where you can get that. Reddit’s already a thing; go to the relevant subreddits there.
But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen.
If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.
What irks me is when humor is automatically equated with low effort. Sometimes, a joke is the perfect comment on a thread, but heaven forbid we crack a smile.
Jokes within thoughtful comments have no problem to get upvoted here. Don't mistake "apparent humorless" for "completely dry", as many highly upvoted comments do contain humor, but it's more subtle and within a comment that is insightful even without the joke, not just a comment containing a joke without anything else.
On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.
The problem is not humor on online forums being "low effort", it's "low SNR".
The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation.
Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.
You would have a point if people tended to be wise here, but HN just trades humor for smugness and cynicism. Instead of the top comment being a joke it tends to be a middlebrow dismissal from someone who never bothered to read the article past the headline. The lack of humor doesn't make the comments here more information dense, it just moves the entropy elsewhere and makes it a bit more insufferable.
Great point, and I agree that it sucks that low-effort "serious" comments are more tolerated than humorous ones. But I also think disallowing jokes has a "chilling effect" that ultimately encourages a greater number of people to either think before they post or not post at all. It's not perfect, and of course I'd prefer if low-effort comments vanished regardless of their tone, but it's waaay easier to get away (or even become a celebrity) with extremely low-effort comments on Reddit, low brow or not.
Heh, yeah, my top comments are also humor. Thing is, I put a ton of effort into crafting a good laugher, and then once in a while it gets kicked and that just makes me sad.
Redditors have always been political, in fact it was such a big problem r/politics was one of the first subreddits. I think it’s great Reddit captures everything from far left to alt right while in r/skiing I don’t really ever see politics.
Reddit is different (I'm not sure it was ever good), but by design from its origin and for the bulk of its life it was normie 4chan. It was aggressively offensive everywhere. Where it was political, it was way more aggressive than it is now, because it was barely moderated or moderated by psychopaths and perverts.
I don't get all of this Golden Age talk. I thought it was less boring when half of it was /b/, but the idea that it was apolitical is weird.
In 2010 every women in SF had "no redditors" on their dating profiles. I'm still not sure why this happened, but I think a friend of a friend of a friend told them it was a website for pedophiles.
It's still a gathering place for men with these attitudes. Reddit in general is a boy's club where women are considered second class, and there are no women-only spaces, but plenty where men dominate.
For example, the 'lesbians' subreddit is full of pornography, and the 'actuallesbians' subreddit is full of men pretending to be women. Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.
This has been a "culture" on the internet for as long as I can remember, dating back to the first printed picture from a computer (or first sent image over internet?) being of a group woman and one of the standard test image (for early machine learning maybe?) was a woman in a suggestive pose (from Playboy or similar magazine if I remember correctly). The term "No one is a woman on the internet" has also been uttered for as long as I remember, although many of the early pioneers of computers were women and the space wouldn't have been the same without them.
There are women-only spaces on Reddit (or at least they claim to be, impossible to verify obviously) just like there are male-only spaces on Reddit (and both goes for the internet in general), you just need to know where to look.
> Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.
I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.
Edit: To add another example from this very submission, which is a common way of framing things (on the internet):
> Alright boys, I think I have figured out where the timeline went wrong [...]
> I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.
This doesn't prove that it'll happen to _every_ women-only subreddit, but I think the previous poster is alluding to the ban on several radical feminism subreddits. I'm sure more detail can be found on their new home, which rhymes with "we are over it".
> one of the standard test image (for early machine learning maybe?) was a woman in a suggestive pose (from Playboy or similar magazine if I remember correctly)
> I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.
By "exclusively for women" he means "excludes trans women".
Well, yes. Because they're actually men. So you end up with absurdities like the 'actual lesbians' subreddit being full of (and moderated by) fetishistic dudes talking about their "girl dicks" and other such nonsense.
Seeing all of those "first name" usernames (eric, matt, greg, justin, ...) reminds me of when my first email address at my university was "matt" because it was on a VAX and almost nobody had accounts. It would be interesting to measure the maturity (half-life?) of a site by the complexity of usernames as all the obvious ones are snatched up. I joined HN pretty early but unfortunately used my standard username instead of grabbing a short one.
One of the sure-fire signals of a startup getting old and successful is when the IT department declares a standardized account name template for new hires like firstinitial.lastname(.optional_number). So far I’ve only worked at places where I could get firstname@company.tld, which says something about my preferences, I think.
Yep, and you could often tell who was a real old timer (or maybe who had institutional clout in the company) by who got to keep their firstname@company.tld instead of being forced to change to the standard naming template, which could create a lot of problems with longstanding workflows (in my case it has always been (mylastname@company.tld).
Dang, that's a ton of upvotes for the first day. HN really had a leg up at the beginning. I bet a lot of reddit clones never get half as many users as HN had at the start.
Funny to see everyone's username green because their accounts were just created. Although I see a few accounts that were created months before launch. Maybe there was internal usage before launch that wasn't archived.
Edit: ha, I see the internal usage was archived after all. Here's the real first day, pg's account creation date: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 Seems like it didn't catch on internally and usage died out after a few days, and then there's pretty much nothing until the public launch.
Its our collective badge of shame. Where are the ancient texts? With a different mind set we could have a mobile device with the first x years of internet preloaded. I kinda like that theme: There are lots of things that could have happened with a different mind set. The network before Eternal September was rather revolutionary on its own.
If there is anything to learn for me it is that those who had the guts to think big never went big enough.
In the end everything is politics. Programmers [like many other fields] like to live in denial there so the closest thing to a constructive effort was the pirate party which did nothing. We gave the world corporate monstrosities that lobby out of self interest.
In general I guess you can say that server-rendered websites are easier to assume they are archivable, but that doesn't mean a bit of client-side scripting will break the archiving process. If the scripts are also fetched (and not relying on 3rd party domains), the fetching and rendering process should work the same as long as the UI doesn't depend on API responses. Lightweight scripting, especially done within the <script> tags of the page, will work perfectly fine for most archiving software. Keep in mind all of them already fetch data from <img> tags, and most fetch 1st origin <script> src's as well.
But I'm not sure how you went from "a bit of client-side scripting" and "Lightweight scripting" to "letters and images is unviewable without some modifiying logic" here in this thread? Sounds like you just want people to hear how much distaste you have for the dependence on JS for showing content?
What were the other sites HN users would hang out at back then? Slashdot? Google groups and listservs? Was HN really the first true "community" for this audience?
I had a del.icio.us account since the beginning until it got sold, but it wasn't really a forum or hangout. It was a link aggregator.
I still have a Slashdot account, but I can't remember the last time I logged in there. Peak Slashdot was really 1998 for me, when I was working in my first IT job and would check it as much as 5x a day. By 2011, it had declined greatly in readership because of the combined effects of Twitter, Reddit, and HN.
I’m on mobile but maybe I’ll do it later. Or one of you could claim the honor of discovering and sharing it.
Initially I suspected that all the people on the actual-first-day weren’t actually people — that pg seeded HN during its early days, much like Reddit, with multiple personas that only seemed real at a glance.
But now I think pg emailed a link to all@ycombinator.com and those initial users were the people from the 2005 batch. Then they collectively lost interest (which accounts for the multi month gap) at which point pg made it public as Startup News.
I would give a hint on how to find the real first day, but I think I like leaving it as an open puzzle. As a hint, pay close attention to the URLs on the page that this submission points to.