[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hystoria - a Reddit-like site where all pos...
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Show HN: Hystoria - a Reddit-like site where all posts must be 5+
years old
Author : moksha256
Score : 195 points
Date : 2020-12-09 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hystoria.100millionbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hystoria.100millionbooks.org)
| dawg- wrote:
| Oh man I love this. I have long had a sort of back-shelf idea to
| create a "Month Old News" site where you can read headlines from
| a month ago with more context and thoughtful analysis.
| retzkek wrote:
| Delayed Gratification is this, but quarterly. https://www.slow-
| journalism.com/
|
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573
|
| (not affiliated, and not a subscriber)
| geitir wrote:
| I like the idea but why 5 years? Just to damper current events
| and lead to thoughtful discourse I'd think 5 days
| moksha256 wrote:
| True if looking at individual news stories. However, when
| looking at significant developments, 5 days is not enough to
| create proper context. I'm thinking about things like wars,
| public policy, scientific breakthroughs, major business moves,
| etc.
| diegocg wrote:
| FYI, there is a subreddit for 10 years old news. It doesn't
| receive much traffic https://www.reddit.com/r/TenYearsAgo/
| jodrellblank wrote:
| _click_
|
| " _Leslie Nielsen, star of 'Airplane!' and 'Naked Gun,' dead at
| 84 [10YA | Nov 29]_"
|
| Oh :(
|
| I didn't realise.
| chaos_a wrote:
| /r/Stuck10YearsBehind is more popular
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Stuck10YearsBehind/
| greatNespresso wrote:
| Really cool idea ! I Land on a 404 for now unfortunately
| dsalzman wrote:
| Reminds me of The Hacker Classics. http://jsomers.net/hn/
|
| It includes every HN post with a date like "(1999)" in its title
| that has earned more than 40 votes. Some good gems in there.
| skavi wrote:
| this could just be a subreddit, no?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Given the quality of mods on reddit, I reckon it's better this
| way :)
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| Why would the mods on reddit be any different that the
| moderators on hystoria? The owner of the sub gets to pick the
| moderators, so moksha256 would get to pick moderators on
| either platform.
|
| Maybe you mean reddit admins, who are employed by reddit to
| oversea the site? What issue would they be causing?
| moksha256 wrote:
| It could be, but then reddit would own it, and the fediverse
| would lose out. And users would have to deal with their awful
| new interface and privacy shenanigans.
| pwython wrote:
| Honestly, how does this site differ from a subreddit? How
| does Reddit "own" a list of links that a user has shared?
|
| What in this site's privacy policy (which is safe to assume
| is a one-man band with no legal council) make it more
| transparent or free of shenanigans when I'm just sharing a
| link?
| moksha256 wrote:
| Reddit owns reddit.com so they can do whatever they want
| with it. And indeed, over time, they've added ads and
| analytics and generally made it more commercial and less
| user-friendly. This is a subjective opinion as someone
| who's used reddit off and on for the past 10 years.
|
| My site is owned by me. I expect to be the primary
| contributor to it after the initial hype dies down, and I
| would prefer to spend my time contributing to a site that I
| control.
|
| Privacy policy is at https://100millionbooks.org/privacy/.
| You can judge it for yourself. I run my own mailing list
| server and analytics server. There are no trackers on the
| site. Since launch 3 years ago, there have never been any
| trackers or ads on any 100 Million Books apps or extensions
| (not even affiliate links). That's a pretty good track
| record, and you can bet Hystoria will benefit from all of
| it.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Reddit "owns" a subreddit if people go to Reddit to access
| it, people go to Reddit to add to it and it cannot be found
| anywhere other than Reddit. And then Reddit controls it.
|
| The general case is the "network effect". The Fediverse is
| partly designed to combat it.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| So could HN
| [deleted]
| cbanek wrote:
| I wish I could see - I love this idea. Although sometimes I look
| at newspapers from a long time ago to see what was being talked
| about. A lot of times it's the little things that are the most
| interesting. Those things that we thought were huge but ended up
| being flops or "I wonder what happened to those guys..."
|
| I think sometimes seeing how much of a kerfuffle we made out of
| past current events can help you realize that time does go on,
| and things and people were that crazy back then too.
| moksha256 wrote:
| Sorry, it's back up now. I ran into multiple rate limits, some
| of which were hard to determine/uncover/configure.
| antgiant wrote:
| This reminds me of an idea I've had for a restaurant, but know I
| will never actually build myself. Standard "Sports Bar" setup
| with TVs everywhere, but all of the TVs are playing the live
| broadcast from exactly 8 years ago. (I picked 8 years so that the
| news would match up with the US Political cycle, the Olympics,
| and most of the time the leap year cycle.) I always thought that
| it would be fun to watch the breathless reporting of long past
| news in real-time at a place like that.
| moksha256 wrote:
| Ok it's _actually_ back up now. I ran into a rate limit, and then
| another rate limit, and then another...but things should be good
| now. Sorry.
| parisianka wrote:
| Have 404 error om the site now
| moksha256 wrote:
| I created Hystoria as an experiment to see if blocking out
| current events can lead to more thoughtful discourse.
|
| ---
|
| Hystoria is a simple, reddit-like site (built with a simplified
| version of Lemmy [0]) where only items older than 5 years can be
| posted.
|
| I've been obsessed with media dynamics for years now, always
| wondering what variables can be adjusted within the current
| environment to result in better media production and consumption.
|
| This is my approach for Hystoria. Time creates context: so even a
| vapid political article from years ago can present worthy
| insights since we know a lot more about the topic, context, and
| outcomes. Lindy effect: chances are that an older item worth
| discussing now is even more important now. And philosophically:
| we know exponentially more about the past than the present, and
| history rhymes, so we should talk more about the past.
|
| More details on my approach are in the launch post [1].
|
| ---
|
| [0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
|
| [1] https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/introducing-hystoria/
| ngold wrote:
| This is what makes askhistorians nice. There 20 year real I
| think. I look forward to checking this out.
| SirLotsaLocks wrote:
| Ay I thought this was based off of lemmy. It's cool to see it
| be used to create interesting sites like this.
| moksha256 wrote:
| I've deployed a number of web services and I have to
| say...Lemmy was incredibly streamlined and easy to deploy.
| Deployment is entirely automated with docker and an ansible
| script, and updating requires just 1 command.
|
| Really looking forward to them completing the ActivityPub
| integration.
| anchpop wrote:
| Does lemmy still do the thing where they censor certain
| words and don't include a way to configure the censorship
| to try and discourage certain groups from using it?
| emayljames wrote:
| I would seriously question why you would want to attract
| anybody that used any of the regex statements words, but
| is as easy as changing it in the code.
| anchpop wrote:
| Really? You can't go 10 minutes in many LGBT spaces
| without hearing someone using the f-slur in an
| affectionate way. Also banned is "b!tch", which is not
| really considered that offensive in most of the US
| between female friends, as well as "pu!sy", which is
| maybe vulgar but not an offensive term at all (I notice
| "dick" didn't make cut). Maybe for a site like Hacker
| News those terms aren't usually appropriate, but I see
| Lemmy \more as a replacement for Reddit and I'd hoped it
| would be inclusive to everyone, not just to those in
| their bubble.
|
| I don't know how their system works, if using these words
| just means the comment won't be shared or if it flags it
| for a moderator's attention, but I don't think so. Here's
| a direct quote from a developer:
|
| > I'll have to think about this. Hard-coding it means I
| don't have to do a database migration every time someone
| comes up with a new slur. And putting it in a DB table
| means someone could very easily remove it by deleting
| every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make
| it _very_ difficult for racist trolls to use the most
| updated version of Lemmy.
|
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
|
| In my view this goes against the core point of the
| fediverse. The whole reason I like the fediverse is
| because it democratizes control by giving it to the users
| instead of a small-group of potentially self-interested
| owners.
|
| (After googling I found out "n!ps" can be used as a
| racial slur but I associate it with a funny slang for
| "nipples". I wondered how the AI conference dealt with
| this but apparently they changed their name a couple
| years back to avoid connotations with the slur so maybe
| it's more widespread/well known than I thought.)
|
| (edit: censored slurs. asterisk didn't work because it
| triggered the markdown so I used !)
| moksha256 wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this element of Lemmy...thanks for
| bringing it up. Philosophically speaking, I detest the
| idea of software limiting a user's speech in such a
| way...maybe such a filter would be needed, or maybe not,
| but I would prefer to see the need demonstrated over time
| through practice instead of bluntly imposed by software
| by default.
|
| Reminds me of how Mastodon doesn't allow quote-
| toots...but quote-tweets can be highly effective when
| used correctly. Should be up to instance owners to
| regulate such behavior.
| calibas wrote:
| Looks like it:
|
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/server/lemm
| y_u...
|
| That's the most offensive Regex I've ever seen.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| This reminds me of my approach to reading the news around
| election day. Every day's news was just waybackHN's random day
| function:
|
| http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=random-day
| headmelted wrote:
| You should fire this behind CloudFlare or a general cache
| provider immediately. Get the settings for Nginx figured out
| later, you don't want to miss your moment on the front page..
| moksha256 wrote:
| Yeah I was scrambling for a few minutes there but finally
| uncovered some not-so-well-documented rate limits set by
| default in the Lemmy config. I suspect requests will die down
| pretty quickly after this submission peaks.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I love the concept, but I don't know if 5 years is even enough
| time for people to have gotten over current events. If you made
| it 20+ years, I suspect that would work better.
|
| In any case, good luck, and I hope I'm wrong. :-)
| enchiridion wrote:
| I think having it at a filter would be nice. Maybe 5, 10, 20
| years.
| hlindhe wrote:
| Blocking your own proxy?
|
| 404 Kod: Message, IP. 172.18.0.3, 180 per 60 seconds
| moksha256 wrote:
| Ugh it was just working, looking into it.
| calibas wrote:
| To add, I believe that's caused by rate limiting in Nginx.
| moksha256 wrote:
| Thanks, looks like it was at 1 per second...I just
| boosted it a bit.
|
| EDIT: boosted again...gosh, HN front page is no joke :D
|
| EDIT 2: I ran into multiple rate limits, some of which
| were harder to discover/configure than others. Site
| should be back again. Sorry.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Seems like the host is down altogether for me.
| [deleted]
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| For me too.
| dom96 wrote:
| Why have rate limiting at all? Just disable it
| sangnoir wrote:
| Maybe they don't have an unlimited budget for bandwidth
| charges? I'd strongly recommend they go behind a (free or
| cheap) caching CDN first before removing limits.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Host pings, but port 80 is dead.
| calibas wrote:
| Also, the rate limiting is probably meant to be based
| upon the client's IP, not the proxy IP. Usually, the
| proxy adds the client IPs to the request headers and you
| can use those in Nginx rules.
| [deleted]
| 2sk21 wrote:
| I love this idea!
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Interesting - reminds me of the "Delayed Gratification"
| magazine I just started subscribing to; it's a less ambitious
| timeframe, but by being deliberately 1-2 quarters behind, it
| does avoid a lot of churn and puts in a lot of perspective.
|
| (FWIW: I find I enjoy the magazine, but I find it also spends a
| bulk of it in discussing interesting but marginal items from 6
| months ago, whereas I would've expected a benefit-of-
| retrospective discussion of key items from the past)
|
| https://www.slow-journalism.com/
| [deleted]
| easytiger wrote:
| Fantastic idea, I've had several concepts like this in mind.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| A very interesting idea.
|
| I had my own idea:
|
| xornews - news about politics that are only in one camp, or the
| other, but never in both. For example liberal/conservative.
| That's the main split in my country.
|
| But I realized it can't work without a bunch of moderators
| fascinated by political science.
| moksha256 wrote:
| I made a tinder-style clone a couple of years ago where you
| would swipe a headline left or right depending on the political
| direction you thought it leaned.
|
| When you got one wrong, it was a signal that you should read
| the story (i.e., that the story was not run-of-the-mill
| left/right propaganda).
|
| I thought it was a fun idea with real benefits, but it never
| really caught on.
| emayljames wrote:
| Politics are binary.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The politicalcompassmeme subreddit is an interesting example of
| co existence. I think the flairs / labels of users is key.
| cylon13 wrote:
| I was absolutely astonished by the civility and depth of
| understanding people showed for each others' positions when I
| visited that sub. I think in order to have a successful post
| you can't just dump on "the opponent", you have to make
| something everyone from any place on the compass will laugh
| at, even if it's a bit of a dig. That really incentivizes
| empathy since you can't laugh _with_ people you disagree with
| if you don't really understand where they're coming from.
| theplague42 wrote:
| r/pcm uses irony to defend racism and anti-semitism... it's
| a garbage subreddit
| wmf wrote:
| I've long thought that a Hacker Canon adjunct to HN -- including
| only posts that have stood the test of time -- would be an
| interesting thing to have.
| UhDev wrote:
| Did you have to wait 5 years to launch this?
| moksha256 wrote:
| Nope, and yet it's being publicized on platforms that
| prioritize the present :)
|
| But that's the world we live in. No single platform can (or
| should) dominate the media landscape. Everyone has to play in
| harmony with everyone else.
|
| There's no silver bullet winner-take-all outcome for this thing
| we call the media.
| [deleted]
| theplague42 wrote:
| I'm not really sure what problem this is supposed to solve.
| Hysteria is not a new phenomenon (Satanic Panic, witch trials).
| Disagreements and politics are not new; what if someone posts
| about the start of the Iraq War? Ignoring the present doesn't do
| anyone any good.
| minikites wrote:
| A post from 2015 about how the Earth is flat is just as
| disingenuous as a post from 2020 about how the Earth is flat. I'm
| not sure how this is supposed to lead to automatically thoughtful
| discourse.
| flubert wrote:
| Can't thoughtful discourse begin on a topic that is wrong,
| discussing why it is wrong? For example, I'd love to see a
| critique of what is wrong with:
|
| http://alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm
|
| ...which makes the claim that you don't need to correct for
| relativistic effects for GPS to work correctly. I don't see an
| immediate, obvious flaw in his thinking, so I think it would be
| great to have as a conversation starter with someone more
| knowledgeable.
|
| In fact, thinking about it more, doesn't stack overflow
| essentially depend on people being wrong and needing
| correction?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The author isn't actually familiar with how GPS works. First,
| there's no timestamp transmitted by the satellite (aside from
| the nav message, which isn't used for this). The satellite
| time is estimated as an offset from receiver time. Secondly,
| relativity is compensated for by fixing the satellite clocks
| so you don't get that location drift. Thirdly, if you had a
| perfect clock and used a naive algorithm, yes you'd have
| problems with changing elevation or gravity. Fortunately, GPS
| accounts for both receiver clock offsets (whatever their
| cause), and drift in offsets over time. The receiver is also
| constantly adjusting its clock based on the satellite signal
| so that error never accumulates beyond acceptable limits.
| dawg- wrote:
| Here's the secret, thoughtful discourse is hard work and will
| never be "automatic" :)
| grahamburger wrote:
| It does at least mean that you're limited to discussing flat
| earth posts that were able to stay online and findable for at
| least 5 years, which is a subset of all flat earth posts. So
| that's good!
| moksha256 wrote:
| That's a good example of a post that probably wouldn't do well
| on such a site...you're right, time doesn't add much context to
| that topic.
| thereticent wrote:
| Presumably, not by cutting down on old cruft but by cutting
| down on new cruft. I would think that requiring the post to
| stand some kind of "test of time" would cut down on quick-
| trending but shallow content in a lot of cases.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| These particular constraints may not be ideal, but
| AskHistorians has a similar restriction called the 20 years
| rule where discussion of events from the past two decades is
| verboten. It doesn't automatically make conversation
| thoughtful, but it's an easily enforced rule that largely
| precludes modern politics without sacrificing too many topics
| of interest.
| Fnoord wrote:
| There's still going to be controversy. For example, Turks not
| admitting Armenian genocide (~100 y.o.). Also, the winner
| writes history. I guess within those 20 years, the losers get
| mostly assimilated.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There are still things people care about outside that
| window, but it has the effect of giving people time to sort
| out evidence and write things that can be cited. You'll
| find that there are many posts taking apart those issues.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap". With the benefit
| of time it's easier to filter out the crap. New crap is shiny,
| old crap is stinky.
|
| Sturgeon was talking about pop culture. There was a lot of
| crappy music composed contemporaneously with Bach, but the crap
| has been forgotten and only the good stuff survived.
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