Dang is going to have 65,535 karma points soon

What do you think we could do differently? Serious question.

I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.

I consistently wonder why posts critical of HN-affiliated companies that have stats like upvotes per hour and number of comments that would theoretically make them the top story getting pushed off the front page.

Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed

Downweight posts and comments based on the frequency and positive sentiment. IE things that are posted often and with high positive comments should bubble to the top less often.

I'm afraid I don't understand the first bit - but in case this is what you meant: we definitely don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC-funded startups. That's actually the #1 thing of all things we don't do. There's tons of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... but the short version is that we know the community's good will is the only value HN has, so we try never to do anything that would damage that.

Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.

* By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.

Other people want us to downweight negative sentiment. I wonder what happens if you downweight all the sentiments.

I keep starting and deleting a reply here. My moderating experience is with much smaller entities, but I've been here more than a minute and I think probably the best thing one can do is keep putting out accurate info about how the site actually works.

A lot of people who are stomping mad are mad because they think, for example, that you personally flagged #Thing and don't realize that's not how that works. A lot of that -- the best antidote is calm, cool education without getting cranky, etc.

In my experience and similar provisos.

This makes me think twice about upvoting dying comments that I think are constructive but just happen to go against popular consensus.

I have a lot of karma and an account over a decade old. So I probably have nothing to worry about. But is agreeing with comments killed by down vote really a red flag?

Your account's fine and the posts you've been upvoting (I took a quick look) seem fine. What we're really trying to avoid is garden-variety flamewar.

> is agreeing with comments killed by down vote really a red flag?

On the contrary, that's a good contribution and we hope everyone will do it when good comments (that don't break the site guideline) have been unfairly downvoted.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

p.s. It's always the good users who worry about these things!

Okay, I replied before you edited your comment to add the bit about what constitutes a "bad" comment. I definitely don't upvote those comments. :)

Thanks, dang.

Well my intuition is topics with high negative sentiment won't saturate the front page for long periods of time, unlike topics with high positive sentiment. The latest thing is obviously AI and chatGPT. I'm interested in both, but if there was an increasing downweight based on how long it is popular, and how popular it is, they would still show up on the front page, but not quite so frequently.

Sorry - I'm a compulsive self-editor and I have to see the post in 'reality' before I can tell what's wrong with it. I have the delay setting in my profile set to 1 minute but more is not practical.

> Sorry - I'm a compulsive self-editor and I have to see the post in 'reality' before I can tell what's wrong with it.

I have the exact same thing. I check a comment three times, it looks fine. Hit 'reply', the page refreshes and I spot a whole raft of things that are wrong with it. Very frustrating. Maybe a 'preview' button would help?

Reset karma for everyone. Your top karma people abuse their authority and you don't even notice. If a post is flagged, show who flagged it and for how long.

What authority?

It doesn't take much karma to vote or flag. Well under 100 points IIRC. Past that point, having more karma has no effect on what you can do on the site.

> Your top karma people abuse their authority and you don't even notice.

What authority do 'top karma people' have?

I have 25,772 karma, for what it's worth, and you have 2. I don't think there's anything I can do here on HN that you can't do?

(Hah, and I just noticed that my account is two days older than dang's!)

The solution is simple: downweight all content which generates engagement of any kind

Have you ran some experiments with giving different people different front pages?

To explain a bit more:

On the one hand, you need a critical mass of people to have a discussion. On the other hand, large group dynamics seem to be a problem.

HN is generally many multiples larger than the critical mass for the former, at least on the front page. Attention drops off a lot if you go further.

So as an experiment, you could do something like 'rendezvous hashing' to show each user a random 10% subset of submissions. (If you want to gradually introduce it, run the experiment on 20% of the users only, but show them a 50% subset, so that each of the longer tail items still gets 10% of total users? You can play with the numbers.)

You could make this opt-out, too, so that people don't create ten accounts in the hope of seeing everything. Direct links would also still work.

Thanks—I appreciate your wisdom and I know that you're largely right. But I'm scared of unintended consequences.

It may be that there's a level-up here that we haven't achieved yet. But answering complaints and pushback is such a big part of what I do, and takes so much energy, that I'm scared to make more of the admin stuff public. I know it would explain things and have a settling effect for some; but others would misinterpret the information and get even more riled up by it. What the total effect of such a change would be is impossible to predict, but if it were 10x of the latter (the nightmare scenario), I'm not sure my heart could take it.

High karma users don't gain any special authority or privilege.

There are a few places in the code that consider karma but IIRC it's never more than 500 (the downvote threshold). It's actually on my list to add more goodies for higher levels - maybe something like linkifying URLs in user profiles - but it would not have anything to do with authority on HN itself. We want the best comments and the best arguments to 'win', not skew things in insiders' favor.

Correct. Flagging takes 30 (well, 31) and downvoting takes 500 (well, 501). After 250 you get to set your topcolor. I think that's about it for now.

Do you have a simple AB testing system in place to test hypotheses like this? If you're the only sherif in town running experiments, it doesn't take much work to build a simple one, probably around ~100 LOC ("do things that don't scale").

We don't. I know it sounds simple but I'm too tired.

Edit: to expand a bit lest that seem snarky - what I mean is that maintaining the current system takes so much energy that there's precious little capacity left over for creative exploration. This is a problem.

The obvious solution is to ban commenting altogether. On balance, it's just a bad idea. And the commenters. Ban everything, delete the site, degauss the drives and throw the server out of the window. Then throw a bigger, bulkier server out of the same window so it lands on the first server. Then break both servers down until their components are indistinguishable from one another, and mix them together. Then separate them into a number of small piles and hide each pile inside of a complex puzzle box - a different puzzle for each - in different sacred locations around the world, protected by whatever spells or enchantments are culturally appropriate. Then kill anyone who knows the location of the puzzle boxes, dissolve their bodies in lye, mix the lye into concrete blocks and dispose of the blocks in international waters, following a random dispersal path. Then blow up the boat with an orbital laser. Methods for the procurement and operation of an orbital laser are left as an exercise for the reader.

It's the only way to be sure.

I agree with you that popularity is a diminishing curve and at some point becomes annoying. With the current AI tsunami, we're well past that point for some people, but not others.

From an admin point of view it's tricky because (unless I'm high on koolaid?) this is a major technical development, so genuine advances are happening all at once. Too many for me to keep up with.

The 'delay' setting is there for this (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) - not sure if that suits you or not. Everyone seems to have a slightly different way of working.

How do you attempt to counter groups who deliberately game things?

Newer, widely purposed tech that hasn't taken hold yet is the one I see most often. Where people have invested non-trivial time. Eg the rust crew which I choose as an example because I quite like rust so I'm not bashing the tech here.

There are bogus "here's a cool library/app/thing" articles which get to the front page where I scratch my head and then discover "oh, it's boring as hell but in rust." I see people expressing legitimate points of view (which I frequently disagree with) about cases where C might be a better choice or where a rust re-write doesn't buy the user much that are immediately massively downvoted. It's mob mentality, is it organised or self-organising? Doesn't matter either way. Makes rustaceans look pretty stupid though. And yes you can do this for non-rust stuff and it happens. And it's easy to see why. You invest a ton of time into a tech you really want it to succeed to maximise the payoff for doing so.

What do you do to counter it? Anything at all?

HN is gamified on karma - an idea taken from slashdot with a mildly different implementation but a really good idea that has been under-applied accross the web. In this game popular in the zeitgeist massively trumps interesting, well written, thought provoking and well supported. Sure by the time you've got 50 points you probably should stop caring and you've got karma to burn to be thoughtfully unpopular, but if you take the time you probably want that seen and it's the stuff you want to see - which is kind of the point.

The other question I have is why has there been next to nothing here (that I've noticed - maybe I missed it?) About the twitter files revelations and their importance or lack thereof? Intervention? If so please would you share the thinking behind it?

The point being, to suggest what you could do differently requires a clue on what you actually do now, which I'm not at all sure I have.

Add “transparency” logging for all users.

From then on, whenever a user takes an action on the site (posting, commenting, voting, flagging, etc.) they are prompted to provide an explanation as to how their action contributes to the community. All actions and their transparency notes are stored in this log.

Make it so that it can be skipped, but where applicable the action is delayed, marked with a sigil, and down-weighted.

Then what is the algorithm for determining where something should be ranked. I see submissions with 400 votes in two hours being ranked far below ones with 100 votes in 10 hours, and often the variable seems to be the article is critical of ChatGPT or a YC portfolio company. What else goes into the rankings?

We've worked a ton on trying to prevent that sort of gaming. I would never say that we're catching all of it. If you see a case that you think has broken through our defences, the best thing to do is to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look.

Re the Twitter stuff: there have been quite a few major threads. They also attract a ton of user flags. I'm personally open to the topic but the chalice is so poisoned that I'm not sure HN can discuss it in an interesting way, and interestingness is what we're going for here.

FWIW I'm pretty sure I've flagged fewer than 100 comments in my decade or so on HN. I strongly suspect people with a lot of karma are much more likely to post a comment in response or maybe downvote something than flagging it.

Also, a lot of the high karma accounts got there by posting links, or just by grinding their way up by posting a lot of comments, or because they're 'famous' for something. Karma doesn't represent any sort of unusual power or authority. If you think it does you're reading too much into it.

We ran an experiment something like that a few years ago, but mostly people got pissed off that they were seeing random stuff on the front page.

What's not clear to me in your comment is what we would be testing for. If you're going to A/B test different front pages, what's the fitness function?

I think if it were me, I would not reveal more than is already on the public record. I would wonder how to do repetition (of the already public bits) well for a smart crowd, knowing that smart people tend to loathe repetition.

For example, I might contemplate translating the guidelines into a few major languages (emphasizing in an intro that the site is in English and the translated guidelines are only intended to ease the onboarding process for a global audience). I think a lot of people fail to grasp how multicultural HN is and that a lot of dust ups are rooted in cultural and language barriers.

Help me understand how this would make things better.

"How are stories ranked" is near the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Does that answer your question?

In terms of moderator action: we might downweight ChatGPT topics (for oar against) if they seem repetitive rather than significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). But we don't downweight posts that are critical of YC companies—or rather, we do so less than we would downweight similar threads on other topics. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

That link doesn't really tell us. We're a very analytical bunch here, and when I see one story that should have a 10x higher rank according to the "basic algorithm" being ranked lower, that means these "other factors" are much more than a slight twiddling. And when you don't provide the full algorithm, just a hand waive, it makes it difficult to ascertain what's really happening.

Are you sure there aren't abuses from your portfolio companies managers/employees to flag negative stories? I imagine Sam, for example, knows exactly what he has to do to get ChatGPT criticism guided off the stage.

Edit: for example, do you know what happened with this story? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35245626

This is a very interesting/important topic. This was a new topic. It was really hot in the first hour, and just got smashed off the front page.

Thanks for already having run the experiment!

In vague terms, the idea is to suffer less from 'how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default)' while still having enough eyeballs per front-page submission to have a discussion.

Now how would we operationalise that? A simple measurement is to check whether engagement per submission is having a longer, fatter tail. But that would be merely something that's easy to measure, not something we directly care about.

You'd need to have some proxies for drawbacks of 'large group dynamics on the internet'. Perhaps check civility of discussion or so?

> [...] but mostly people got pissed off that they were seeing random stuff on the front page.

I guess if you'd want to check again, you'd either have to educate people better (ie better PR) or you'd have to be more sneaky.

An idea for the latter: instead of restricting users to 10% of submissions, as a test run you can reduce them to 80% of submissions. That way the front-page would still look pretty similar to before and you wouldn't drive people too far into the long tail of submissions. Of course, any effect you could measure would also be weaker.

What did you measure (or hope to measure) when you ran this experiment a few years ago?

I've been doing an experiment on reddit to reduce its emotional impact on me, which is to hide all points. I was inspired by HN's approach of not showing you other commenter's points.

It works quite well. I'm much more true to myself and get into fewer combative situations. I bet it would reduce complaining to mods on HN as well. The site could still use points exactly the way it does behind the scenes, but users would be less concerned about their own status.

I understand. In the typical corporate world this is solved with "hire interns to work on all the cool things we don't have bandwidth to explore, while being simultaneously jealous of them". Or I'm sure a lot of people such as myself would happily volunteer to help out.

I don't really feel like reddit is a fair thing to compare this site to.

I dunno, something about the text-only medium seems to keep a lot of junk at bay.

It's on my list to make it a profile option to hide all points/karma things.

Hiding it for everyone would be more radical and kind of scary to me. But we could maybe try it temporarly just to see what happens.

We just did what Jerry Weinberg called "first order measurement" - looking at what was happening. It wasn't a borderline call; people hated it.

I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868928 (Dec 2019)

> Are you sure there aren't abuses from your portfolio companies managers/employees to flag negative stories? I imagine Sam, for example, knows exactly what he has to do to get ChatGPT criticism guided off the stage.

Quite sure. That is, there may be managers/employers of $companies trying to flag things, but being a YC portfolio company doesn't make that any easier. And yes I'm sure that Sam can't do that. (I also know that he wouldn't try, but that's a separate point.)

Re the FAQ: it doesn't give a detailed explanation (we can't do that without publishing our code) but it summarizes the factors comprehensively. If you want to know more I need to see a specific link. Speaking of which:

Re https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35245626: it was on HN's front page for 4 hours, and at some point was downweighted by a mod. I haven't checked about why, but I think most likely it was just our general approach of downweighting opinion pieces on popular topics. Keep in mind that the LLM tsunami is an insanely popular topic—by far the biggest in years—and if we weren't downweighting follow-ups a la https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it would saturate the front page every day.

Actually we tend to not do that moderation on randomwalker posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=randomwalker) - because they're basically always excellent. But a certain amount of randomness is inescapable and randomwalker posts do great on HN most lot of the time. If we made the wrong call in this case, so much the worse for us and I'm genuinely sorry.

This sounds well considered and I think you are doing well trusting your gut instinct on this.

You can downvote and flag, they can’t.

What HN is missing above all else is a section for meta posts, i.e. posts discussing HN itself, where questions like yours can be elaborated in detail.

It's ridiculous that this impromptu feedback session is happening here in a sub comment of a trivia thread that many users will just overlook. Feedback and community engagement should be an ongoing, (semi-)formalized process, not an ad hoc, once in a blue moon type of thing that will have been buried under a deluge of garbage by tomorrow morning.

Well, the limits for that are 500 and 30 karma. But you technically have a point as 2718i314 (the user I replied to) doesn't have enough karma to reach those thresholds.

It's Jira for forums

I've vouched for more comments than I ever flagged.

I used this method on reddit myself. It's just a userstyle, so I turn it off occasionally, but it makes it a voluntary action I have to turn back on if I want to see it.

Helped out, I think. Along with carefully practicing not escalating and picking when to just not comment.

What makes you think karma is anything other than a popularity contest rather than the best argument? I've had comments downvoted to negative land without anyone commenting on my comment. If someone can't be bothered to state what they find wrong with a comment, then they shouldn't downvote. Such downvotes are basically trying to silence the speaker instead of addressing what they are saying.

Outside of the UI difficulties in keeping a clean look, would different ways of providing response to a post or topic not help to solve this? For instance if there was some way to mark something as repetitious that could be contrasted against e.g. upvotes to get dynamic and 'automatic' feedback on the perceived 'freshness' of a topic.

In general downvotes seem like a relatively poor feedback mechanism because there's no shared agreement on how they should be used. This [1], perhaps ironically flagged, post offered feedback on why people downvote, and it's just all over the place. Even if there are guidelines, people will be people. At least with something like clear adjectives, the percent of 'intended' feedback would be higher.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23997697

To be honest, meta subforums are however almost always toxic where people publicly hang their beef with other members out to dry. Not all requests of dang et al need to be public, you can email them (I have in the past).

Don't change anything. I would wish the HN crowd would not be "Only the US exists" but it is what it is. Left a dozen times b/c of hate comments over the last decades, but always came back (with different accounts) because there are comments that are gold nuggets.

It can really come down to who you're talking to.

I use old.reddit.com and have a heavily filtered r/all for general news (which I could do without), and specifically participating in discussions that are almost entirely text around what may or may not be a text post.

Other people use it like an image board or video feed.

I do agree that reducing the amount of media can mitigate junk, though.

You haven't addressed publicizing who flagged a post. For instance, who flagged the first post on Bob Lee's death? How long was it kept flagged? Who removed the flag?

How would one know if flagging wasn't abused? I've had comments flagged that get unflagged a day later. Were there any consequences for the person who flagged the post?

> it doesn't give a detailed explanation (we can't do that without publishing our code)

Precisely why would publishing (the relevant part of) the code be a problem? Twitter did it just a few days ago, and they aren't even known as an information hub of the open source world, plus they face a lot more public scrutiny for everything they do, to put it mildly.

I read through your linked post, and I wonder if it would work better if the algorithm was something like this:

Take what is currently the two front pages (i.e., the current front page, and what you get to when you click "next" from the front page). Then randomize out of that set and show it to the user.

You could do that for any value N, perhaps even a fractional N (1.2, 1.5, etc.) to see how much of an impact it has.

Instead it sounds like you took /newest posts and randomly placed them on the front page. These may be completely or nearly completely unvetted, so it's not surprising to me people reacted to that. (Granted, this is with the benefit of hindsight and so on.)

Stepping back a bit, I'm not sure any of this will meaningfully change the "mob" dynamics of HN. But HN attention is so focused right now, I do think spreading that out might have an impact. Right now, posts tend to die off quickly and sometimes I wish discussions would live on a little longer than they do.

I definitely empathize with feeling that any change could make things dramatically worse.

That is snide of you. Does that deserve a downvote?

Sorry I missed that point. We wouldn't publicize flags any more than what people upvoted or downvoted. That data is quite personal.

I don't think that.

I've seen a tremendous amount of positive action coming from StackExchange's Meta forums over the years. Best of all, you don't have to visit them if you don't care about meta stuff.

It's really weird how two of the most important platforms of the open source world (HN and GitHub) have no feedback process in the commonly accepted sense. Every niche Python package has an issue tracker nowadays where problems are collected, discussed, and often resolved, with the synergy of the community of users. But the grand systems underlying all of this are somehow exempt from needing anything like that, and "email the moderators" is good enough? I don't buy that, sorry.

I'm not sure you've got an apples-to-apples comparison there (between what Twitter published and what I was just talking about).

Either way, though, I don't want to publish that part of our code for two reasons: I fear that it would make HN easier to game/mainpulate, and I fear that it would increase the number of objections we have to deal with. It's not that I mind dealing with objections in principle, but a 10x increase would bury me.

So trust you that it doesn't get abused? Nope.

I was being a little facetious. You can’t do anything about voting mob mentality, it’s just internet culture. You guys have been great at moderating verbal assaults and bullying.

If I could say anything, it would be to stand by your TOS and limit political threads. We are here for tech related news. That’s what HN is great at.

10 years now on HN.

I don't know what the commonly accepted sense is but we have two active feedback channels: HN comments, and the inbox at hn@ycombinator.com. Active enough that I spend my days dealing with them.

You said "We want the best comments and the best arguments to 'win', not skew things in insiders' favor." But only those that get to a certain threshold apparently.

I don't think I said anything about trust? No doubt it does get abused. We do what we can to counteract that.

I don't know about your comments, but if I see one which is easy to debunk by looking it up then I just downvote. There's no reason to be less lazy than the original poster just to prove them wrong.

> I'm not sure HN can discuss it in an interesting way, and interestingness is what we're going for here.

I ask this with the greatest amount of respect: Is it possible that you're taking that "mission statement" a little too seriously here?

I'm a casual HN user and I open the front page 3-4 times per day. Roughly 50% of the topics tend to be well-written but ultimately standard blog posts from random technologists on fairly standard technology topics.

Some of it is indeed interesting, and what's interesting of course depends on the reader, but I think it's safe to say that most people won't open the front page and be utterly blown away by how incredibly interesting every single post is.

Considering this, silencing a lively discussion because it might not meet certain, ultimately subjective, criteria of "interestingness" seems excessive. To be clear, I don't want to see the front page dominated by a single topic every day, but it pains me when discussions containing (among other things) thoughtful comments are effectively hidden from view in a matter of minutes because an algorithm or a moderator thinks we'd be better off reading about how someone has connected their dog's heart rate monitor to their car's entertainment system using a Raspberry Pi.

"We want" means it's a goal to aspire to, not that it's already the case.

Not sure what you mean about thresholds.

> Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.

Thanks for confirming this. There was some speculation last year about partial shadow bans for voting,* and it's good to hear an authoritative answer.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059

When this happens to an HN account, is it permanent or can it be reversed if the account stops upvoting "bad" comments? If it's permanent, affected users would like to know. Evaluating comments and determining whether they should be voted on can take a long time, and the affected users could save a lot of time if they knew that their votes would never count again.

Allow me to chime in:

- the voting behaviour is just like reddit or rather just as bad - it is herd voting, flippant voting (but I really don't think how this can be fixed; maybe it can't be - but that is how it is to be honest and maybe it's time we acknowledged it)

- there is a sense of "aura/legend" attached to certain users, I find it maybe a bit extra weird because I am not from the US (later about it), and maybe not from the "in" crowd that I can't understand the why of it (I would not have known even if I knew of those users) - useless/meaningless/contentless comments get upvoted and reach the top -- not showing showing rank/voting might be a great idea imho (again, I really don't know how this can be fixed or whether this has to be fixed)

- HN seems like a "US only" forum largely, maybe that's the intention, I am not sure. I mean some comments and even posts just make it look like everything and everywhere works as it works in the USA

- Brigading or soft-brigading either just happens or maybe allowed as well - esp. on political threads - maybe just do not allow politics at all (no exceptions!) or those might need extra attention. I mean there is no point in allowing a political post when it ends up just getting raided. Also I often feel political posts specifically about USA are more kosher than political posts about other places.

- Encourage non-technical discussions more (but with the exception of political posts :P) - personally my best experiences on hn have actually been on non-tech/sw/hw posts really

One of the things I like about hn is its simplicity but maybe wouldn't mind "sections" or "categories" for different types of posts. Again this has its own trade offs.

I mean it's not so bad and whatever is bad maybe cannot even be fixed.

Re voting: I agree - it's a weakness of the mechanism. I've posted a lot about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Re "certain users": I don't see it that way! I'd prefer this to be a place where anyone can post about anything, and if their comment is insightful, that is what matters.

Re "US only": last I checked, US users were only 50% of the community. It may be less than that now.

Re brigading: it's definitely not allowed, and we've worked a lot on trying to stop it, but it's a hard problem.

Re non-technical discussions: I couldn't agree more, and we work hard to encourage that. Even to the point of various secret agendas.

Re sections or categories: no, I don't think that's in HN's DNA. For better or worse, this site is organized around a single front page that everyone sees the same way. Past explanations here if anyone is interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Isn't it simpler to either nuke it all from orbit, or bring in the sharks (with lasers) ?

I second not sharing anything that isn't already public.

But there is this pattern where these discussions get hashed out either (a) when someone misbehaves and dang posts a reply to remind them about the guidelines or (b) like this, we have an impromptu comment thread on HN's mechanisms. In either case, the content gets buried pretty quickly and we're relying essentially on human memories to keep this institutional knowledge alive.

I wonder if it would help to explicitly collate this information somewhere. Think, something parallel to the guidelines. But the guidelines answer the question, "how should I behave on HN?" whereas this would be answering "how is HN run?" (Or perhaps, how is it not run.)

It's a half-baked thought, so don't take it too seriously, but I figured I'd mention it.

I chose to make this comment to say, in the nicest possible way, that I do not understand what the parent comment's author intends to accomplish with this idea. I hope I have said enough about my comment to convince everyone that making it was worthwhile, and not motivated by personal animus or sarcasm. I also hope that everyone reading it will like it enough to vote me some more karma, which I will not abuse, but simply glow a little brighter from. Thanks for reading my explanation of my comment, and I hope you agree that I helped make HN a better place.

Your comment makes me think that we should take it even more seriously. The whole idea of HN is intellectual curiosity. If the site isn't intellectually interesting, it fails—full stop.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it is interesting. There are all too many ways in which it is not. I just mean that that's what what want it to be, and try to help it be. Even though we fall short.

Connecting a heart rate monitor to a car does sound kind of interesting to me though! but not with a dog - that sounds too close to abusive. But I could imagine someone making a biofeedback system where their heart drives their car or something. That would ba a great HN post.

Make humor legal again on HN for a start?

And either ban "this is offensive" comments or politics altogether.

Have you looked into expanding the team? (I’m guessing the answer is yes: if so, how has it gone?)

Humor has always been "legal" on HN! But it's a tricky business because most people vastly overestimate how funny their jokes are. I always refer to scott_s about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.

Re politics: it's not possible to ban that altogether, nor would it fit HN's mandate of intellectual curiosity to do so. For past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If there are questions I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to answer them.

Completely agree on the “certain users” thing. The UI de-emphasises the author of the comment. There’s no profile picture or “checkmark” for us to recognise and reflex vote. That’s a good thing! There isn’t a concept of following certain users, another good thing. If there was, we’d have popular users “dunking” on unpopular ones and having their opinions confirmed by their followers showing up to vote.

If anything, HN threads reward people who comment early. I’ve noticed the users with most karma are also extremely online and comment on a lot of threads early. If the thread becomes popular, their comments get more views and karma than someone who comments later. Even here, HN tries to mitigate this effect by giving every new comment in every thread and sub-thread a few minutes at the top when it’s new. This encourages people to comment even if they’re late to the party.

More could be done like removing the list of top users or moving profile karma a couple of clicks away, but HN does more than most websites to de-emphasise power users. That’s why I comment here and not elsewhere.

The "commonly accepted" system in this day and age would be an issue tracker where the public can collect, discuss, contribute ideas, and rank issues by voting. Issues can be sorted, searched, filtered, and, most importantly, closed when they have been addressed or rejected.

There are many variations of this feedback system, but comments randomly interspersed in unrelated discussions, never to be found again, is not one of them. And neither is a private mailbox.

> useless/meaningless/contentless comments get upvoted and reach the top

Could you point to an example? I dont think I’ve ever seen this happen on HN, i know its rampant on Reddit though.

It's not permanent in the sense that we remove the penalty when we see that the user has shifted their behavior. That could be either because someone emails us or because we (randomly) take a look at the situation and change things.

I know that's problematic because it depends on us seeing things and manually doing them. I'd love to automate it—not just because it would be fairer but because it would be less work for us! But I don't know how to write code to do that.

People sometimes ask us to remove all the points and karma stuff from what gets displayed. Do you think that we should?

> Don't change anything

There where there is still work to do, there is work waiting.

Pick any thread on C++ where someone suggests C has its place with reasoning. Any thread on clojure. Any thread on rust. Zero effort with popular with thread zeitgeist "wins". Reasoned supported dissent not so much.

Well I'm astounded that you let people "user flag" the story showing the evidence of government intervention in social media "moderation" which until it came out was a rank conspiracy theory. It's deeply controversial and upsetting for large numbers of people who would rather it were not true and I'm one of them. I would definitely rather it if it wasn't true about the suppression of a true story in the lead up to the election. I would definitely rather it wasn't true that the FBI, CIA, NSA etc were getting involved where they really should not. But it is true no matter how much I dislike that it is. It should be discussed widely and nowhere more so than here - it's our industry. How bad is it and how concerned should we be about it is a vital discussion, not be "user flagged" to be out of bounds. I completely understand that a noisy and vocal minority used to think Elon could do no wrong and his farts smelled like lavender and yet we had reasoned, sensible discussion here about his efforts in the Thai cave rescue. Nowadays a noisy and vocal group think Elon is in league with everything that is evil and shout it to the rooftops. Still we are likely to manage.

You didn't say it outright but I would take you at your word you, as in HN didn't moderate the story away and I would like you to confirm in the face of what we now know about pressuring moderators.

If it's "user flags" that did it are you being gamed on that? How do you know?

Would that be happening if it made Trump look like more of a crook than he is which plays to my prejudices just like 90+-ish % of those here? Zeitgeist. Major story that affects us as people, our community, many of our startups and specifically HN, which seems like it would be subject to similar pressures?

The major threads? I never saw them and I come here too often! ;-)

Thanks for explaining. We may be too old school for that. My take is that each site organizes around its initial conditions and it's not really desirable (or even possible) to radically change those.

I'm also not sure that an internet forum like HN is a good fit for the issue tracker model—but that could just be rationalization on my part.

> one which is easy to debunk

Yes, and I also do it, but very rarely and as an exception (and I am strongly in the position of "sniping weakens the system").

The issue is that it is possible that the censor may have misunderstood and missed something that was not clearly expressed.

Yes but it's complicated. Mostly by me.

I think the site is interesting overall. That doesn't mean every single post is, or has to be, for everyone.

And, ironically, even interestingness can get repetitive. When I see a post titled "How I made Netflix' video decoding on Android 25% faster", I know that I'm going to find a war story where some silly hardware bug was preventing proper cache management or something. It's interesting in a way, and if I read the full post I'm going to learn plenty of new things – but at the end of the day, I've seen (and done) it all before. Not this particular bug of course, but this type of story.

What I'm really looking for is ideas and thoughts that are completely new to me. Not just in their particulars, but in their general direction. That's very difficult to find. And "dissenting", "controversial", and "offensive" opinions are an absolutely crucial part of finding it, in my experience. A "sort by controversial" feature like Reddit has would be a godsend for HN.

I'm not saying an issue tracker should be integrated into HN. That would be a waste of effort. There are plenty of mature systems, like GitHub, that you could use at no cost and with essentially zero setup required.

Don't you get tired of answering the same questions again and again, and rebutting the same arguments year after year? I can't imagine not being able to just write "Duplicate of #3845" and close the issue.

> Take what is currently the two front pages (i.e., the current front page, and what you get to when you click "next" from the front page). Then randomize out of that set and show it to the user.

Well, that's essentially identical to what I suggested if you specialise it to 50% of submissions visible per user.

But yes, I agree that this would be an interesting experiment.

However it's easy enough for us to suggest experiments; and much harder for dang and friends to run them.

If you don't like the community here, why do you stick around?

I don't really check anyone else's karma, so hiding others' wouldn't change my behaviour.

I am vain about my own karma though. Maybe a UI toggle to hide my karma so I would care less about it?

a crazy idea, maybe, but the simple up/down voting on a comment could be replaced with a different mechanism: speak your disagreement or agreement. later, say an hour later, a gpt-powered system quantizes the comment for substance/information and executes the up/down voting.

That is what I intended to point to. I believe karma/points could be hidden and maybe that semi-hidden leaderboard page as well. I would not even want to see my own karma really.

I take this occasion: I think some extra way should be devised to avoid losing important submissions in the flow of new ones.

Some of them are not exactly idle: just a few hours ago I submitted a piece about an epidemic of "voice scams", AI boosted: the idea was that it is not simply "intellectually interesting", but important, urgent and pressing, and especially calling for the awareness of the community.

I have put some consideration on the matter to come up with proposals, but no good idea yet.

Passing a threshold doesn't do anything for your own comments.

Regarding voting, how about swapping to a two axis system, one up/down for agree/disagree and one for contributes/doesn't contribute?

In my experience the lively ones aren't that productive. People start commenting mostly for the audience, with a heavier reliance on rhetoric and less on understanding others.

A potentially small change, since there's a lot of space on the page where you reply. People tend to adjust behavior from small nudges - could adding a summary of the rules/hn guidelines on the reply page help avoid some less useful comments?

This could go after the reply button, before it, before the comment box even. Or, to get fancy, positioned based on karma (a little more in the way when it's low, more out of the way as it climbs).

No functional change.

I've found myself delete a lot of less useful comments when I stop and say "is this really helpful? Or am I trying to 'win' a discussion".

> We are here for

"Intellectual curiosity" naturally calling for the technically inclined.

> How bad is it and how concerned should we be about it is a vital discussion, not be "user flagged" to be out of bounds

It's also really hard to discuss because the ability of the average user to comprehend nuance seems to have gone down, instead pattern matching things to the nearest cliche. I've seen time and time again what should be a nuanced discussion having users mentally replace nuanced statements and facts with more readily accessible clichés.

I have no simple solutions to that issue, inspiring that kind of nuanced discussion would likely need it to explicitly gamified (e.g. having a specific award/karma that people can give out for someone else understanding the nuance of something someone else said and an equivalent down vote for rounding something off to a cliche) and even that probably wouldnt work.

> I can't imagine not being able to just write "Duplicate of #3845" and close the issue.

You know that what you're saying is "I can't imagine not being able to show the user a middle finger?", right? Because that's how it usually feels on the receiving end. You mentioned StackExchange upthread; the identifying meme of SO and SE family is "closed as non-constructive" and "closed as duplicate" - that is, how absurdly many good topics are killed or blocked this way for no discernible reason.

For Dan, I imagine the amount of work is the same. He could be clicking[0] to close ticket #12346 as duplicate, and making it clear to the entire HN userbase that user 'TeMPOraL just wasted his time by having the audacity to ask question without first searching[1] through prior #12345 issues. Or, he can just make a few keypresses to insert a canned paragraph into an e-mail[2] - resulting in me getting my answer/scolding directly into my inbox, but more importantly, in me feeling heard and respected as an individual contributor, as well as being reassured HN is moderated by someone who cares. Not to mention, I can always reply if I believe I'm being dismissed too early, without risking to create a stink.

Same amount of work, completely different outcomes.

--

[0] - In some crappy modern issue tracker WebUI. Like the GitHub one you mentioned. Or Gitlab.

[1] - Via some crappy, eventually-consistent Elastic Search-backed search form.

[2] - Or, these days, he should be able to forward the e-mail to DanGPT, with an annotation like "doesn't work, gtfo, hash table in the sky", and DanGPT would then produce a few polite and informative paragraphs, based on the forwarded e-mail and maybe automatically pulled comment history. I wouldn't really mind to be on the receiving end, even if I learned this is how the reply was written. It's still much better than "Closed as duplicate" or "WONTFIX" or "LMGTFY".

I feel like if karma was removed, the "created" date should be removed as well. I'd certainly welcome the change and do not see the benefits of karma. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Try browsing HN at different times of day. As someone living in the EU, I honestly don't see HN as being all that user-centric. I attribute it to the fact that I browse when most USians are asleep, Earth being spherical-ish and timezones being what they are.

Except that it's not the same amount of work, because many issues/questions are in fact duplicates, and many users do in fact search the issue tracker before filing another one.

So having a public issue tracker reduces the number of issues the maintainer has to respond to, because it enables (certain) people to answer their own questions by looking at what has been discussed previously.

There are very good reasons for why issue tracking is now the standard for 99% of open source projects. It's not about having fancy web UIs, it's about the process itself.

How should we distinguish important submissions from the others?

Interesting. I see non-Americans chiming in all the time, though some of them may be located in the US.

How is it determined what posts reach the first page?

I visit hacker news so that I can avoid current affairs news, but all too often non "hacker" stories appear on the feed and it feels like they shouldn't have made it out of New

Just a guess - you may be downvoted not for exactly what you are saying, but how you are saying it. You may have valid criticism, but being rude is not met with welcome on HN (for good reasons).

instead of a karma number, it would be better to have a different indicator. still count karma in the backend, but display only a percentile, or a number of symbols depending on the karma compared to other users on the platform. For example, relatively low karma would be `+`, high would be `+++`. Something that is very difficult to game and gameify, while still giving a nice little indicator of activity and whether someone's other comments are liked here.

Or just make the user karma a simple average over all their posts and comments. Anything but a straight number that goes up each time!

I use my own karma display as a way to check if its likely i have new replies.

Blind praise towards Apple is a very common example

> How should we distinguish important submissions

I meant that, remaining on the assumption that the users will upvote submissions thus determining the perceived degree of importance, the fast flow of the news makes important ones go lost. Extra mechanisms to facilitate that "somebody notices the important" should be there.

This said, other mechanisms that differentiate submissions besides user upvote are not impossible.

As said, I do not have good proposals at the moment, but surely if I come up with anything sound I will contact you and present the idea.

I promise you that people who like Apple feel exactly the opposite. Perceptions are driven by pre-existing feelings.

It's just what's described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html: upvotes, time, software actions, and moderator actions.

There's no easy way to distinguish between "hacker" and "non hacker" stories because different people evaluate these expressions completely differently.

I would advocate an even more radical change: Remove the username from posts and comments, at least by default.

If the purpose of this site is exchange of ideas (rather than personal interaction), who wrote something should never matter. Only what was written matters. Discussion threads become collectively sourced arguments rather than ego battles. Take the identity of posters out of the equation.

In the rare cases where it matters (e.g. "Show HN" threads where the author offers to answer questions), it should be no problem for people to explicitly identify themselves ("author here"; this is mostly already happening anyway).

> and many users do in fact search the issue tracker before filing another one

I imagine the same kind of users would also use the Algolia-powered search bar at the bottom of (almost) every HN page to search for prior discussions on a topic. Even if a topic shows repeatedly over the years, Dan always replies with at least a fresh summary next to a link to prior issue - as a result, there's a really good chance you'll hit gold when you search for it.

> So having a public issue tracker reduces the number of issues the maintainer has to respond to, because it enables (certain) people to answer their own questions by looking at what has been discussed previously.

I feel it's important to recognize the limits of the analogy. HN threads are not a product. Dan is not a maintainer. People's questions and complains are not issues. Moderating a discussion group is all about human connection[0].

Now, I do believe a lot of the things Dan writes should be collected, edited, and published as an updated FAQ. I get why guidelines are vague, and why not everything is spelled out, but if the amount of repetitive moderation work it creates is keeping Dan at capacity, then maybe it's worth it to extend the FAQ a bit.

> There are very good reasons for why issue tracking is now the standard for 99% of open source projects. It's not about having fancy web UIs, it's about the process itself.

I may be too cynical, but I think the reason is mostly path dependence: this is what Github shipped with when it took the world by storm. It was both streamlining and dumbing down/functionality reduction of systems people used prior (Redmine, Trac, and then earlier systems) - but very convenient at entry level. So people adopted it, and now are used to it, and bend it way beyond its performance envelope, for things like long-term issue database or LARPing project management. Or keeping a community - issue trackers and OSS projects are too drive-by for that.

Point being, most of those reasons don't apply to HN moderation, and issue trackers are a poor fit for this in general. If we had to do it somehow, I'd prefer a meta.news.ycombinator.com board that's running Lobsters clone (because it's like HN but supports tagging threads, which would be useful here). But I feel that not doing anything fits HN better - this is a community, not a corporation; not everything needs to be streamlined. There are strong social side effects to having people just talk about things.

--

[0] - I think. Dan has much more experience and a better perspective on this.

I think for many (most?) people that would just result in them always voting +2/-2. Because stuff you disagree with is wrong (-1), and wrong posts don't contribute (-1), and likewise for agree/contributes. At least those are the heuristics that were preconfigured in my irrational monkeybrain.

Also when someone does say something I agree with but that does not contribute ("most grass is green") I wouldn't want to reward them with a +1 agree either, just punish with -1 doesn't contribute.

Remove downvote.

> something that was not clearly expressed

I'd argue that in this case it's also in the interest of the community to downvote, since the comment adds more noise than it contributes to the discussion. In the end it's a ranking; if other comments are better worded and clearer, everything else being equal, they deserve to be higher up.

Karma is still part of the skinner box that keeps me commenting. I'd rather keep my addiction.

This is an excellent suggestion. Coupled with hiding username (which is even more of a radical change) I think the forum will be even better.

Downvotes have an important function: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

An idea I had: Have some way to reflect whether the OP of a reply messaged the reply or not. i.e. If UserX posts a comment and UserY replies, under the UserY comment have a single, empty line for UserX's reply where UserX's comment will appear if UserX replies. Edit-Or text "no reply" then a "replied" link once done along with the other "top line" links.

I think that would underscore that what appears to be a conversation between two people is not. That's important and I think often lost in online discussion. If UserX doesn't reply they might have been persuaded to UserY's position and one way of signaling that is to not reply. Meanwhile there's very likely someone who will read a well reasoned and backed up comment and nonetheless disagree, and they're most likely to reply given their disagreement. More so in the age of bots. The aggregate effect is for discussions to be weighted harshly negatively to the point of destructively.

Edit-I'm not very aware of the "famous user" effect. Sure there are usernames I recognize, but it's few, and the UI doesn't seem to give them much weight. I 'worry' more about the criticality of the site.

How would you know it was Dang that was moderating, or some stripe ceo replying to yet another deplatforming post?

I think that touches on one of the things that could be easiest to improve. HN has upvotes and downvotes without any guidance on what people are meant to be voting about (agreement? post quality?). So people just downvote stuff they disagree with in the hope that other people won't see it.

Because flagging also affects visibility it's clear that many users simply use flagging as a kind of "super downvote" which it presumably isn't meant to be. Their goal is to suppress interesting discussion of interesting things uncomfortable for their world view, not to clean up spam. I always read with showdead on because the sheer quantity of interesting, useful posts that get flagged is well beyond the value of the flagging mechanism.

HN seems to be stuck in a form of circular reasoning in which flags are taken as a sign that some people are (or claiming to be) upset, therefore the discussion won't be "good", so it is OK to suppress it, which then encourages people to flag things. But this just empowers aggressive minorities who weaponize their own feelings to shut down interesting debates for everyone else. It seems counter to the mission.

A simple fix: put the ability to flag behind a very high karma threshold, write out a clear policy for how it's meant to be used i.e. what is considered rule breaking and what isn't, then take away flagging privs for people who consistently flag things that don't meet the policy.

usernames I do like, personally, since some people I know are on here, and sometimes a comment's content changes if the username is known to you, e.g. WalterBright.

I have no idea what current tech is, but here's something from 20 years ago: Slashdot makes downvotes have a reason, and has a metamoderation.

So I post a well-researched article that refutes something the parent says. There's no reason that should be downvoted past 1.

- On HN someone downvotes it because they don't like the article

- On Slashdot someone downvotes it because they don't like the article. The pick "-1 flamebait" as the reason because "I disagree" isn't available, and because they are happy to lie. Then someone else metamoderates - "is this flamebait Y/N?" they say it isn't. The moderator then has their moderation judged as unfair and their moderation powers limited.

That's not what I've seen in places it's actually used. Get a decent mix though I agree the directions generally correlate and you'll rarely have a negative in one without the other.

Then perhaps based on user's voting history, it could be calculated how likely a user is to always vote +2/-2, and how likely to actually differentiate between both axes. This could then be used as a multiplier for user's votes on the contribution axis.

It would probably require hiding comment scores though - otherwise it'd be easy to observe how the multiplier changes and game it.

There already is ‘disagree’ and ‘super disagree’ (flag).

Some users submit via "shotgun" method, posting 20 or 30 articles per day.

It reminds me of my former neighbor's dating strategy. A few times I used Python and the HN API because I was interested in the average karma per submission for top users and whether it matches my own opinion about their post quality. It led me to believe maybe a good metric for limiting the number of submissions someone makes: daily submissions allowed = average karma per submission (once you've reached 20 or 100 submissions)

It's not something I can relate to---why people do this shotgun thing; shoving a mound of potentially interesting (and often not self-written) articles in hope that two or three land on the front page. The karma doesn't do anything except give you validation that your contributions "mattered", but if you repost someone else's work (or even your own from the past) you're basically getting validation that other people might care about this thing you care about... which feels empty, to me.

I personally can't develop something technical and interesting more than once per week, and then I doubt how many users want to read about my really obscure and often futile interests (automating cloud publishing of ABC files, trying/failing disassembling an obscure DOS game, random SCAD files for one-off minor life improvements, buggy Python libraries for poker/tailoring/instrument tuning, learning just enough to almost push a stylus driver for two unpopular Linux laptops)

Mostly, I like reading the articles by people who do something technically cool and new and put a lot of effort diving into that thing and sharing its secrets, like this CAN injection post. The expectation is that those users can only post a few times a month unless doing cool stuff and writing about it is their full-time passion/job. Another expectation is that there are enough of these people that the front page can stay full with technically cool/new posts.

The third---and by far, the hardest---expectation is that great* (by my own flawed definition) posts need to be promoted reliably and without bias from /newest to / while also working to reject only-fanboy-/self-voted content or poor quality wikipedia links and seventh "own repost" in four years and New Yorker articles about hip-hop...

I used to flag bullshit articles right away, but they arrive like waves on the beach, and I've learned to filter past the stuff I dislike rather than bother losing some unseen privilege because I get put on a "user who flags too much for bad reasons" list.

To elaborate my skimming: in this moment, there are two reasonably popular but reasonably "not so techy" Wikipedia articles in the front page 30. There are two non-tech (historical) posts---one by a hit-or-miss "often poster" and another by someone who basically only posts non-tech/historical subjects---although in this case, once every two weeks. Five users I recognize as "I post all the damn time" users, although I only consider one of those in the "I post all the damn time and it's annoying" camp. I instantly recognize one repost, but it's one I would find interesting if I saw it for the first time. The majority is stuff I find appropriate for HN, and a minority of that is stuff I personally find interesting. If I get two or three decent articles on the front page and one from /newest, that's still 20 minutes of content that I enjoy, and the HN status quo gives me this.

"GPT, express all the above thoughts and sentiments but only using 30% of the characters I used and with far fewer personal pronouns."

I’d appreciate if you made it transparent in the rules how many points are required to post in Ask HN. I recently posted a job related question there, but it never posted. I didn’t even receive a response as to why. Felt like I wrote a letter, handed it to someone, and they tossed it into the trash without even opening it.

In my perfect world, it would prompt people to reflect on their contributions before actually submitting them.

Ideally this would be a moment to think about whether the contributions meet the guidelines or otherwise move discussion forward.

Edit: to be perfectly clear, I’m asking people to justify their contributions.

With comments, HN is a community. Whiteout comments, HN is just a bunch of black pixels on a grey background.

I'm tracking in my head a few hundred of users. I don't know the exact number because I never made an written list. Some users make consistently good comments in some topics, and it's an important signal for a discussion.

For example. ColinWright is a mathematician like me. I usually skim the math posts but he reads the whole post. So when he make a comment in that post it's usually accurate. If he says that in page 3, second paragraph there is a huge error, I just go to page 3, second paragraph and there is surely an error.

Nobody is perfect, but some users have earned a good reputations in some topics. I classified others as clueless enthusiastic, others as troll/morons/crackpots. Other are just unclassified. It's topic specific, so I may think a user makes good comments in one topic and regular comments in other topics. (I don't remember any case of good comments in one topic and really bad comments in other topics, but I have no formal list to check, it's just a fuzzy memory list in my head.)

Some preliminary ideas that could probably be refined:

1. Remove non-hacker type content (i.e. news concerning the death of the Queen and anything Trump). Or move it to an off-topic list that doesn’t appear on the front page or other lists. It’s not in the spirit of the site, and I come to this site to avoid it. I treasure the actual hacker discussions on this site and feel like those articles do not add to or even diminish the value. Plus many of those stories that make it to the front page tend to be very focused on America / the English-speaking world.

2. Remove karma or deemphasize it. Discussion is important. Arbitrary numbers are not and (unintentionally) influence how people engage.

3. Add a higher barrier of entry. It’s great how you have to earn 501 karma before you can downvote. Perhaps up that limit and/or require a year old account. Prevent new accounts from posting for a period such as 3 months. This would allow people to pick up on the culture and etiquette before they begin commenting; like an apprentice studying under a master before beginning his own work. I’d even consider adding a simple quiz to create an account. Something that proves you’re a hacker in spirit. The purpose of all this is to prevent the website from stooping to Reddit standards and keeping the quality of content high. Those who engage in discourse on this site should be here because they really want to be part of the community and are willing to jump through a few hoops.

4. Create smaller communities. Find a way to group people across time zones into smaller pockets. A classic issue on Reddit is that smaller subreddits for niche hobbies are often great until they reach critical mass. Past a certain number of users, the culture is lost and everything appeals to the lowest common denominator. If hn is to grow too large, perhaps there could be a way to artificially divide it up.

5. Increase the damn font size!

Thanks for all that you do :)

Hi dang, I hope this message finds you well. Although my reply may not directly address the original question, I believe it is relevant to the topic at hand. As a dedicated and experienced contributor to Hacker News for the past 14 years, I have occasionally participated in passionate discussions that have turned somewhat heated, and I have also submitted low-quality content on occasion. As a result, my account was placed in a restricted status, and I frequently encounter a "you are posting too fast" notification that hinders my ability to engage in discussions. I would like to suggest that you consider implementing an expiration date for this "special status" for users like myself.

This ongoing "you are posting too fast" notification has significantly impeded my participation in meaningful conversations. For instance, during a recent debate on the implications of artificial intelligence in the job market, I found it challenging to effectively engage with other users due to this restriction. Similarly, in another thread discussing the merits of various statistical approaches to a subject, my contributions were stifled by the same limitation.

I kindly ask that the administrators of Hacker News consider adopting a more flexible approach to managing user interactions. This approach should accommodate the occasional expression of strong opinions while preserving a respectful and productive environment for all community members.

(Ironically, this very comment was subject to the "you are posting too fast" limitation, which is why I could not respond sooner.)

Maybe usernames could be hidden at first and then be revealed after a timeout.

We do need a way to distinguish participants so we can correlate replies to earlier comments of the same participant; otherwise it's way too disorganized as you don't know which voice is which.

Revealing usernames eventually is right, I think, because clicking through to see how that person describes themself (job, hobbies, etc) is an interesting dimension to their comment.

Send email to hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules and requesting removal of the penalty status. I too once accrued an account penalty due to actions I took in heated threads, and an email cleared it up. The chances of dang seeing your request as a comment (even in a post about him) are much lower.

You see the problem, right? The world is filled with people/organizations who do the right thing almost all the time, but then use that clout to do a bad thing when it really matters. I know we cannot know the contra-factual on this particular submission being suppressed with moderation, but it seems, ugh, convenient that Sam's PR announcement of all the tests that ChatGPT is passing gets to sit atop HN for a day, while a very intelligent and well articulated criticism from mostly admired person gets squashed.

It makes everyone wonder, was this a 'mistake'? Or was it that once-in-a-rare-occasion that YC chooses to cash in its good reputation to suppress a discussion that will cost its friends? It sounds like all they need to do is ask one mod to take care of it, and it goes away pretty quickly.

There once was a "undocumented features of hacker news" which was on github when "awesome" lists on github were the gimmick a few years back. I do not recall the link or name now.

I think it's important for conversation to see if you're replying to the original author or a new participant. Both types of comments are valuable, but the original author can clarify their comments, whereas a new participant may be misinterpreting them, or going in a different direction entirely.

Also, for better or worse, I think people put more effort into making things (including written comments) that are attached to their identity in some way, so usernames increase quality.

Here you go. I usually email Max when I notice something missing from his list.

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments)

Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)

I worry that it's the sort of thing that people would tune out as background noise after a while.

Maybe it could show up randomly or if a mod notices discussion going haywire or something.

Anyone can post to Ask HN. There's no karma limit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35326541 certainly posted, and would have shown up on both /newest and /asknew. But it wouldn't have ranked on /ask (or not for long) because the upvotes on it were mostly dropped by our anti-voting-ring software. It looks like that was a false positive. I'm sorry! We don't know how to write anti-abuse code that doesn't have false positives.

> Don't you get tired of answering the same questions again and again, and rebutting the same arguments year after year?

Oh yes - it's probably the worst part of the job. But I think it's necessary for community because people respond differently when they're getting personal attention.

It's still my intention to build a canonical set of explanations for each common question and then mostly refer people to those. I've inched toward that over the years via HN Search links to my post moderation comments (which I know can get a bit annoying).

Even then, though, the mechanism will just be standard comments in ordinary threads, because that's how conversation takes place here, and people will always want to have personal conversation with the mods.

Users also tend to respond better when they get a detailed explanation of specifically how their post(s) broke the guidelines. Unfortunately, that sort of explanation is super expensive to produce—in time, energy, and stress. I don't have what it takes to do it in every case, which is a pity, because it tends to work. Here's an example from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35403143.

Long term, we need better feedback mechanisms to let people know that they've broken the rules, and which rules, and for how long they might be in the bad dog box.

Yes. It's definitely on our list to implement a feedback system for that. In fact I just mentioned that at the end of the comment I just wrote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35472465) before seeing yours. For now the decidedly low-tech way to deal with it is as philipkglass says, to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look. We're happy to remove the rate limit when we see people using HN as intended.

I'd be happy to take the penalty off your account - you've been a valuable and valued contributor for many years. Unfortunately I'm still seeing flamewar comments in your feed. I know that people have strong and valid reasons for posting that kind of thing but we just can't have that on HN, regardless of how right someone is or how legitimately they feel. It leads directly to this place burning itself to a crisp and preventing that from happening, or at least trying to stave it off, is our #1 job.

What I tell people in this position when they email us is that if they want to build up a track record of using HN as intended, they'd be welcome to email again after a while and we can take another look and hopefully remove the rate limit.

> Sam's PR announcement of all the tests that ChatGPT is passing

Can you link me to that?

> The world is filled with people/organizations who do the right thing almost all the time, but then use that clout to do a bad thing when it really matters.

That's a good point! but it's also an irrefutable charge. In fact, someone who behaved perfectly forever would be no less accusable of this. Btw I'm certainly not saying we behave perfectly—but we do take care to moderate HN less, not more, when YC-related interests are part of a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That's for reasons of self-interest as much as anything else. It wouldn't make sense to risk the global optimum for local gains.

> It sounds like all they need to do is ask one mod to take care of it, and it goes away pretty quickly.

People are going to feel like that's happening no matter what we do, but FWIW, we don't do that. We do downweight submissions as part of moderation practices that have been established for years, but a YC person doesn't have any more clout over that than you do, if you happen to email us and ask us to take a look at a particular thread (pro or con). And we always answer questions about what happened when people ask.

Btw if you feel like that randomwalker article is still relevant and can support a discussion of something specific and interesting—that is, not yet-another-generic-AI thread—go ahead and repost it and let me know, and I'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page at least for a while (how long depends on how the community reacts).

I appreciate the intention but unfortunately I don't think that's realistic. It would just lead to a plethora of extremely low quality "explanations".

It's fine for people to post lots of articles as long as most of them are good and on topic for HN. But if you're aware of users who are doing that and the articles are mostly low-quality or not on topic for HN, I'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com.

> automating cloud publishing of ABC files, trying/failing disassembling an obscure DOS game, random SCAD files for one-off minor life improvements, buggy Python libraries for poker/tailoring/instrument tuning, learning just enough to almost push a stylus driver for two unpopular Linux laptops

That all sounds great to me! with the possible exception of the first one - depends on how tricky/unexpected the details there would be.

Sorry for the noise, but it I agree that it's a very good list of topics.

Quite possibly, though I wouldn't be so sure. Even small changes may be useful (if there's a chain reaction as it were) to stop things escalating either so much or so quickly, even if it's mostly ignored.

I don't have any info on whether it's mostly new accounts or randomly anyone that is likely to post rule breaking stuff so I'm aware I'm guessing on a lot of this.

Being able to turn it on for a particular thing makes sense (e.g. any political story) - my first thought on top of your suggestions is

* Show if under X karma

* Show if discussion has more than N flagged comments

Things seem to work pretty well here, hopefully there's some tweaks that don't change that but lower the burden for you and others.

I feel that the curve needs to be adjusted to curb clickbait from trending to the top.

There are a lot of stores that trend to number 1 in under an hour that end up disappearing completely from the front page, moving near the bottom, or flagged to death, within a couple of hours because it’s just not quality content for this forum.

This isn't true. I'm a member of a sailing forum and this doesn't go on there. Karma is probably part of it. Hard to interpret and subjective rules are another. No value outside of to YC is another. Etc etc. This isn't a community. It's a news aggregate.

Trust is important in a community. Which this isn't!

I disagree. It is a community, we want it to be a community, and we work hard to make it more of a community.

How large is the sailing forum? Size is the biggest factor in my experience.

I don't know what you mean by "no value outside of to YC" but I think—in fact I know—that HN has added massive value to lots of people's lives, and not just by providing interesting reading material. I know this because people tell me how HN changed their life, and I also know that HN changed my life (long before I started as a mod).

I don't know how to do that! Wouldn't it require software that could distinguish high-quality from low-quality content?

The same bait (sensationalism, indignation) that makes many users upvote those posts is what makes other users flag them. This rise and fall has always been the pattern on HN—it's one of the cycles of life here.

It's like throttle/pedal mapping in a car. It's about the effective curve along time/position.

Right now, it's super sensitive where a little signal does a lot right at the beginning.

Stories rocket to the top because they're new and got a number of quick votes. The curve needs to be smoothed out so that things don't lurch to the top.

Edit: I've been around here for a little while. It used to be awesome to see things jump to the top (used to have a lot lower volume of posts and users), but the audience has changed a lot, and I think things need to be adjusted a bit to slow the meteoric rise aspect. Good content will surface.

Just to provide an example of the problem. This post reached #1 with 16 upvotes and 0 comments in less than an hour.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35478120

There's a fear here of the "community" on the part of you and HN. You may not realize it, but you treat it at least somewhat in an adversarial way. That cannot ever be a healthy community.

Part of the issue is HN is too broad. Whatever goes here, really. Communities that work are focused on specific things.

It's pretty big, but not massive. A fraction of HN.

But I'm members of other communities that always have at least 100-200 people online at the same time. I guess that is still a fraction of HN? But They all work well.

An obvious thing that comes to mind is how downvoted comments are grayed and purposely made difficult to read, and flagged comments aren't readable at all. Being downvoted or flagged means (regardless of what they're supposed to mean) literally nothing other than "goes against the mob's mentality," so comments are penalized in a functional manner for going against the mob. They shouldn't have the power to artificially make opposing thoughts more difficult or impossible to read. Maybe control it with settings similar to showdead, for those who like the mob to curate the thoughts and ideas they're exposed to for them.

> Can you link me to that?

I can't, but really? Every major announcement from them has been top of page. And I don't disagree with that being the case. ChatGPT is THE story of 2023 tech, and their announcements are important to the tech industry. I just like all the discussions around this hugely important topic to be given the same freedom to succeed.

Thanks for the discussion.

> Every major announcement from them has been top of page

As far as I know that's not accurate, or even close.

We're not playing favorites; all we care about is that the most interesting stories get the front page time, since there are many more submissions than space on the front page.

I don't like mob behaviors either, but there are plenty of reasons why comments get downvoted and flagged besides that. Low-quality flamewar comments, for example, deserve both downvotes and flags, for reasons that have nothing to do with mobs.

You've unfortunately been posting some of these yourself - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35429902. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we have to ban accounts that keep doing it.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.