Good reminder, it would be easier for moderators if more people followed
Moderating something like HN is a very hard job. Gratitude .
(I'm not saying HN should do exactly the same thing, but one example is Slashdot's system where a comment can get downvoted in a way that tags it specifically as trolling/offtopic/whatever - https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml seems to describe it alright)
As internet communities evolve over the years I have seen some changes in HN posts and comments but I suspect HN not trying to grow at any cost has done a good job of keeping it from becoming reddit.
These guidelines, in many ways, embody that sentiment. While some might complain they are restrictive and harsh (I think, for example, of new commenters being met with a swift downvote to oblivion when they comment "me too!" or "cool!" on a thread), I view them as a way to elevate discourse, prioritizing the depth and quality of conversation over fleeting internet trends, a beacon of light in this sorry internet that mostly devalues thoughtful discourse and inquiry.
Understanding the dynamics of a community and its shared norms can be as important, if not more so, than the actual content. in nurturing a thoughtful environment, in particular an environment that nurtures curiosity and civil discourse, we're not just preserving the present, but serving as role models for tomorrow's communities. personally I'm glad that HN emphasizes intellectual curiosity and mutual respect. this is truly a special place
Obviously partisan politics don’t really have a place here but metapolitical critiques of the technology known as bureaucracy (which is pervasive in government, science, everywhere really) and how well it is or is not working is definitely relevant from a systems perspective, imo.
I downvote for off topic, or for comments which detract from the conversation. I believe most others with the ability to downvote do the same.
Replying to off topic posts would be counter to the purpose of downvoting.
Personally I like to make it a point to break this rule from time to time to reduce this pattern.
Now, the horse race of the day, or manufactured moral crisis? Not really what this is for.
1) Search for duplicates before you submit a link.
2) If the submission is not from the current year, append (YEAR) at the end of the title.
3) It should be clarified that the guidelines about comments apply to linked article authors too. "Be kind. Don't be snarky." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."
4) There's dang's own idiosyncratic, controversial, unwritten exception to "Please submit the original source", i.e., unless it's a corporate PR.
[EDIT:] Three different replies have said to append [pdf] and [video] to submissions, but that's already in the guidelines. "If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."
EDIT: unfortunately I cannot defend my point in the comments, as I am now rate limited :)
EDIT 2: /u/Dylan16807 yes I'm seeing that. When I try and post it says "you are posting too quickly, please slow down"
Nonetheless, I agree they could be a bit more explicit about this.
That was a really neat mod intervention I wasn't expecting but really appreciated.
Well actually it does because you're wrong about this, it isn't about him replying to you, he manually sets a flag on your account.
The only limited thing is time. I have never consciously thought of downvotes like that, but their only truely meaningful use would be to push down items I do not only not want to spend time discussing, but not even spend time reading, under the precondition of the assumption that most others likely feel the same.
Right, but in my experience, this usually occurs after a reply.
One feature I've thought of would be for someone in a conversation thread to know if the other participant upvoted their last comment. Giving someone an upvote and not replying would send a strong positive signal without taking up more space.
Some comments can go yo-yo, but I don't think it is possible to see the two counts separately.
I said it before and I'll say it again: this is a bad rule. People can read through the corporate bullshit themselves instead of having some "journalist" tell them what to think of it.
I'd go the other way - disallow downvoting if you comment, and disallow comments if you downvoted. You get one choice of how to indicate that you don't feel the comment is correct.
Admittedly, teaching people not to downvote just for disagreement would be better. Personally, I downvote a ton, but never for disagreement - I downvote for exactly the reasons I see in the guidelines: non-substantive comments. Or, admittedly, I also downvote people who are just being a jerk.
Jokes aside, I think it is hard to moderate too strictly on the topic of “no politics” without enforcing a particular political viewpoint, because we tend to see politics we like as normal, and politics we don’t like as politics.
Interesting. How do you know?
I know that I have stupidly taken some downvotes personally, but later realized, those comments were maybe not bad by itself, but in that context attracting flamewar OT debates. With some extra words, I would have realized sooner.
And downvoting for merely not liking someones opinion is something I really don't like, but is explicitely allowed here.
Not going to keep replying, as I suspect that a conversation between two people flagged in this manner is one of the likeliest to turn flame-y :)
So yes downvotes for mere disagreements are okay here.
This means whenever Microsoft announce something or someone writes about something on Twitter, submit that instead of theverge.com.
I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.
(last sentence was slightly edited for clarity)
Thanks, that's very helpful. You make a good point about comments like "cool project!" not being allowed, which could cause the overall sentiment to feel skewed negative when it might actually be well received. That said, it can feel noisy and unhelpful to see a thread full of empty comments, so what if we had a thumbs up button or something that people could use to register "cool project" ? Maybe not practical, but just thinking through the problem a bit.
While the guidelines seem more there to help the community as a whole stay out of potholes, sinkholes, and black holes.
But that’s me and I can see why people might have a different point of view on this. This is a model I use, not an argument.
[1] editing headlines being an exception.
Personally, I don't downvote anything unless it's either complete and utter bullshit (e.g. someone acting like PHP is bad based on arguments barely valid in the end of the PHP5 era), or it is plain and simple far-right/conspiratorial in nature. It used to be the case that this was how most people used the downvote feature.
Nowadays? Seems like the tide has shifted, and even completely legitimate viewpoints (not just on politics threads) get downvotes for unexplainable reasons. It saddens me a bit.
> I'm not saying HN should do exactly the same thing, but one example is Slashdot's system where a comment can get downvoted in a way that tags it specifically as trolling/offtopic/whatever
Such a thing exists. You have to open the comment's dedicated page by clicking on the timestamp; if you're over 500-1k karma you can then flag it. Enough flags auto-kill comments and they only appear for those who have "showdead" enabled.
I personally don't think this causes the community as a whole to lean snarky - that one might be a pre existing condition rather than the format.
I also think the occasional rule breaking is good, 'I don't have anything substantial to say but your project means a lot to me and I'm grateful' is substantial in a way that default 'thanks' is not anyway.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.backblaze.com%2F...
Which is a pretty shitty thing to say regardless, but when the real world withers away from us a little more every year, it starts to become monstrous.
I'm yet to have any pushback on sending a thank you note, but who knows maybe it will upset some people in the future ;)
Which - I guess - also deserves a "add some contact details to profile" note.
This is one of the more serious pain points I notice (thankfully only occasionally).
Obviously getting some visibility is important for people launching new projects. Sometimes adversarial comments seem to be motivated by commercial rather than technical reasons.
If the comment is inflammatory, false or even just misleading, I wouldn't count it under this umbrella.
Here are some past explanations of how we approach this. If anyone reads those and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
That would be awesome were it possible. Got any special insight into how to do that? I don't have a problem doing so, 16 yrs on reddit, if I ever downvoted even 30 times total, I'd be shocked. Others I've talked to make it seem like that's a daily or at best weekly total for them...
I think the trouble is that people fear others seeing the comment. Downvoting is used as a technique to prevent that contamination. It betrays some sort of mistrust in others' intellects.
I guess what I'd say is that most disagreements are honest ones - people coming to different conclusions on subjective things - and that's the kind of disagreement I don't think downvotes should be used for.
It's a weird dynamic to have in a web forum, where people are essentially engaging in text-based conversations, but casual, emotive speech is discouraged because that's what Redditors do, and every keystroke brings us closer to Eternal September.
I guess part of us really want to be against other people and the shady systematic downvoter fills that role. It is always stupid, though. Luckily we don’t get much of that here.
Also I vaguely remember a couple of people here bragging that they had networks of sockpuppets specifically for mass-downvoting, but IDK.
This place can certainly be petty enough for that.
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
at least i come here for the discussion of interesting problems. sure sometimes i wonder, like, should i really have spent the time to comment on wobbly walls in britain? was that question i posed a nerdsnipe? maybe, but then so was the whole article.
Sure, but that's a different phenomenon. If you make a comment that gets a lot of attention, sometimes people will go read a bunch of your other comments. I have also had the opposite of this happen, where I suddenly get upvotes on old comments.
Dead posts are far from the majority here, and the vast majority are dead for a very good reason.
Grey posts just mean that some people disagree, but it does not really say much about the post itself. It might be that the tone was wrong, or the poster was being an arse. It does not prevent people reading it, and it does not prevent discussions about it. Grey posts are not a sign of persecution or a cabal against you, it’s just that it rubbed some people the wrong way.
You are interacting with a whole lot of people here. Some of them will have had a bad day or just be irrational. You don’t need many of these to get a net negative vote count. It does not really matter.
It does. A ban on HN is a shadowban. You can still post but only those who have "show dead" on will see it (greyed out and marked dead).
And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.
If I make a factually inaccurate comment, I can expect at least three replies correcting me. We like to joke that they all start with "actually..." Maybe I've also been downvoted, but it's clear I was incorrect about something.
If I'm downvoted without replies, was I being a jerk? This requires some self-reflection, but there's rarely any mystery. Maybe I made a joke that fell flat, wasn't appreciated, or was deemed unsubstantial. Flop on this one badly enough and the mod will let you know by word or act.
Which brings us to the last possibility. If I haven't been incorrect, a jerk, telling dad jokes, or being generally pointless and my comment is still being downvoted, then it means I've said something that some people wish wasn't true. It might not even be a majority, just whoever happened to be passing by. Be proud and don't sweat the fake internet points.
Wait, I'm now wondering if I've been limited. I've never once seen the "Vouch" button and I've flagged some blatant stuff that nothing happened to, but figured there was somewhat of a vote (or multiple flags) before it took any effect. Can anyone confirm this behavior?
THANK YOU
It makes sense though, the mods are unpaid volunteers doing work that people generally don't appreciate and often criticize. You'd have to be a crazed zealot to sign up for that.
All that to say HN is nothing like that.
E.g. a new product was announced because the old one used to catch fire. I mean the context isn't usually that dramatic, but there's often important information about a price change, or a response to previous consumer complaints, or how it fits into the broader product line, or is a response to competition -- all of which is much more valuable than anything in a press release.
Shadowbanning is something we only do for either (1) spammers or (2) new accounts that are showing signs of being repeat abusers. This seems to be roughly the correct tradeoff.
Also, HN-ers tend to have very sharp BS detectors which really helps.
1. Be respectful.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Move the conversation forward. This sounds like a repetition of #2 but there is often a distinction in that, say, a discussion about a new product feature is likely not the time to discuss the company’s history with features. Going in that direction is moving the conversation sideways.
4. Provide supporting evidence for what is said. Claiming something like, “I’d never buy this from Company X” is a baseless statement compared to “I’d never buy this from Company X because A, B, and C are an indication I won’t get much support beyond the 90-day warranty and that’s not enough at that price point.” The trick I use for this is to include a word like because since it compels an explanation.
5. Avoid attempts at humor. For one, text mediums like HN can easily lead to misinterpretations; there are many people reading for whom English is a second language, so being clever can cause confusion for those readers; if my humor were so good to be worthwhile for the amount of readers a place like HN has then I should be a comedian. I'm not a comedian.
Most of what we do is "done silently and only admitted to after the fact". HN is a curated/moderated site; it always has been. We don't publish a moderation log but it's always possible to get an answer to a question—you just have to ask.
On comments: they could solve a shitload of the complaints about comments by just adding meta-votes, like those on Slashdot, and letting individual users define their own filters for what they do and don't want to see. Automating and letting the community manage itself would be so much more efficient and fair than relying on mods, or the extremely vague and unhelpful generic vote button.
If other users didn't think this submission about HN rules was interesting, it wouldn't be upvoted.
All comments get rate limited as they start to nest, by hiding the reply link. Are you seeing that?
More discussions/description from dang here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
I don't get it. We're not talking about reddit here, we're talking about HN.
On the one hand, it's at the very least considered good UX to inform users of information regarding their account status that impacts their experience.
On the other hand, it's probably acceptable for a place called "Hacker News" to hide some community features behind "You have to demonstrate some willingness to do some computer sleuthing to learn this detail."
The guidelines may say that humor should be avoided, but the readership (the people who, in the end, decide what HN is) seems to disagree.
I don’t agree with this position. There is a place for administrators to shape the place they want to build for the world and have it be differentiated from other places.
As a thought experiment: HN could turn into a TikTok clone and it would be wildly popular. It will be decided by the users, but the user base will be 100% different. And the world would have lost a unique place for yet another clone.
So I appreciate it when the site owners are opinionated and proactive about maintaining this space.
It's a totally sane motivation it just doesn't obviously make a messageboard better.
So for a post you'd have 4 buttons:
- Good (which says 'this is a high quality post that adds to the conversation' when you hover over it) - Bad (which says 'this is a low quality post that detracts from the conversation' upon hover) - Agree (with the title being 'I agree with this post' on hover) - Disagree (with the title being 'I disagree with this post' on hover)
You'd then have only the 'Good' and 'Bad' options give or take away karma points (without the score being visible), and the number of people who 'Agree' and 'Disagree' would be displayed near the post separately in some way.
Edit: Maybe we need an overlay meta HumorNews to channel all of our distracting banter lest the people who yell at you for daring to ask a question in a source repository issue declare "you are wrong, stop being you, stay in your lane, and follow the rules precisely".
I read like 2-3 links max on my visits here.
While it might have worked for you karma-wise, many bad/average attempts at humor seem to get downvoted a lot and I am glad for it.
When I click on a topic that I'm deeply interested in, the last thing I want to see is someone's attempt at being witty to collect internet points.
i have no problem discussing political opinions themselves, but i have no interest arguing about who these opinions belong to and which party is on which side of the debate or judging people or groups for having a particular opinion, or worse attacking them for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36219385
It's worth remembering that HN is a common law system. If you want to nerd out about what the real, fine-grained guidelines are, follow Dan's comments; they're the site jurisprudence.
A corollary to the humor thing: insubstantial comments are problematic when they're negative and less problematic when they're positive or encouraging. That's a principle that goes all the way back to Graham. So you're generally going to be fine attempting a cheerful joke than you are trying for a sly dunk.
Personally there's nothing I can't stand more than people who take life too seriously and can't find the absurdity in every day matters. If someone manages to make me spit out my coffee, give a chuckle or even just a smile then I am eternally grateful. After all, I'm usually on HN because I need a temporary mental break from work.
Value comes in many shapes and forms. But is also in the eye of the beholder. I just ask that you and others don't assume for a second that someone trying to make others laugh is doing it for "internet points." Some people genuinely like trying to bring a smile to the faces of others. Those who succeed are my heroes.
In my experience here (and I have been around a while), the actual case is that some humor is welcome here. But the subset of what is welcomed on HN, versus the set of "all things someone finds humorous", is pretty small. I've had humorous comments upvoted before, even highly so. But there's a pretty particular brand of humor that seems to work here. And you can't always predict how something will be received.
I will say this: some of my most highly upvoted comments are among some of my lowest effort ones (eg, something like "Fuck these guys. The NSA can go go hell" or similar) while I've had tons of comments that I spent half an hour or more working on, doing researching, finding citations, etc.... and they either got zero votes, or got downvoted.
My point is that it's really hard to guess how people will react to any particular comment here, humorous or otherwise, on any particular day.
I don't mind it when someone calls it out with a "/s" or "/jk" (/sarcasm, /joking).
Related: humor at work: https://hbr.org/2020/07/sarcasm-self-deprecation-and-inside-...
Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click the 'flag' link at the top. There's a small karma threshold before flag links appear.
" This could be more clear. I was able to figure out what they meant, but "25 minutes ago" is not a timestamp. If you hover over the link it will display the timestamp, but I never even noticed that until today.
I think it would be clearer if the text said "click on the reply link". Yeah, I know the link doesn't say "reply", but "reply link" is what it is, and "timestamp" is something it isn't.
I guess that's probably the best way to summarize this argument - the extraordinary burden demands extraordinary benefit and not even the people who are really into this idea often argue the benefit would be commensurate with the burden.
As a strictly text-only medium that would be difficult.
That's why I vastly prefer text-only media. Email lists (without attachments), Usenet, or even forums that only do text. The written word requires more effort than just posting pics so quality is almost inevitably better.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Unless the context of the discussion is about voting (such as with these threads), I have a quick trigger finger when it comes to voting down comments that talk about votes.
Even if someone is asking "why am I getting down voted" or "If you are going to vote down, tell me why" complaints are annoying and pointless. Sometimes I explain, but it's not worth it, so I just vote down comments that do this.
Tangent
See, when someone does answer why they are getting voted down, the person being voted down will generally argue with the person answering, which just means you didn't want to learn why people were voting you down, and rather, you wanted to argue. If you just thanked the person for answering "why are people voting down my comment", you'd get the answer more often. But answering that question is generally NOT an invitiation to argue the merits of the reasoning for voting down.
For example, let's say I know you are getting voted down because I've rouintely see your comment get voted down because a group of people think it's wrong for whatever reason. So, I answer: "You are getting voted down because people think you are wrong." If you come back and argue with me, saying you aren't wrong... you've missed the entire exchange. I'm not necessarily arguing for one side or another, I'm simply explaining why you are getting voted down. Feel free to disagree with the reasoning, but it doesn't make my answer wrong.
End Tangent
Anyways, if you want to know why you are being voted down by people you respect, do your research. And if you don't respect the people voting you down, why does it matter what they think?
The human users of HN -- I do not have a problem with, 99.9999% of the time...
In fact, quite the opposite -- I'd submit and suggest that the intellectual capacity and the willingness and ability to help others of the HN community is quite amazing indeed!
But let's talk about AI-driven automated bot postings for a moment...
I, as a user, don't mind bot postings so much -- IF (if and only if!) they contribute something of value to the discussion. That is, without being snarky, without being derrogatory, without distracting from or railroading the conversation, without moving the conversation in a political and/or ideological direction, or engaging in the public shaming of specifically named individuals...
Because there seem to be a lot of bot postings like that...
>"HN has the following rule:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
This seems to be the rule that is most broken by apparently agenda-driven AI bots on HN... (it's as if some are intentionally trying to provoke people!)
To conclude, HN = Exceedingly great community of humans!
My question (to the HN community, and to the bots!) is simply as follows:
How do we tell a human created post on HN -- from an AI bot created one?
?
Downvotes are for material that does not support productive discussion, if it is productive to discuss a comment (even on a meta level like “why it is a bad comment”?), then downvoting is inappropriate.
I've noticed some San Francisco specific post appearing too at similar hours. These generally get more comments but as before usually go after some time.
---
Personally, some political stuff is fine, interesting and worthy of comment. I do find myself replying and then deleting my comments on those threads after I realise the discussion is meaningless.
Spot on!! I personally couldn’t care less about these brownie points, my whole life been (and still) using alt/nicknames accounts and mostly in sites/chats where the whole upvote system isn’t there, when I help someone in something or make a joke, because it makes me feel better to know I helped someone or brought some smile, I don’t care about your fake coins or whatever, but some people are so fixated about it for some reason, and that’s why I don’t like “influencers” culture in general, they are usually slaves to these thumbs up!
Here's an exchange from a book I thought of while typing this comment, to illustrate my meaning.
`But he could not resist the temptation to speak and to awaken a little human warmth around him. “A pity for the car,” he said. “Foreign cars cost quite a bit of gold, and after half a year on our roads they are finished.” “There you are quite right. Our roads are very backward,” said the old official. By his tone Rubashov realized that he had understood his helplessness. He felt like a dog to whom one had just thrown a bone; he decided not to speak again.`
"don't feed the trolls", "downvote and move on" are valid pieces of advice.
Which is a good point, but nevertheless I think that if one disagrees with a post (excluding the post breaking site guidelines), it is good culture to explain to the poster why one has done so.
This reminds of the 1-5 star rating system issues, and how people interpret it however they want without reading what it means. Let’s take Uber for example. I leave a 5/5 rating for a purely average trip where everything went as expected. Afaik, this is how Uber’s rating scale works (apparently drivers start getting warnings if they drop below ~4.5), so it surprised me when I once saw a friend give a 4/5 since the trip was “just normal/average”.
Conversely, let’s take Goodreads, where I feel that many people don’t read the definition of the rating scale and give star ratings not matching the definitions.
Goodreads definition is: 1 star="did not like it", 2 star="it was ok", 3 star="liked it", 4 star="really liked it", 5 star="it was amazing".
With that, if you simply found a book “ok”, you are to give 2/5. If you simply “didn’t like it”, then that’s a 1/5. It shouldn’t be unexpected to see many 2/5 and 1/5. And a 5/5 should be a rarity. Yet you if look at the actual reviews, feels like many people don’t follow the rating scale definitions and give it their own meaning.
Don't force me to fight an asymmetric warfare battle against malicious authors to participate.
Either way, I feel like the XenForo reactions/Slashdot ratings system probably works better if you want to avoid the upvote/downvote abuse that sites like Reddit have, since they make people think about why they like/dislike a post rather than treating it like a binary matter.
https://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2014/08/22/don-martin-foneb...
I mean, I guess we can just talk about HN if you want. Yay, circumstances were such that HN moderation isn't as shitty as reddit, and may even remain that way for the lifespan of the site. How long is that anyway? Will HN be around 30 years from now? 5? It's so much smaller, that how many unlucky heart attacks or misfortunately early deaths would derail it? Is that a higher-than-single-digit number?
So, any discussion of purely HN moderation (besides those asking for input on policy adjustments) aren't talking about anything long term and pointlessly self-congratulatory.
I never down vote here on HN, because why should I waste my time when I can just move on?
Of course, if we alter your metaphor only ever so slightly, then you don't need an invitation to the public square, the town council meeting, or the bus stop bench.
And internet forums have certainly been happy to take the place of those things when it suits them, but without the inclusivity they require. They want the benefits of being those things, without the tradeoffs. We see no effort being made for them to not be those things.
I suspect a strong correlation between those who see no reason to be concerned by that, and HOA members who sneak out at 5:45am to measure your front lawn's grass with rulers.
Malign people wrap antisocial stuff in order to get people to eat of it.
A joke with nothing inside it is just annoying and derailing. See the guy who always interrupts the conversation with a pun.
It is possible to wrap decent stuff with humor.
There have certainly been occasions -- albeit rare -- when a humorous HN comment has made me laugh out loud, or at least grin.
But most of the time I find attempts at humor here to be annoying and distracting. Especially when it devolves into a deep thread of few-word or one-line responses that reminds me very much of things I dislike about Reddit.
Put another way: I don't come here for humor. That doesn't mean I won't appreciate it sometimes, but that's not what I'm here for, and the majority of the time I find it to be an unwelcome distraction from what I actually come here for. I come here for discussion, whether just to read it, or to participate in it. Short, humorous comments almost never lead to discussion.
> HN tends to be little better than Reddit at either.
I assure you, you are wrong in this. There are times when I see HN threads devolve into Reddit-land, but it's fairly rare, and very noticeable when it happens, because it reminds me why I generally don't bother with Reddit, but am (mostly) happy here on HN.
I don't think humor in general is a bad thing (my friends would likely in part describe me as a wise-cracking, sarcastic jokester at times), but I just don't think HN -- or any sort of textual medium where participants don't know each other that well or at all -- is a great place for it.
Obviously we're all free to disagree on this (and we obviously are, given the size of this subthread), but I think overall the community agrees (through up/downvoting) that humor on HN should be fairly rare.
I make no distinction between the 2.
No one has time to do that themself, and the CEOs, attorneys, experts, etc. won't return your calls anyway (they can't return everyone's calls).
Opinion writers are the one who tell you what to think. IMHO, few of them are better than blogger.
I'm reminded of the xdcd "someone is wrong on the internet!" comment. I'm starting to get to the point where I don't feel like arguing or even explaining things; I just want to downvote, move on, and hope my moderation contribution has made the shape of the thread more useful to people.
If I had to explain my downvotes every time, I'd hardly ever bother, and I suspect that's true for most people. A forum where no one wants to take the time to moderate is not going to be a healthy place.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
I hope this irony was intentional, as it's top notch.
I think the system we have now works well for the thing it's designed to improve.
For how easy it would be to just ban me (which I think has happened before, in the form of a shadowban maybe I forget), it doesn't seem to happen.
Moderation on here is pretty dang good for how large the community is.
And in tandem, the guidelines grow with the community to reinforce behaviour that's seen to be fruitful and disincentivise behaviour that's derailing.
I think humour on HN is one of those things that’s, let’s say, “a little bit naughty” - but you can get away with it sometimes if it’s genuine.
I feel people are given too many chances sometimes, especially when they "also make good comments". The problem there is that these are often quite active users with a lot of total comments, so "only n% of bad comments" means a lot of "bad comments". The standards should be higher for very active users, not lower, as their influence on the site is much larger.
For example I'm looking at at story where a single user posted 45 comments (~17%), quite a few in "flame war style" and (rightfully) flagged. Most other comments are fine, except the threads that user created. The topic didn't cause the flamewar: that user did. Now, everyone can have a bad day and that's okay, but I'm somewhat amazed some people are not banned as they frequently engage with a type of aggression, contempt for differing views, and bad faith nonsense in a way that really "destroys what the site is for", as Dang would say. I can name a number of them from the top of my head and I can virtually guarantee you they will have at least one flagged comment on their first two comments pages or so, and most likely several.
The reason these topics are derailed are these people (and others), not the topic as such. Don't ban topics, ban people if they can't bring up the maturity and professionalism to keep some basic level of composure (maybe HN needs better tools for this; e.g. topic-bans, temporary bans, etc. but that's a bit of a different discussion).
Especially on difficult topics I want to have interesting conversations that explain differing viewpoints, and criticise other viewpoints in a constructive and good-faith way, or provide additional context.
While I appreciate this is a difficult thing to moderate, this, in a nutshell, is my main criticism of HN's moderation.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I don't think we should make it any more complicated. You might benefit (on the margin) from some feedback, but that makes the conversation more noisy for everyone.
I can say that personally, if I downvote something without also replying to it, it's either because I don't have time to write a helpful response, or because I know my own contribution would make things worse.
Do you mean like, Alice shows her project and Bob gets on and becomes adversarial to get attention for his competing project? Or are you saying that Alice creates adversarial sock puppets just to increase the comment count and visibility?
No, we are saying his behavior is unacceptable, and that if he wishes to participate in this community he will need to conform to those standards.
It is not a mercy to allow bad behavior in order to be more "welcoming".
What if this were an in-person community, and the above commenter had a problem with personal space and non-consenual touching? Not only are you driving everyone else away, but you are also risking legal consequences (or worse).
The way to help such people is have firm boundaries and clear rules. If the above commenter had any question about what constituted an acceptable comment, he could refer to the HN guidelines which the subject of this very thread.
The only "politics" stories are tech/industry politics stories.
It's possible to want both.
I've gotten downvoted for comments I probably never should have made (or at least should have heavily edited), and I understand. In fact I've made comments where I later thought "that should get downvoted" and been weirdly disappointed when it got upvoted instead ("I should have done a better job with that comment for it to deserve those upvotes"). I don't ask those people to explain their downvotes. I'm not proud of everything I've posted and those downvotes improve the discourse. In fact in reading these comments, I now suspect my account has that shadow rate-limiting flag on it and deserves it.
On the other hand, I've also gotten some truly inexplicable downvotes. Downvotes that I could not imagine anyone doing in good faith. Those downvotes do not improve the discourse and the community, they're simply infuriating and foster ill will, and these guidelines are all about fostering good will. If the person even made an effort to explain why I was downvoted, sure, I might continue to argue with them, but I would also appreciate the explanation and accept and understand their downvote.
On behalf of ESL people, you're offended? Maybe you should let them speak for themselves.
Humor is a big part of what makes life worth living. I love it when someone makes me LOL.
Maybe the non-native English speakers just think, "Well, I don't get that, but whatever." In their other reading, they'll run across idiomatic English sooner or later, too.
Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive.
who are you thanking? the mechanics of HN means that a uesr would have to actively search around for a response, so odds are your thanks simply goes the ether.
Avoid getting into flame wars, and send an email to dang saying you'll do so in the future, and you're fine. If you can't do that, or can't be bothered to use Google to figure that out, there's a good reason for your account to be rate limited.
I suspect your "other comment" got flagged for being political polemic from a new account, which fits the pattern of, as dang phrased it, "repeat abusers".
How many times have you seen a deeply nested Reddit thread where each reply is maybe a single sentence long, and they're all low hanging word puns? Just completely worthless threads that are all noise.
Either way, after the divisive last few years I don't think that that many people care for downvotes anymore, i.e. for what "the other side" thinks.
This is one of the biggest differentiators from Reddit.
I really hate it when discourse about anything devolves into rights.
If I have a genius or terrible take like "Chairs are pointless. Nobody should use chairs because ..." you can't just say "Well actually The Constitution allows people to use chairs and you can't ban the private use of chairs." That doesn't bring anything to the discussion.
Nobody is saying here that HN isn't legally allowed to control the content on its website, but different people have different opinions about what's right and wrong for websites to do which doesn't involve having to bring the government in to settle things.
Slightly related to the topic of moderation and this forum, the people behind it should really do something about allowing users in here to delete their comments/past history. We’re only a doxxing event away from making the news (this forum was no better than Reddit when it came to the Boston bombing, as an example and talking about doxxing).
Unlike more turgid efforts: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part...
No, moderation varies wildly from place to place. As do the rules and guidelines that the moderation is driven by. Each community has to figure this out for itself.
It is, really and truly, ridiculous, to bring up how moderation works on reddit, when discussing moderation on HN. It's an entirely different group of human beings working from an entirely different set of guidelines using an entirely different set of tools. It's just a total non sequitur.
> I mean, I guess we can just talk about HN if you want.
This whole discussion is about HN! We're discussing a link to the HN guidelines! Like, what made you think we're in any way talking about something else?
What in the world are you even talking about with the rest of this? It just seems entirely unrelated to the topic.
Downvoting for disagreement was absolutely a norm here 2010-2012. You'd have been chided for giving a reason to your downvote then.
The deletion of comments and comment history is a perennial topic; you can search Dan's comment history to understand the rationale behind our policies on it.
If it was precise then that'd be a 500 page legal document for site guidelines.
"Weak" is the operative word. Being right doesn't do you much favors if you can't communicate it. In this context, "looking" weak is being weak.
This might be a feature - some events are ripe for ridicule and jokes, and Reddit having has areas where this is completely the norm provides a forum.
But when you want to know what chainsaw to buy, how to make a specific ESP chip work or some other random thing, Reddit also provides.
You have to avoid getting sucked into its cesspits.
If you hold this opinion then you can never say water, food, shelter, internet, etc. are human rights either.
No. Function over form.
Unfortunately when it comes to the major news subs, the big issue isn't polarizing politics, it's just people using the headline to spout memes.
> Be kind.
It also lists specific hurtful or harmful behaviors that the community tends to use, which is often just as effective. Certainly I have had no trouble reporting harmful conduct, because it’s covered by the collection of guidelines addressing it — and when a new kind of harm becomes prevalent, they’re updated to reflect that.
Gender is an interesting problem for HN, because with explicit misbehavior prohibited by the guidelines, the tech-male gender biases in the community are primarily expressed through voting, flagging, and starting “plausible” flamewars. I don’t think altering the guidelines would have any effect on those behaviors, and would probably encourage them. It’s definitely possible to witness ‘probable’ bias effects and report your perceptions of them as such; the mods have a lot of flexibility to evaluate a concern in context of a potential bias. I really encourage speaking up to them when concerned.
I wish more community guidelines were just this block:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says
> Avoid generic tangents.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
And one modification of my own:
> Avoid generic tangents. Generic negative comments that can be copy-pasted into other posts are noisy and uninteresting. Be substantive and relevant when sharing your concerns.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...
The people who already agree that the article is shallow learn nothing, and the people who don't know the article is shallow also learn nothing.
And I agree with you, position strength is tied to facts, which is why writing a shallow dismissal instead of listing some facts leads to a weak position.
Incidentally, why are you responding to me and not just saying "you're wrong, I'm done talking to you."
I think of votes as a sort of social currency that makes this a fairly observable marketplace of sorts.
Perhaps in ten years all of OP comments will seem prescient - who knows? Not my intent to say they are doing anything wrong. If nothing else, shows dedication.
In that respect, ignoring, flagging, and shallow dismissals replies are three distinctly different outcomes with different utility to the users of this site.
As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.
Useful and/or somewhat serious subreddit can have submissions derailed and useful content buried by meme comments, and meme subreddit can have someone be too serious and upset or disheartened when people don't engage on what they see as an important or cool thing (or not even that people don't engage, but that any discussion is derailed by the community as a norm).
It's great that I can go to one place for almost anything (kind of, they're getting a little pushy and scummy with the monetization), but sometimes the community is also a downside.
me too. how many of our grandmothers repeatedly said, “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
it’s wild to me to see how much The Internet has tried to pretend it can escape from things humans figured out were important a century ago. in a lot of ways we’ve collectively fooled ourselves into believing the people who came before us were all stupid.
i mean, so many of the failures we’re seeing from companies or large communities have turned out to be our own hubris pretending as if The Internet wouldn’t have super basic, reaaaaally basic human problems like, “if you’re not nice, 1) people will be rude back and 2) a community full of assholes will _shockingly_ be a shitty place.”
this is basic shit that even a social halfwit knows when they go out in public, but we (myself included) are hilariously relearning and pretending like it’s a deep revelation.
if we can’t post anything nice, don’t post anything at all. we act liek this is complicated.
I prefer to think instead that HN has crystallised down the lofty goals of civilised dialogue into a handful of wonderfully tangible rules - but unfortunately, rules that can only be followed by somewhat thoughtful people.
This works on HN because HN content (stuff that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity) naturally drives away non-thoughtful people.
For example:
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
At this risk of sounding elitist, if you don't know what fulminating means, or you actively seek out conflict online where you can sneer at others, then you are not the kind of person who will be able to follow the guidelines, and you will quickly be downvoted, which on HN carries a very visible stigma as your comments literally fade into obscurity.
Instead, you will be quickjly driven back to the safe echo chambers of Facebook or wherever, where you can find like minded-people who will sneer alongside you.
I feel like you’re attacking attempts at inclusivity in general with your comment, which seems misguided. Inclusivity and trying to accommodate people is not what causes toxicity.
I think I dislike it because it reminds me of the busy exec replying with a single word, and that is definitely lacking in humanity.
Since you've mentioned twice that you didn't get an explanation, I'd be curious to see the case that you didn't get an explanation about. Is there a link? Usually when people remain upset about something long after the fact, it's for good reason.
It doesn't really depend on whether I think someone's trolling, because the response is usually much the same in either case and anyhow genuine trolling (i.e. totally bad-faith action to provoke or waste time) is relatively rare.
You can always abuse the “Edit” function for a somewhat limited way to reply and have a conversation, but it’s simpler to just drop an email note.
I'll still say that the instances of HN moderation with which I have the greatest reservations tend to resemble what antisthenes describes above: poorly-conceived articles which would themselves be legitimately flagged and admonished if posted as HN comments to which the rather understandably heated or snippy response instead draws moderator action.
And yes, HN mods can't read everything or be everywhere,[1] so moderation is inconsistent, though I know what it strives toward.
And I can often identify how a response might have been improved or what elements run aground on HN's policies. I'm not convinced that the occasional exception or leniency would utterly wreck the ship (though having seen what, in dang's words things that strongly encourage that a "thread will lose its mind"[2] there's some reason for caution). But in a world where, to borrow from Tim Minchin, there's frequently a contingent which "keeps firing off clichés with startling precision like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition", diplomacy dikes do on occasion break.[3]
And tone-policing that, particularly unilaterally, strikes me as a greater wrong.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Which you've noted, 2 days ago <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37225175> and eight years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9979719>. Another HN perennial...
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176686> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689715>.
3. Tim Minchin, "Storm" (2009), <https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Tim-Minchin/Storm>. Animated video: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U> and live performance: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk>.
I've sent a lot of HN mod mail over the years, and usually get a response within a few hours. Occasionally a few days, during busy times, and on a very small handful of instances, an apology for missing or overlooking an email. I think all of those have occurred within 1--2 weeks tops.
I try to keep most correspondence short, sweet, single-focused, and direct. (Most of that concerns submissions: titles, URLs, or nominations to the 2nd chance pool.)
Occasionally I address more complex or difficult issues. Dang emailed me a few days ago noting that he's still meaning to reply to series on one topic (not pressing, though interesting). I'm aware that he's pressed and that there are more urgent priorities. But he does go out of his way to stay on top of things.
(I also owe him a reminder on another issue, also fairly minor, I'd raised a couple of months back.)
Keep in mind that mods are ingesting a firehose and that complicated or poorly-scoped questions or issues might be difficult to respond to. (This is a general principle to keep in mind when corresponding, not just for HN mods.)
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256792>
Sites classified as "general news" (ordered by frequency in the front-page archive): nytimes.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, theguardian.com, washingtonpost.com, reuters.com, npr.org, cnn.com, slate.com, vice.com, latimes.com, cnet.com, yahoo.com, sfgate.com, cbc.ca, cnbc.com, guardian.co.uk, bits.blogs.nytimes.com, vox.com, salon.com, time.com, nymag.com, telegraph.co.uk, boston.com, newsweek.com, chronicle.com, msn.com, axios.com, news.com.com, propublica.org, independent.co.uk, timesonline.co.uk, mercurynews.com, theglobeandmail.com, pbs.org, theintercept.com, usatoday.com, buzzfeednews.com, spiegel.de, rollingstone.com, thestandard.com, go.com, smh.com.au, cbsnews.com, abc.net.au, nbcnews.com, seattletimes.com, aljazeera.com, bloombergview.com, motherjones.com, firstlook.org, thehill.com, apnews.com, informationweek.com, news.com, thedailybeast.com, huffingtonpost.com, theage.com.au, csmonitor.com, nwsource.com, japantimes.co.jp, thestar.com, bostonglobe.com, dw.com, indiatimes.com, nypost.com, ap.org, chicagotribune.com, sfchronicle.com, dailymail.co.uk, news.com.au, foxnews.com, kqed.org, theatlanticwire.com, scmp.com, texasmonthly.com, wbur.org, yahoo.net, swissinfo.ch, nationalpost.com, spectator.co.uk, sfweekly.com, detroitnews.com, theweek.com, nzherald.co.nz, washingtonexaminer.com, aljazeera.net, cbslocal.com, nltimes.nl, weeklystandard.com, ctvnews.ca, miamiherald.com, nydailynews.com, thetimes.co.uk, dallasnews.com, startribune.com, bostonherald.com, euronews.com, kuow.org, themorningnews.org, upi.com, globalnews.ca, guardiannews.com, theherald.com.au, thesun.co.uk, belfasttelegraph.co.uk, houstonchronicle.com, ibtimes.co.uk, koreaherald.com, metro.co.uk, mirror.co.uk, seattleweekly.com, standard.co.uk, dailyherald.com, huffingtonpost.co.uk, huffingtonpost.com.au, huffpost.com, inquirer.com, ktvu.com, ocweekly.com, sundayherald.com, theweek.co.uk, wpri.com, wtsp.com, americanchronicle.com, annarborchronicle.com, augustachronicle.com, catholicherald.co.uk, dukechronicle.com, heraldsun.com.au, katu.com, kdvr.com, kfor.com, ktla.com, myfox8.com, myfoxdc.com, myfoxny.com, news-herald.com, news.google.ca, pressherald.com, thechronicleherald.ca, timesherald.com, wttw.com, wtvr.com, wunc.org, wvgazette.com.
This is based on downloading all archived HN front pages from 2007-02-20 through 2023-06-21 and analysing stories by title, site, votes, comments, and submitter.
The duplicates-detection code is deliberately porous: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650172>
But overwhelming the front page with multiple takes on a story (e.g., the Tver aircraft downing yesterday) would be tiresome, and even multiple takes on what's essentially the same story over a span of a few days or weeks can get tedious.
The critical qualifying exception is "significant new information": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406835>
Around 15% or more of HN front-page submissions are to paywalled and/or general news sites.
(I've classified the latter in my analysis of historic HN front-page activity, I haven't gone through to specifically note paywalled sites.)
And tightening paywalls can have a large impact on submissions. After the New York Times strengthened its paywall in 2019, HN front-page submissions fell to about 25% of their previous level.
But I frequently downvote disagreement where it seems to me that the comment also reduces the overall thread quality.
>but I think overall the community agrees (through up/downvoting) that humor on HN should be fairly rare.
I disagree with that from two perspectives, for one, the majority of the site’s users are lurkers (I’ve been lurking since 2007ish, first account I made in 2014 and barely used it to comment, and made this mainly to engage a month ago), and these up/down votes only account the users who engage in the comments. The second side is, I believe it’s a different personalities, the ones who engage in comments up/down votes are mostly the intense ones who comes out usually as condescending, since being that after all might get them some of these kudos, and the ones who don’t engage in up/down voting are the relaxed personalities who don’t mind to have some humor from time to time, hence the comments in here saying they don’t favor humor will get more votes than the others, because they are the ones who engage and care about these votes to start with, but that’s my personal observation only.
Would make great training data these days!
(I generally use 2009 as a representative "early year" as HN was sorting things out and evolving rapidly in 2007 & 2008.)
By year:
2007 418
2008 438
2009 407
2010 290
2011 271
2012 222
2013 224
2014 259
2015 329
2016 442
2017 426
2018 476
2019 418
2020 251
2021 194
2022 167
2023 95
Sites: bloomberg.com, wsj.com, economist.com, venturebeat.com, businessweek.com, businessinsider.com, fastcompany.com, inc.com, hbr.org, ft.com, alleyinsider.com, forbes.com, fortune.com, nikkei.com, marketwatch.com, xconomy.com, entrepreneur.com, portfolio.com, business2.com, cio.com, bizjournals.com, bloombergquint.com, insidefacebook.com, nasdaq.com, fool.com, financialpost.com, prnewswire.com, adweek.com, morningstar.com, americanbanker.com, businessinsider.com.au, industryweek.com, bankertimes.com, businessinsider.co.za, businessinsider.de, businessinsider.fr, forbesindia.com
As above, these are ordered by overall frequency within the FP archive.
No kidding.
On most Launch / Show HN posts half of the comments are "CEO of yourdirectcompetitor.com here, cool project, good job, here are some irrelevant questions so that my obvious self-plug doesn't get deleted."
Even then it only appears so to those commenters, any thread talking about healthcare, legal rights etc etc has the same festering underbelly of hatred you'll find on any comment section from a newspaper.
The major reason you can have this perspective is that a lot of these contentious subjects are blanket banned, the inevitable firestorm in the comments can't happen if the thread isn't allowed.
I have no desire to take HN "offline" and pollute my inbox/outbox with a bunch of moderation notes. That's too annoying.
It might be slightly better if every submission and comment had a mailto: that automatically populated a new email with a link, but even then, this shouldn't be necessary.
Hacker News is an advertisement for Y Combinator.
Let's not pretend that this is a charity.
It's also worth noting that the operators of such "free" services don't publicly take the haughty attitude of "if you don't like the service, you can have a refund of $0". You'll never hear that rhetoric from dang. They want people to use their services. Only unaffiliated outside defenders use that rhetoric.
The commentariat's genteel reputation also evaporates once you step into the "political" threads HN does allow, namely immigration, outsourcing and of course, crime in San Francisco.
A former head of state in Ycombinator's home country is headed to trial, and a coup plotter in the world's current largest military conflict is apparently dead. Both of these are historic events, but you'd never know that on HN.
I don't think you need to go back and forth with users. You don't actually need to do anything - this is just my opinion.
I do apologize if it caused you any grief, that wasn't my intention either.
One synthesis is this: wise strategies depend on the audience composition and time scale.
More people should learn wise ways to quantify future rewards. Reinforcement learning, economics, and finance cover some simple ways. One way is a constant discount factor, but it is not the only nor best way.
I am not demanding this of him of course, but this sort of level of finer details seem to not get discussed in the many threads like this that I've read.
Like most clichés, this is easy to say, but hard to apply. It is imprecise and does not capture its own limitations. These three words don't move us forward; we shouldn't fixate on them; we must move beyond them.
Reality exists without perception. It benefits us to clarify the difference. Here are some clearer statements that reflect current philosophical and scientific knowledge:
1. We only perceive a small, incomplete, distorted portion of reality.
2. Human perception is a flawed but useful error-corrected simulation designed to help us survive.
2. Perceptions and beliefs strongly influence individual behavior.
3. Behavior is constrained by reality (perceived or not, believed or not).
4. Over a sufficiently long time scale, individuals and groups who understand reality have a survival advantage.
5. Perceptions can deviate from reality for arbitrarily long time periods.
Not useful for all people, but potentially useful for some.
Broadly speaking, the hacker ethos has relied on a "share and enjoy" metric, a direct reference to a bit from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. People sometimes forget that the bit goes on to offer specific suggestions for those who are receiving something for free and have complaints regarding the flavor directed at the provider.
Another problem: subjective matters often appear objective during disagreements, and people tend not to be interested in this important distinction at these points in time (whereas in abstract threads like this those skills remain intact).
Another problem: relative categorization, ie: "HN moderation is great [compared to other sites]" that I suspect is not realized as such, and again: during disagreement, this perspective tends to be "not appreciated", "JAQing off", <your culturally infused meme of choice>.
Similarly, the bandwidth limiting on Hacker News diminishes moderation workload, because nobody has to moderate a comment never posted. And I don't doubt the site has enough signal to make an educated guess that posts going rapidly in a short burst of time is a good low resolution flamewar signal.
Too many words to say the post limiter throttle is one of the things that keeps the site free to use.
> As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.
New accounts have no history and no score, so they fit into the community in a (justifiably) low-reputation place. While you can do that, you'll have an army of "greentext" accounts and the community tends to downsample their opinions.
One can argue this framework is bad, but it is a framework under which one can consider the question of whether rate-limiting is immoral.
(I'd even go further to argue that "my property my rules unless the government has declared otherwise" is a default ethical framework for, at least, most Americans. Be it Disney World or my own hearth, there are a set of rules, written and unwritten, that those who do not co-own the property must abide while inhabiting the property or operating the property, and the owner may revoke the privilege of inhabitance or operation at, broadly, their discretion. Maybe "ownership makes right" isn't good enough for the specific context of "a user of a freely-provided authenticated public forum", but I think the burden is on the person holding that opinion to explain why we need a rule more restrictive than the default property-ownership-based 'my forum my rules').
Not only are the vast majority of opinions propagated there terrible, the topics and framing of articles is highly biased and astroturfed. I think I can pretty accurately spot Reddit/twitter politicians in the wild, and it is always kind of sad, because there is so much conflicting propaganda coursing through their heads that little of the unique person supposedly holding those views shines through. The reason I can spot it is because I was there as well a couple of years ago, but luckily was able to cut out those toxic influences from my life.
Rule 0: this isn't reddit. Pointing out this isn't reddit isn't a shallow dismissal, it is an apt response to an equally shallow pun/joke.
Rule -1: you shouldn't downvote for disagreeing unless you post some substantive or tangible response. If the post doesn't deserve a response, you should report the post.
Sorting comments by popularity, with the convention of Up=agree down=disagree, just promotes populist opinions explicitly.
A much better metric would be the amount of responses a post gets divided by the entropic density of the post/thread.
4 paragraphs of "musk bad. rust good." gets 13 replies? decent.
Posting "Whataboutism is whataboutism.", gets 40+ responses, back and forths, multiple tangents of discourse, all in a fraction of the timeframe.
Which one results in a more higher-quality discourse? As it is now, the circle jerk floats to the top like a buoy, the actual discourse gets hidden in a spectrum of contrast.
The presentation, ranking, sorting, and conventions of all major aggregative and news sites forgo a metric that optimizes for quality (of discussions) and instead optimizes for quantity of participation, no matter the detriment.
minimaxing shallow PKI's and forgoing second-order effects, as always.
A general search showing links to rationale / reasons: <by:dang please don't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=>
You can also typically search Algolia for "by:dang" + the text used to describe what guideline was transgressed.
As I've noted elsewhere, HN operates on frictions and nudges: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137757>
And you can always email mods for clarification, as has been noted several times already in this thread. Dang explicitly includes this option when banning established accounts in many cases.
In large part though, HN presumes adult behaviour, which includes the ability and inclination to research for yourself what you might have done wrong.
Site list: theatlantic.com, newyorker.com, archive.org, smithsonianmag.com, qz.com, nationalgeographic.com, aeon.co, openculture.com, theconversation.com, might.net, theparisreview.org, vanityfair.com, ted.com, popularmechanics.com, laphamsquarterly.org, buzzfeed.com, fivethirtyeight.com, outsideonline.com, thehustle.co, newrepublic.com, foreignpolicy.com, harpers.org, esquire.com, longreads.com, newstatesman.com, lettersofnote.com, gq.com, thewalrus.ca, cjr.org, strongtowns.org, historytoday.com, variety.com, hyperallergic.com, 1843magazine.com, collectorsweekly.com, theamericanscholar.org, nplusonemag.com, bigthink.com, brainpickings.org, thenation.com, theoutline.com, theinformation.com, washingtonmonthly.com, macleans.ca, redherring.com, thenewatlantis.com, prospectmagazine.co.uk, quoteinvestigator.com, theawl.com, airspacemag.com, calvertjournal.com, canada.com, mensjournal.com, torontolife.com, thecorrespondent.com, thecritic.co.uk, britishmuseum.org, nationalgeographic.co.uk, publishersweekly.com, autoweek.com, folksonomy.org, laweekly.com, menshealth.com, rijksmuseum.nl, metmuseum.org, prospect-magazine.co.uk, wunderground.com, agweek.com, banksy.co.uk, banksyfilm.com, minnesotamonthly.com, openlettersmonthly.com
(Again, by order of frequency in front-page stories.)
This and other precentages are based on 35% of stories being unclassified, that is, coming from sites I've not explicitly tagged. Based on some random sampling of that pool, those are most often blogs or corporate sites. My classification for news, science/academic, and programming sites is generally more comprehensive as I'm able to leverage regex matches: "edu" and "ac" for academic, GitHub and GitLab domains for programming, for example, also station call-letter patterns such as [KW][A-Z][A-Z][A-Z]for the US for many general news sites.
If it bothers you that you can't figure out precisely why you were throttled, an email to the admins expressing a desire for UI around that might not be unwelcome.
There's licensing around selling food. I wouldn't be against "license to practice software development," but I'd note that (a) that's a very different world than the one we live in and (b) I don't know that most of the open source software we enjoy, hack on, and bemoan would exist in a universe where licensing standards made every software engineer who had authored it beholden to a minimum standard of quality before distributing it.
Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?
I'll happily forfeit my right to remain aloof and to give no signs of engagement if I get annoyed to the point where I'd prefer to go to war.
And though I suspect dang would respond that everyone sees bias against their own specific viewpoint, this particular pattern seems persistent, plays into well-established truth-to-power dynamics (where truth is disadvantaged), and specifically as concerns policy, has been repeatedly defended by dang.
Put another way, HN's alignment is to curiosity and discussion rather than truth or fairness. I've already touched on many of the considerations that factor into this above, and why I remain unconvinced by those arguments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769278 (Sept 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30390204 (Feb 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185464 (Feb 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342064 (July 2019)
We're happy to take the rate limit off once we have reason to believe that an account is using HN in the intended spirit and will keep doing so. Unfortunately your account is still breaking the site guidelines badly. You posted several instances of nationalistic flamebait just today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273338
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273246
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273223
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273200
and religious flamebait the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37259499.
You've also frequently been crossing into personal attack and name-calling:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024609
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024609
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015841
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015814
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015805
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015781
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37005281
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999963
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36943596
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36789253
In fact your account breaks the guidelines so frequently that it's past the line at which we'd ban an account, not just rate-limit it. I'm not going to ban you right now because it wouldn't feel fair to do that in response to a question about being rate-limited. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
If you build up a track record of using HN in the intended spirit for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
If you don't mind a late addition, it's also responding to comments as written, and not as one would prefer for them to have been written, as you're raising an objection not grounded in what I'd said.
One of my personal faves was responding to what struck me as a somewhat unthinking response to the true reality at the time of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22132283>.
Another addressed common tropes from Wealth of Nations: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17965681>.
I've increasingly taken to responding to highly disinformational or misinformed commentary by simply linking an authoritative rebutting item, occasionally quoting the specific element that addresses the point in question. E.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999668> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27284014>.
I'll also, when the argument seems to be circling rather than progressing, leave as my last response (if any) a link to a previous comment of mine in the thread, to make clear that I'd already addressed that point.
And much of that is not with the goal of convincing the person I'm responding to directly, but in addressing the wider audience. Though occasionally the former seems to occur: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36550938>.
Plenty of stories with political overlap [1] still get discussed on HN. Your list seems cherry-picked to me - presumably because those are the topics you dislike, and mostly people overemphasize, and are more likely to notice, the data points they dislike [2].
I'm not sure where you got the idea that HN doesn't have rules, but it does, and they certainly exclude abusing other members [3], doxxing [4], etc.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
From my own recent history, this subthread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37115294>.
> Perceptions can deviate from reality for arbitrarily long time periods.
According to the theory, this is not [contained within] reality.
What if the "obviously" correct model you were raised on is not correct? Possible for Newton's theories, but impossible for something even more complex?
Even if the given reason is not something I entirely agree with, reading why others might feel the way they do helps. With more samples, I can even get a feel for whether a given response was the respondents' personal interpretation/preference or representative of the community as a whole.
For downvotes that seem self-explanatory, I admit I do tend to skip over the replies.