21 ms·

Two HN Announcements

• curiousjorge 11y ago
  big fucking deal
• brobinson 11y ago
  Great! I do see legitimate [dead] comments occasionally. How will this affect shadowbanned users, though? Can a shadowbanned user's comment ever be vouched from the grave?
  • dang 11y ago
    If I understand your question correctly, then yes, that's why we did it. The vast majority of banned users' comments belong under community review. I should add that moderators are still going to intervene sometimes—just hopefully not very often. For one thing, some decisions only we have the data to make. For another, some decisions are based on the values of the site and those are not open to change. But the long-term vision for HN is to make it as self-regulating as possible, and it's been obvious for a long time that the bulk of HN moderation should be done by the community. The only question is what the right mechanisms are to get us there, and vouching is a big experiment in that.
• minimaxir 11y ago
  Very promising announcements, Sam and Dan, although I have a few questions: 1) How does spinning out YC as its own service affect a) the job posting system and b) the YC class qualifiers in submission titles? / What does "editorial independence" mean in the context of his announcement? YC submissions had a lot of points, true, but I had thought that was attributed to the high YC user base. 2) Will users be able to vouch for [flagged] submissions in addition to [dead] submissions? 3) Due to the vouch system, will the use of banning in general be readdressed, since there is now a way to address false positives/negatives? Shadowbanning was implemented at Reddit as a last resort (that the new CEO wants to remove), and it isn't respectful to the user to not know if they are banned. EDIT: Reordered to match dang's responses.
  • dang 11y ago
    Doesn't affect (1) at all. As Sam mentioned, this is formalizing the de facto structure that's been in place a long time, so that announcement doesn't come with any changes to how HN works. (2) Absolutely. Users can vouch for anything that's dead, including [flagged] and [dupe]. I see the notational confusion there; will ask Sam to update the post. (3) Probably, but I'm not sure I agree with the line you're drawing from vouching to banning. Today's release massively lowers the cost an account of being banned. Instead of having your comments always stay [dead], they're now up for review by your fellow HNers; the community can decide what's good and bad. I'm not sure 'banned' is even the right word for it now— 'under moderation' would be closer. The reason I say 'probably' above and not simply 'yes' is that there are a ton of issues to consider about it.
    • erik-n 11y ago
      >Users can vouch for anything that's dead, including [flagged] and [duped]. I see the notational confusion there; will ask Sam to update the post. If you were to rename the "duped" label, may I suggest "nuked"?
      • dang 11y ago
        Whoops, I meant of course [dupe], not [duped] (fixed now). The traditional pg shorthand for duplicate. Not likely to change!
  • KeepTalking 11y ago
    Additionally, how is this going to affect startup school ? Startup school picks attendees from hacker news.
    • dang 11y ago
      It has zero effect on Startup School. We'd never do anything to impede that!
      • 11y ago
• raldi 11y ago
  > If we notice abusive vouches, we'll take away vouching rights That might scare some people away from vouching. Could you clarify whether it'll be more like, "If you wrongly vouch for even one single thing, we'll silently and permanently remove your vouching ability forever with no possible recourse" or more like, "If you show a repeated pattern of bad vouching, we'll reach out to you and explain what you're doing wrong, and only if it continues, take away your vouching privileges as a last resort, perhaps only temporarily" (or somewhere in between those extremes)? P.S. I couldn't be happier to hear about Dan's promotion. He has an expert touch for community management, and (I learned after an opportunity to join him for beers one night) some deep wisdom on the subject, too.
  • strangecasts 11y ago
    I read it as the latter - I don't think it's unreasonable to interpret it as "we may take action if you're using separate accounts to unkill your own posts/repeatedly vouching for obviously abusive comments".
  • dang 11y ago
    Please don't worry about this. It really is just like flagging. We only take away flagging rights if someone repeatedly misuses them—never for one random thing. I wouldn't have even included the bit about taking away vouching rights except I know that the question "What if people just vouch for all the bad comments" was going to come up otherwise. (Also, I don't think I've been promoted? But thanks—that's particularly meaningful coming from a seasoned veteran of the early Reddit...)
    • raldi 11y ago
      > I don't think I've been promoted Editorial independence is a big vote of confidence; they don't toss that set of keys to just any old schmuck.
      • samstave 11y ago
        For whatever reason, I read this in Rodney Dangerfield's voice and it made it all that much better. But I agree, this is a huge vote of confidence
• paulirish 11y ago
  As part of the organizational change, I'd love to see a plan to making the Hacker News site work great on mobile.
  • habith 11y ago
    > I'd love to see a plan to making the Hacker News site work great on mobile Seconded. I'd also like to see something implemented to control the contrast on downvoted/dead entries. Either collapse them ala reddit or give me the option to disable the low contrast view.
    • dang 11y ago
      We did make one change in this department. If you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its individual page, dead and downvoted comments should no longer be faded out. That's so people who want to consider vouching for a comment will be able to read it. In case anyone is wondering, 'flag' and 'vouch' links don't appear beside comments in threads. You have to go to the comment's individual page (linked from its timestamp) to see them.
      • rory096 11y ago
        An example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298777 Good change, by the way. Don't know how many times I've (probably fruitlessly) commented next to a dead comment to point out that they're unknowingly accidentally shadowbanned.
  • creullin 11y ago
    I agree. The mobile apps for HN are terrible.
    • qubitcoder 11y ago
      For iOS HN apps, my current preference is Akepa owing to its features and attention to detail--including comment collapsing, bookmarks, history, Readability integration, and replies (using it now for this comment). The performance is quite snappy as well since it uses native components instead of a being a wrapper.
• paloaltokid 11y ago
  This is exciting! I look forward to seeing the vouch feature in action. I notice a certain classes of stories regularly being flagged off the homepage, mainly those that deal with racism or sexism in the tech community. Being able to rescue quality stories on those topics should provide some interesting fodder for discussion.
  • brudgers 11y ago
    I'd like to be optimistic. Yet the issue I experience with stories on those topics is that the discussions tend to attract trolling behavior and the exact sort of expressions of outrage that behavior seeks to evoke. To me, the quality issue isn't the story. It's the counterproductive comments.
  • throwawaymaroon 11y ago
    Oftentimes racism or sexism topics aren't flagged off the homepage, but subject to decreasing rank based on comment activity. Lots of comments -> likely flame wars, or so the argument goes. Vouching won't change how those topics are treated. And to be honest, I don't know that I mind. HN has a problem discussing sexism in a nontoxic way. I accept the argument that sexism in particular should be a banned HN topic (the way politics is) for the sake of healthy discourse. Now I think that the conversation on sexism in the tech industry is important, and I think 'healthy' discourse is an illusion used to mask certain political motives, and I have a generally low opinion of HN's moderation policies, implementation, and clarity. That doesn't mean that banning sexism as a topic would be inconsistent. It would be too consistent: instead it's easier to just penalize quickly commented posts, which happens to frequently apply to topics on sexism. I just wanted to point out that "interesting fodder for discussion" is not exactly a goal of the moderation team, at least not if it includes "racism or sexism in the tech community."
• happyscrappy 11y ago
  >I don't plan to be very involved--other than as an enthusiastic user (who would, however, prefer that it be easier to read on a phone) I always assumed not having a mobile style sheet was intentional to slow down eternal September, but if sama is asking for it then that can't be the case, right?
  • krapp 11y ago
    But most of the complaints about that are coming from existing Hacker News users, for whom the experience on mobile is terrible. If Hacker News was as adamant about stopping the Eternal September effect as some people believe, they would demand references and a CV before letting anyone join, or else be invite-only like lobste.rs. Not having a mobile stylesheet doesn't really seem like it would help in that regard. Cynicism and incivility are far more corrosive to this community than the Eternal September effect could be, anyway.
    • happyscrappy 11y ago
      >demand references and a CV That would not be HN and would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I would imagine most users have used a throwaway acct to make some comment without being brutalized, and some of the best comments come from new users.
    • grayclhn 11y ago
      > But most of the complaints about that are coming from existing Hacker News users, for whom the experience on mobile is terrible. I'm not sure what your argument is here. Who else would complain? The people who have been driven away?
      • krapp 11y ago
        My argument is that not having a mobile stylesheet isn't keeping low quality users from showing up, it's mostly annoying the ones who are already here. As a way of holding back the Eternal September effect, bad mobile UX seems like a specious idea at best - which is why I doubt that has anything to do with the state of the mobile experience here.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• steven2012 11y ago
  I think more important than resurrecting posts from people who have squandered their privileges are we need to allow for better and more convenient browsing of comments, so that we can let the best ones shine. 1) native folding of comments, like reddit. I don't understand why this doesn't exist yet, and is the single more important thing to going through the comment list effectively. 2) better algos for upvoting and downvoting comments and threads entirely. This is something that reddit is absolutely great at, the top comments on reddit are generally the best or funniest, depending on the context. The top comments here are generally the first ones posted, or the ones from people already with high karma, and thus either the fast or the already-karma-advantaged get more karma.
  • iak8god 11y ago
    > 1) native folding of comments This one seems like such an obvious improvement that I've been assuming there's some really principled reason I'm not aware of for why it isn't done.
    • nkurz 11y ago
      I doubt there is any principled reason for the lack. Rather, I think it's just that the people in a position to make the improvement don't place the importance on it that you do. Personally, it's not a feature I've ever wanted. I'm using the https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodleonmmfkdhfofamacceeikgecp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle... extension, which offers this, and never once have I intentionally folded a comment. Accidentally, I've folded comments many times. My main improvement to the extension (if I were to write my own) would be to _remove_ the folding feature and just have new comment highlighting (which I find much more important than folding). Separately, if this is an important feature, why not use an extension that offers it? Is there a reason it needs to be built in?
      • mattmanser 11y ago
        It's useful when a parent comment spawns hundreds of replies and you're not interested in the direction the parent comment has taken the discussion, but want to discuss other parts of the article. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does it's annoying scrolling trying to find the next top level comment.
• TheBiv 11y ago
  I am clearly in the minority here, but I really don't mind (and somewhat enjoy) the mobile experience because I can glance at ~25 stories without scrolling instead of the 3-5 stories that the HN redesigns typically show without scrolling.
  • jonah 11y ago
    I use http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ on mobile. Slick and compact.
    • TheBiv 11y ago
      Visually it is stunning, however functionally, I use HN to glance at the top things happening in the tech/startup community and the premii link only shows me 6 stories before I have to scroll. Yes, scrolling isn't that big of a deal, but neither is stunning design for the sake of stunning design. (Just my own personal opinion and I genuinely enjoy that you like that premii link; it just isn't for me)
    • edwintorok 11y ago
      There is also an app for Android that is somewhat similar to that one, and being an app it starts faster than the browser opening the website. In fact I enjoy reading HN from that app more than reading it from a desktop.
  • jordanlev 11y ago
    I agree that information density can be lacking with some of the redesigns... but I want to point out that if you're able to read HN on a mobile screen it is because you are blessed with youth and/or good vision. A lot of us can't make out the text when it is so small, so a ton of pinch-zooming is necessary, which is a rough user experience. (That being said, at least pinch-zooming is an option... nothing bothers me more than when a site actively disabled zooming on mobile with the god-forsaken "user-scalable=no" meta viewport attribute!)
    • TheBiv 11y ago
• bane 11y ago
  I can't help but like the spirit of the vouch system, and I'm sure quite a bit of thought went into it. But at the same time I'm wondering if the site really needs two different versions of up-vote/down-vote with different different semantics. Still, I get it, it's a kind of super-vote, reserved for people with a little karma (i.e. some "skin in the game"). Out of curiosity, how'd you guys arrive at 30 for cutoff?
  • dang 11y ago
    30 is the flag threshold and has been for years. I don't know how pg picked it. It works well, though, and we like that it isn't a high bar. You'd be surprised at how different votes and flags are in effect. The upvoting system is a lot more broken than the flagging system is. People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting". (That's not a criticism—it's simply the chemical reaction of the voting mechanism and human nature.) Flagging is much more reflective in practice. You can think of vouches as an experiment in seeing whether up-flagging can contribute as much value to HN as down-flagging has.
    • jccc 11y ago
      It's a bit startling to read an acknowledgement that up/down voting conflates disagreement with lack of value, and that this effect is undesirable. Debate over this point continues to bubble up every once in a while on HN, with some commenters pointing to pg's casual statement from some time ago that he was okay with a downvote meaning "I disagree." Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees? If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.
      • dang 11y ago
        Oh dear. Nothing that I said was meant to express any policy about downvoting and certainly not any change in policy about downvoting. It's just a separate topic.
• MrBra 11y ago
  > [...] art and science of HN [...] I like it.
  • MrBra 11y ago
    Sorry for having hurt you, you downvoter cold scientist.
• forgottenpass 11y ago
  In light of this, what about the submissions that don't allow comments? I've never really understood what those are in the first place, and am curious what they'll be following this statement of editorial independence. Are those advertisements dang does and will continue to pick and choose? Not that I really care, but they've always seemed a bit out of place.
  • dang 11y ago
    Are you talking about the job ads that YC startups are allowed to post to the front page? Those are described in the FAQ. Other than that, I think all live posts are open to comments.
    • forgottenpass 11y ago
      In that case, you just might want Sam to tone down that "full editorial independence" statement. It's fine that you give special treatment to YC, but please don't claim a virtue you don't have.
      • dang 11y ago
        I'm not sure I agree with you there. Doesn't the term "editorial independence" come from newspapers? Those always had ads. Indeed the nice thing about the current arrangement is that the YC startup job ads are completely up-front, always work the same way, and have a fixed effect on the front page. So it doesn't affect editorial judgment at all. (Except that we try to take linkbait out of the titles and I'm surprised that no YC startup has asked us about that yet.)
        • forgottenpass 11y ago
          I'm not talking about ads in general. I'm saying that when the only "ads" run are for the editorial outlet's parent company's investment interests, well, isn't that a bit... I dunno... incongruous with the nature of advertisement in a paper?
• BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Isn't an upvote something you feel should be on the front page? What's the different between the way upvotes count and the way vouches will count? Does one weigh heavier? Was it not in the cards to make upvotes "vouch" for a post?
  • dang 11y ago
    I'm not sure I understand all those questions, but years of experience have shown that votes and flags are radically different things, and vouches are very much on the flag side of that distinction.
• revelation 11y ago
  It's official, HN is doing more in community development than Reddit managed in ... 5 years?
  • on_ 11y ago
    Hacker news is analogous to a single subreddit. Many subreddits do have this level of interaction with the "mods" of the subreddit. While I am no longer a reddit user, I recognize that while supporting the long tail by having subreddits and promoting diversity, they have a massively difficult time communicating and pleasing their users.
  • dang 11y ago
    Happy to take the compliment, but Reddit is two orders of magnitude bigger than we are. That's several layers of 'qualitatively different' away, so the comparison isn't fair. We're in awe of what they have to deal with. I can't imagine it.
• throwawaymaroon 11y ago
  How will I know if my comments have successfully been vouched for?
  • dang 11y ago
    For now, you still have to view the page logged-out. We're probably going to change this eventually. It's clear that better feedback mechanisms to let people know when they've violated the site guidelines—and when they haven't—could add a lot of value to HN.
• creullin 11y ago
  Cool. Any word on a responsive template for the site?
  • dang 11y ago
    We're working on it and it's coming. No one will be happier than I am when it's out, though I'm worried that it will be impossible to please everyone, because the specific requests we get are disparate and even contradictory. We'll have a considerable period of testing and feedback though.
    • logn 11y ago
      If Digg and Slashdot are any guide, it might be wise to just do a slight enhancement to improve mobile proportions and sizing, rather than any re-design.
    • ars 11y ago
      > because the specific requests we get are disparate and even contradictory. The typical solution to that is to give the users a setting page where they can pick between the two contradictory options.
      • dang 11y ago
        The typical solution leads to a combinatorial explosion of complexity, which is no less worrying.
        • ars 11y ago
          It can I know, but it doesn't have to. With some careful design, and not overdoing it on options you can please most (but not all) people.
• tptacek 11y ago
  Do you have any thoughts on the metrics you might use to evaluate the success or failure of the "vouch" feature?
  • dang 11y ago
    Yes. We're going to look at all the vouched comments and the feature succeeds or fails to the degree that those follow or break the HN guidelines by our usual moderation standards. Not sure if that's a "metric" but that's the idea. Beyond that, the only thing that would make us retract the feature is some bad consequence we didn't foresee. During testing we did notice an unforeseen consequence, but it was a good one. Reviewing vouched comments naturally leads to looking at the history of a banned account, and in a few cases we just unbanned it. Some had been banned for an obvious reason in the past, but recent comments were fine. Others had been banned by mistake, such as by a rogue spam filter. So although this feature applies on a per-comment level, it can have per-account side-effects. This also raises the question of whether we can take this feature all the way to letting the community manage which accounts are banned (presumably with occasional moderator overrides). That's on our list, though it's too soon to tell if it will work.
• conductor 11y ago
  Thanks for the "vouch" button. I think it should be also enabled for the posts which are flagged but still visible.
• huhtenberg 11y ago
  Dan, speaking of experiments, can I pitch an idea? Mix a random story from the New page into the front page on each page load. This should get more eyeballs on new submissions, with more even exposure across HN populus and ultimately increase the overall appeal of the front page material. Should make the FP a bit more dynamic too.
  • samstave 11y ago
    Let me propose an alternative: In my profile, similar to [show dead] - let me select the number of new posts to randomly show... And another idea: always show posts with word [xyz] in title... Edit: and finally; collapsible threads please
    • krapp 11y ago
      Let me try to distill this even further - let people have better control of the way list pages and threads are sorted. Filters like that could easily be added through the user control panel and applied as query strings without affecting the appearance of the rest of the site. Being able to sort a thread by most recent comments rather than just karma would be great.
  • rorykoehler 11y ago
    Great idea +1
  • dang 11y ago
    We alpha-tested that and it didn't work. The median item on /newest is far too low-quality (by HN's definition) for randomness to do much good there. In practice, it just mixes junk onto the front page—the worst thing that can happen to the front page. (I've posted about this a few times; let me see if I can find the links.) Edit: I found some of them, in addition to the ones scott_s mentioned downthread. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20%22median%20story%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date...
    • 11y ago
• mildbow 11y ago
  Awesomeness. I think this is a great idea for the community. I applaud this decision because there are quite a few accelerators, but the special part about YC is HN. Being open enough to give it it's own editorial steering wheel is a great indication of goodwill to the community :) Now that HN is it's own thing, maybe we'll see access(api?) for vote attribution? Is that even remotely possible? Or, are the implicit privacy issues too much of a burden?
  • dang 11y ago
    If you mean publishing people's votes, I can't imagine that we'd ever do that. Vote data is intimate and we have a duty to keep it secret.
    • mildbow 11y ago
      Yeah, you are right. I was thinking it would put rest to the voting rings theory if anyone had access to everyone else's vote history. But, the cost probably isn't worth the benefit.
  • GrinningFool 11y ago
    "Now that HN is it's own thing, maybe we'll see access(api?) for vote attribution?" I'm curious why you'd want this? Typically when voting people don't expect that they're going to be 'named and shamed', or even categorized on any level other than anonymously for stats.
    • dang 11y ago
      The research on deanonymization is so powerful that I doubt we'd even release it anonymously for stats.
• cryoshon 11y ago
  Cool update, I am happy to see Sam's vision for HN is the for it to be independent and a robust institution for the tech community. I think the vouch feature might be cool, but we'll see how it plays out since honestly I don't experience many incorrectly killed comments.
• skrebbel 11y ago
  There used to be the occasional outburst of suspicion of mean moderators with double agendas hellbanning great commenters. Dang's been very active presence here recently to explain decisions that might've seemed fishy, and that has already done a lot to remove that kind of thinking. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theories and rebellious "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are still around, and I suspect that the 'vouch' feature will help kill the last of it. I really hope that it'll work as intended! (assuming it's all unfounded of course, which I believe it is)
  • username223 11y ago
    I don't think it's a "conspiracy," but HN has many means of opaque moderation (shadowbans, slowbans, arbitrary score penalties to control the front page), and they continue to be applied with no accountability. We play here at the mercy of capricious Gods.
  • ekiru 11y ago
    Although "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are bad, I'm not sure I've seen them. I have seen comments like "<name in other thread, you appear to have been hellbanned", but I think they were sometimes warranted. The moderators do sometimes make mistakes, and IIUC the normal way to resolve them is: user realizes they are hellbanned, mails the mods asking about it, and the mods, if they feel the user should not be hellbanned, unbans them. Alerting commenters that one thinks may have been banned by mistake of their ban can either speeds this process along or wastes comment space and moderator attention, depending on whether one is correct. I agree that hopefully vouching will kill the "<name>, you appear to have been hellbanned" comments, though.
• publicfig 11y ago
  I believe along side of the changes mentioned for Vouching (which I think is an incredible idea), I'd like to see changes to the way that submission titles are changed. I'm actually very much for changing titles that are clickbait-y or misleading, but I feel like sometimes the original intention of the article is lost when the titles are changed. I think it would help a tremendous amount if a changed headline is noted as changed (for example, with an asterisk like the on on this post) so that users know that they aren't the original submission. I think it would be even more helpful if hovering over that asterisk to show, or including a link to show, the original title would help. That way it's hidden from being easily influenceable on voting but still allows the initial context of the submission to be present Otherwise, I think both of these announcements are great news and would like to offer congratulations to Y Combinator, Dan and the whole community for keeping this such a useful site and community through all these years, even despite growth and changes to members.
• p4bl0 11y ago
  Do we really need these "vouch" link? It seems like complicated for no reasons. People with showdead could just be able to upvote [dead] comments just like other comments (is it not the case already?) and a [dead] comment with enough upvote should be unkilled. And then a banned account with enough unkilled comments should be unbanned. Seems like a simple solution with no changes in the UX.
  • dang 11y ago
    This reads like a transcript from our early design conversations! What swayed us in the end is that the upvoting and flagging mechanisms are qualitatively different. (In fact it's crazy how different they are.) Whatever's going on there is an important psychological distinction, and collapsing upvoting and flagging for technical reasons—an obvious simplicity win—loses out to that. It's also worth noting that flags are treated differently by the software than downvotes are (or would be if we had them, in the case of stories). Once we recognized the distinction between voting and flagging it seemed more natural to have this new feature be on the flagging side, hence vouches. The jury's still out on whether it's a good idea or not, though; if it turns out bad, we might consider reverting to the voting idea.
    • p4bl0 11y ago
      Ah, fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to explain :).
  • smtddr 11y ago
    nah, I don't think of flag/vouch as the same as upvote/downvote. Regardless of the constant arguments around it, I use upvote/downvote on opinions I agree/disagree with. I'd use flag/vouch for things that I don't/do think should be on HN at all. e.g., on a Pokemon forum I can strongly disagree with someone who says squirtel is the better than pikachu because water-type has more advantages that electric-type. I might downvote it, maybe. But if someone posts "Pokemon are stupid, you're all wasting your lives you big losers." ...I'd flag that. Conversely, if I posted how electric-type pokemon are the best and I notice a dead-reply to me explaining very clearly a position supporting water-type pokemon as best, I'd vouch for it. While I might not agree with the argument, I can at least vouch that it shouldn't be dead.
• alanh 11y ago
  Non-HN but YC-related question: Is there not going to be a Startup School this year? I have gone to 2 of them, and it’s always an inspiring, memorable experience.
  • dang 11y ago
    Me too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10235123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10235123 answers your question. It will be back next year.
• lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  Would you mind curating the experiments you do. For example, and it may just be me, but suddenly there is a "past" and a "web" link. I would be interested in reading a short but about them and of course the explanation for why it did not work and got removed. (I think the Google search link is gonna be a mistake but I will enjoy reading about it anyway)
  • dang 11y ago
    Did you see the thread on that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645
    • lifeisstillgood 11y ago
      No I am afraid I missed it. It's probably me, but Perhaps these threads might be more widely read if there was say a link to a curated list on the FAQ page. I think HN has gone from "we can expect everyone to pick it up" to needing a few more signposts. That's an interesting post but it passed by on my timezone / holiday / daily lack of caffeine hour. Eventually we get the knowledge spread around, so it's no biggie. Just an idea. Edit: of course you could improve the number of reads by changing the headline: "How Megan Fox taught herself Clojure in three weeks, launched a bitcoin healthcare startup that raised $4 million - all from her Apple Air" Now, hell I would have read that. It's amazing what cat, pipe and the HN headline generator can do.
• adrusi 11y ago
  Traditionally the karma points were supposed to indicate what you felt contributed to the discussion, then I think it was pg who said that using them to indicate agreement was also okay. So now there's essentially a second point system, for indicating what does and doesn't belong in the conversation, but they are much more serious. I guess I can see people flagging posts that are relatively unconstructive more liberally now, things that would maybe just be ignored before. Maybe that's a good thing, I don't know.
• feedjoelpie 11y ago
  Serious question, not rhetorical: I have noticed there appear to be artificially-bumped posts from time-to-time that relate to YC companies. Is HN providing extra clout to YC companies' PR above and beyond organic community moderation, and if so, will HN's extra autonomy in any way change that?
  • dang 11y ago
    We definitely don't give special treatment to YC companies' stories and I'd be happy to look at links if you have any you're wondering about. But make sure you're not looking at the job ads as described in the FAQ. Those are indeed reserved for YC companies. (That is the main thing that HN gives back to YC in return for funding it.)
    • feedjoelpie 11y ago
      That very likely could be be my point of confusion. Thanks for the response.
    • mahouse 11y ago
      Does HN really need that much money? Sorry for the indiscreet question.
      • dang 11y ago
        The costs are all low except for paying people.
      • asadlionpk 11y ago
        I think HN does have a few people working on it fulltime.
    • Kliment 11y ago
      Any chance we can get discussion threads for those?
      • dang 11y ago
• wainstead 11y ago
  It's probably a good time to reread Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... And I'm not making a wry comment on HN moderation, just that this piece never gets old.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• nkurz 11y ago
  If the purpose of flagging is to change user behavior (rather than simply removing unwanted material from the site) it would seem important that users are notified when their posts are flagged, but before they are banned. Perhaps it would be good to show the "flag" count to the owner of a post, if that owner is not already banned? This might be provide warning to a perceptive user that their comments are considered inappropriate, while not making it obvious to intentional spammers that they need to create a new account. For the same reasons, it might also be helpful to show the split between up- and down-votes, rather than just the total. Since this is visible only to the original poster, it wouldn't have much impact on the overall interface.
• anigbrowl 11y ago
  Good stuff. I'd like to express my admiration for dang and the other moderators, as well as the larger team at YC and of course pg himself for building such a valable community resource.
• gone35 11y ago
  Phew... Every time I see announcements like this I get scared. The other day I literally had a nightmare that HN had been "re-designed" à la Slashdot (in my dream, it turned out to be an April Fools' joke). I know it is increasingly unfashionable to keep resisting "modern" trends and leave the HN look as it is --maybe see it as a mark of prestige somehow? In any case, please never, ever the change the look. Please.
  • dang 11y ago
    You, Sam, and I are all on the same (information-dense, text-centric) page. Besides, we need to keep the HN redesign side projects in business. I must say your nightmares sound rather benign. Mine don't usually end with "haha j/k".
• geoffmac 11y ago
  who is Dan. always mention full name at least once
  • DanBC 11y ago
    Mod dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
• hackuser 11y ago
  'Vouching' will not improve the quality of HN discussions. It seems like the result of an excessive focus on fairness, something I see in many online communities. It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway. The quality of discussions is what brings me to HN, and IMHO the quality is poor; it's just better than the alternatives. The vast majority of comments aren't worth my time (or anyone else's, but they can speak for themselves). In other words, there is much room for improvement and I hope that is Dan's focus. I happily would accept unfairness, and suffer its slings and arrows myself, for a higher signal-to-noise ratio. I'd happily lose a few good comments in return for of better quality overall (i.e., false-positives are not really a big deal - so what if my good comment occasionally gets voted down or otherwise buried). By prioritizing quality over fairness HN can best distinguish itself from a million noise-filled alternatives where 'rights' are the priority. Everyone has a right to their opinions, but not to my time. EDIT: Several edits to explain myself better.
  • lotharbot 11y ago
    > "It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway." More importantly, it affects the occasional person who makes mostly good comments but got hellbanned 3 years ago for something that probably could have been handled with a simple downvote and a "please don't do this, here's what the guidelines say" instead. I regularly see high-quality comments, sometimes the highest quality in an entire discussion, that are marked dead because the account is banned.
    • hueving 11y ago
      hellbanning is easily the worst thing about HN. It's the embodiment of a childish idea that nobody can change, ever. It's not even effective against trolls because a troll will just change accounts immediately. It just silences a section of the population that happened to touch a nerve back in the day. A disgusting black mark on an otherwise reasonable site.
      • brudgers 11y ago
• dtertman 11y ago
  (possibly insane) Idea : Open-source the Hacker News code. You have a self-selecting community of hackers. I'd bet some of them would work for free on the site. It is easier to review patches than create them!
  • pen2l 11y ago
    It's already available: https://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews Though they probably will not share the code for rankbanning mechanisms and such, since the code will help out people who might want to go around it.
    • e12e 11y ago
      That's not the code that currently runs hn - AFAIK it's the code that ran hn at some distant point in the past. I'm not quite sure what's the best current path for those that want to run their own hn, on (something similar to) arc probably anarki?: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki Possibly arc-nu?: https://github.com/arclanguage/arc-nu https://github.com/arclanguage/arc-nu At least it appears arc3.1 runs under racket (not sure how long that's been the case, but presumably for a while): $ racket -v Welcome to Racket v6.1. $ wget http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.1.tar $ tar xf arc3.1.tar $ cd arc3.1/ $ echo admin > arc/admins # WARNING: running random code from the Internet # downloaded over an insecure link is not a good idea! # But a checkout from https://github.com/wting/hackernews.git # *failed* to run under racket... $ racket -f as.scm Use (quit) to quit, (tl) to return here after an interrupt. arc> (load "news.arc") nil arc> (nsv) rm: cannot remove ‘arc/news/story/*.tmp’: No such file or directory load items: ranking stories. ready to serve port 8080 I don't know if https://github.com/wting/hackernews.git https://github.com/wting/hackernews.git is a reflection of the updated hn source - I don't think it is. For one thing, if we look at: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19174 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19174 "Ask Arc: How to add a toplabels in news.arc?" > On Hacker News, the ask and show pages are implemented just like the > front page, but they filter the item list based on title or whether or > not there's a link. > > And yes, that means they won't show items not already loaded into RAM ;) (defop ask ((p page)) (pagepage ranked-stories* p [and (askpage-filter _) _] "ask" "Ask")) > The magic is in askpage-filter: (def askpage-filter (s) (and (astory s) (blank s!url) (~begins (downcase s!title) "show hn"))) There's no -filter, in the github repo: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/search?utf8=&q=-filter&type=Code https://github.com/wting/hackernews/search?utf8=&q=-filter&t...
• misnome 11y ago
  Editorial independence; Does this mean that we will be able to comment on the YC job postings that flurry through?
  • dang 11y ago
    No. Those aren't intellectually interesting stories. They're job ads. If there's an interesting story about a startup, post that and we can all discuss the startup there.
• andrewstuart2 11y ago
  Will flagging be undoable or at least require confirmation? I can see the link already but I don't want to run any tests in case it's not undoable. I can think of many times where I've unintentionally clicked the downvote button while meaning to upvote, and had no way to "unbury" the good comment I mean to hoist. I'd hate to accidentally flag and not be able to rectify the situation.
  • dang 11y ago
    Yes. Both flagging and vouching are undoable.
    • andrewstuart2 11y ago
      Awesome, good to hear. :-)
• rebootthesystem 11y ago
  The first thing I would is change the rules to ban all discussions not having to do with technology. I've been more than guilty of stretching a number of non-tech discussions. Every time I do so I feel horrible for wasting my time (and other HN'ers time) on non-tech threads. Second --and this could be quite complex-- let me, the reader, decide who and what I want to read. In other words, let automatic moderation have a light touch and let me, as a reasonably intelligent adult, decide what I want to see. For example, an obligatory "tech"/"non-tech" tag could allow readers to choose not to see anything that isn't tech related. I know, tag hell could be horrible. Yet, there probably exists a reasonable set of tags that could allow users to moderate their own feeds rather than having to worry about central moderation. I could see new posts being tagged "non-tech" by default unless the poster chooses another tag. Tags could include "art", "politics", "religion", "economics", etc. I'd keep them to a very short set, perhaps five or ten. No more. Too many tags and HN becomes something it isn't. Within the concept of allowing the reader to shape their own feed there's the idea of "private hell banning" if you will. In other words, if I don't want to see posts from specific people that should be my prerogative, perhaps others are OK with the posts while I am not. Let me mute someone personally rather than centrally muting them as if the entire community thought exactly alike. I know running communities is extremely hard work. I have in the past and have zero interest in doing it again. HN has really high S/N and that's why I like to read it every day. I've been guilty of adding to the noise here and there. I'm only human. I have tried to self correct when that's happened, mostly by tying to stay away from non-tech threads.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    HN is not tech only. HN has never been tech only. Perhaps you mean that people should stop posting political articles l? (I agree, these are usually hopeless).
    • rebootthesystem 11y ago
      Yeah, I can agree with that. Every time I get sucked into a political discussion on HN I hate myself so I am as guilty as anyone else. At least I recognize HN would be better without these threads.
• vestaton 11y ago
  Shouldn't editorial independence mean that Michael O. Church is unbanned? Or is Hacker News still committed to Y Combinator's feud with him?
  • nkurz 11y ago
    No, editorial independence means that it's up to Dan to decide whether Michael's unbanned presence makes HN more like the site he wants to create, or less like the site he wants to create. I don't know Michael, but my impression from his writing is that if one could pick and choose just his best comments, he'd be a valuable asset to the site. But if it's "all or nothing", I'm not sure. I am getting to know Dan a bit, and I feel confident that his choice will be based on what he feels best for the site and the users as a whole, and that he will neither accept nor reverse previous decisions simply due to failure to reconsider.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    That guy was a terrible poster, and I thought it was particularly pathetic how he tried to argue his way out of his final straw.
• blakeyrat 11y ago
  If improvements are in the pipeline, can you make the "vote up" link not look like a disclosure triangle? I've hit that thing by accident several times trying to expand open comments because it's the exact same icon most applications use for disclosure triangles, and it's at the exact same part of the post most sites put it-- and there's no way to undo an accidental click of it (as far as I am aware.) Just a suggestion.
  • sjwright 11y ago
    And while you're at it, maybe replace the gifs with unicode? ▲ ▼
  • jcr 11y ago
    Using the "Stylish" plugin or similar custom CSS injection, you can substantially change how vote links look, along with adding space between their placement. My vote links read '▲sig' for up-vote (signal), and empty line of separation, and then '▼din' for down-vote (noise). /* remove arrow background images */ /* XXX Bug in chrome/webkit requires padding or margin */ div[title="upvote"], div[title="downvote"] { margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; padding-right: 1ex !important; text-align: center !important; display: inline !important; white-space: pre; background: none !important; background-image: none !important; -moz-transform: none !important; -webkit-transform: none !important; -o-transform: none !important; -ms-transform: none !important; transform: none !important; /* width: 6ex !important; */ /* width: 1ex !important; */ /* margin-right: 10px !important; */ } /* use unicode text arrows */ div[title="upvote"]:after { content: '▲sig' !important; } div[title="downvote"]:after { content: '\A\A▼din' !important; } /* color unicode arrow text green-up, red-down */ a[id^="up"] { color: #009900 !important; } a[id^="down"] { color: #990000 !important; } /* highlight arrows on hover */ a[id^="up"]:hover { color: #00ff00 !important; } a[id^="down"]:hover { color: #ff0000 !important; }
• ww520 11y ago
  Unlinking HN from YC is a fantastic move. It removes any lingering doubt about bias or censorship in regarding to the YC funded companies.
• nsomaru 11y ago
  Wonder if this means Terry Davis gets to live on HN? It will be interesting to see how this system handles "controversial" user accounts.
  • dang 11y ago
    "Gets to live"? That wording gives me the willies. But if you see substantive (e.g. on-topic technical) comments that are [dead], you should definitely vouch for them.
    • Semiapies 11y ago
      Is it really any creepier than using "dead" for comments not being visible by default?
      • dang 11y ago
        I'd say very much so. One refers to a comment, another to a person.
  • lotharbot 11y ago
    Given that "vouch" still goes through the manual process (it doesn't auto-revive hellbanned accounts, but instead flags them for the moderators to review) I think the most likely outcome is that a few more of Terry's comments will be made visible, but his account as a whole will still be restricted. After all, the moderators are well aware of who Terry is and his general patterns of behavior on his various accounts, but they might not always notice when he makes a comment that deserves to be revived.
• Mickchicken2 11y ago
  If you could make it so when ever company X is hiring one or more staff you could share the location of these hires in the link. I would appreciate it thanks.
• unabst 11y ago
  The biggest lost opportunity I find here on HN are not with the comments moderated poorly or that were banned, but with the comments never posted and the discussions that never happened because of harsh anonymous downvoting. Donwvotes on HN are anonymous and silent. This equates to being slapped in the face by someone with a mask on while you're in the middle of a conversation, without knowing why, and not being able to do anything about it. In a real conversation, disagreeing with someone involves actually opening your mouth and talking to that person, and even then is not rewarded with an immediate punishment to the person you're disagreeing with. This is what leads to a discussion, or better yet, a debate. Instead, the only recourse on HN is to change how you talk or to keep quiet. But at this point I must assume this is an intentional design decision, and I adjust my tone and substance accordingly. But I wouldn't be writing this if I weren't okay with HN's rules. -- (edit/addendum: this isn't to say there are no discussions or debates on HN... but I hope other's agree there is something uniquely HN about most of them)
  • sumitviii 11y ago
    Its because in real conversations, you talk to 1-2 other people and not a million. If a lot of people are discussing something (as they do in parliaments) people have a way of upvoting (by banging tables) or downvoting (booing) others.
    • unabst 11y ago
      When I post I may be putting it out there, but if anyone replies, I'd like to think we are having a conversation. Or like now, I'd like to think this reply is to you, and not to a million people. More people may be reading, but we're not really talking until they join the conversation. In real life, I would never throw a tomato at someone I overheard saying something I disagree with to someone else -- but that is HN. By design, I assume, but still.
  • InclinedPlane 11y ago
    I'd say that this has gotten worse over time. I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.
• empyrical 11y ago
  Will HN move to its own domain now that it's going to become its own thing, or will it stay a subdomain of YC?
  • dang 11y ago
    I don't think we need to move it. It's comfortable where it is.
• Justin_K 11y ago
  Can we please get this site to be mobile friendly?
• jglovier 11y ago
  Will the ycombinator.com banner ad finally be replaced with an HN symbol that links directly to the index? :-p Also, a while back I made a little Hacker News logo concept. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731140) If you're thinking responsive redesign work, just hollar. ;-)
• arihant 11y ago
  I'm fairly certain a lot of wrongful flagging is a direct consequence of fat-fingering the flag button. I've been there, and my fingers aren't that fat.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    flags can be undone.
• mck- 11y ago
  > Currently, when an account is banned, a software filter trips Is there a way to check if an account is banned? EDIT: FYI, my karma counter has stopped accumulating points, and popular posts don't get on the front-page (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301364 – which has 4 points in 23 minutes – clearly higher than frontpage story 28 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300732 – 4 points in 2 hours)
  • empressplay 11y ago
    I think the algorithm for story ranking is a bit more complicated than that...
  • kruipen 11y ago
    empressplay 5 minutes ago [dead] I think the algorithm for story ranking is a bit more complicated than that...
• bootload 11y ago
  "Everyone at YC knows that it's vital for HN to have full editorial independence, and we have absolute trust in Dan's decision-making in product, engineering, and moderation." Go @dan, thanks for listening, then doin' something about it.
• aubreykilian 11y ago
  Wow, you think you're going to read some comments about a community update, and you end up reading a mass of comments delving into the human psyche. Damnit I love HN.
• jacquesm 11y ago
  Congratulations Dan, and thank you for the work on this feature. Rescuing comments that fall through the cracks is an important instrument in improving the quality of HN. I'm currently very busy with other stuff so I'm just reading HN on my breaks right now and not participating much but I've been looking forward to this going live for everybody. Thanks for all the hard work!