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Agreed yours is dull ;-) I wouldn't call this topic meta. I'd call it a critique of HN itself. This thread contains many interesting comments. The topic was

Agreed yours is dull ;-) I wouldn't call this topic meta. I'd call it a critique of HN itself. This thread contains many interesting comments. The topic was up voted quickly by the HN community. If the thread really was manually removed, I'd like to hear directly from the mods about why. Where in the HN guidelines does it state you cannot critique HN? It doesn't. The only thing it says that is similar is this, > Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com. However, this post was a question to the community asking for ideas on how to improve comment navigation and thus discussion quality. So I think maybe something else happened and I'm just curious what triggered the topic's removal.

brudgers 11y ago
I suspect that people flagged the submission [story] because they found it did not rise to the level considered intellectually interesting enough for Hacker News. Flagging increases gravity and pulls submissions down. Why would people do that? I suspect because for many people talking about Hacker News is not the reason that they come to Hacker News. I suspect that many people, like me, classify talking about Hacker News rather than hacker news to fall into the category of meta-discussion much in the same way that talking about StackOverflow is considered meta-discussion and lives on a separate site...if site management seems like an interesting topic, listening to Spolsky and Atwood discusss the building of StackOverflow is a good listen, they made podcasts all the way back to the first weeks of building it. Don't get me wrong, I think a critique of HN could be interesting. I just think a blog post or essay would probably be more intellectually interesting than a quickly written call to arms...in that vein I suppose an actual implementation would be still more intellectually interesting particularly one of those proposals based on pure CSS. Given the organization of Hacker News markup, pure CSS recursing on .athing would probably be a duct tape (in the highest sense of duct tape) grade hack. That leaves the question of why some meaningful fraction of the Hacker News community didn't find the question particularly interesting. There I think it bumps up against a bit of tEndless September. Here's a more popular and but no more interesting thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038 Though in fairness proposing turning HN into Reddit probably gets some extra points for turning the "HN is turning into Reddit" meme on its head. Anyway, people who follow all this stuff are aware that the moderator, dang, has said that collapsible comments are on the feature backlog. My take is that the feature backlog is filled with items that make the site better but that users don't see [e.g. don't see spammers]. The other problem with meta discussions besides dullness is that trying to be polite and thoughtful and helpful sucks up an asymmetric amount of effort, as this post demonstrates.
- studentrob 11y ago
  I asked via email and it turns out it was modded off as a duplicate of a recent post a week ago [1], which I see you cited too I didn't realize the topic was a dupe, oops! Anyway now we know. I was told they're considering the feature and will probably implement something. Fingers crossed! > trying to be polite and thoughtful and helpful sucks up an asymmetric amount of effort, as this post demonstrates. Not sure what you mean here. Whose time, commenter or HN staff? Either can choose to ignore the topic, whether by closing the tab or through modding. As you said, meta discussions are modded off, but allowed from time to time because, according to the response I got in email, "they get people's juices flowing". I'm fine with that though I do think it'd be more clear if that were noted in the guidelines. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038

brudgers 11y ago

I suspect that people flagged the submission [story] because they found it did not rise to the level considered intellectually interesting enough for Hacker News. Flagging increases gravity and pulls submissions down. Why would people do that? I suspect because for many people talking about Hacker News is not the reason that they come to Hacker News. I suspect that many people, like me, classify talking about Hacker News rather than hacker news to fall into the category of meta-discussion much in the same way that talking about StackOverflow is considered meta-discussion and lives on a separate site...if site management seems like an interesting topic, listening to Spolsky and Atwood discusss the building of StackOverflow is a good listen, they made podcasts all the way back to the first weeks of building it. Don't get me wrong, I think a critique of HN could be interesting. I just think a blog post or essay would probably be more intellectually interesting than a quickly written call to arms...in that vein I suppose an actual implementation would be still more intellectually interesting particularly one of those proposals based on pure CSS. Given the organization of Hacker News markup, pure CSS recursing on .athing would probably be a duct tape (in the highest sense of duct tape) grade hack. That leaves the question of why some meaningful fraction of the Hacker News community didn't find the question particularly interesting. There I think it bumps up against a bit of tEndless September. Here's a more popular and but no more interesting thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038 Though in fairness proposing turning HN into Reddit probably gets some extra points for turning the "HN is turning into Reddit" meme on its head. Anyway, people who follow all this stuff are aware that the moderator, dang, has said that collapsible comments are on the feature backlog. My take is that the feature backlog is filled with items that make the site better but that users don't see [e.g. don't see spammers]. The other problem with meta discussions besides dullness is that trying to be polite and thoughtful and helpful sucks up an asymmetric amount of effort, as this post demonstrates.

studentrob 11y ago
I asked via email and it turns out it was modded off as a duplicate of a recent post a week ago [1], which I see you cited too I didn't realize the topic was a dupe, oops! Anyway now we know. I was told they're considering the feature and will probably implement something. Fingers crossed! > trying to be polite and thoughtful and helpful sucks up an asymmetric amount of effort, as this post demonstrates. Not sure what you mean here. Whose time, commenter or HN staff? Either can choose to ignore the topic, whether by closing the tab or through modding. As you said, meta discussions are modded off, but allowed from time to time because, according to the response I got in email, "they get people's juices flowing". I'm fine with that though I do think it'd be more clear if that were noted in the guidelines. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355038