5 ms·

people told you this was the case in the original thread and yet you implemented it anyway

dang 10y ago
People tell us a lot of things, including a lot of contradictory ones. If it were simply a matter of being told, I could have just told myself, since I've made that argument myself on HN for years. But the point was to try the idea for a little while and see what happened. Now we have actual experience to point to.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  You can't argue that it's a weird idea to ban something you can't even define, even as a one week experiment.
  - dang 10y ago
    Perhaps we're using the word "experiment" differently. I don't mean a controlled experiment, I mean making a change for a little while to see what happens. One doesn't need a precise definition to do that. In fact, if we had one it would have been useless, because in complex social systems like HN such information doesn't transmit. People would have flagged whatever they thought of as 'politics', no matter what we said. Which is what they did.
    - kristofferR 10y ago
      But you've gotta have realised that a lot of non-problematic content about politics, like this story, would get flagged unnecessarily, then?
      - dang 10y ago
        I won't say it didn't cross my mind. But if you're arguing that everything should have been obvious, that was far from the case. People have very different, shockingly different, way-more-different-than-you'd-expect assumptions about things that seem obvious to you (i.e. any one of us); since our job is to serve the community as a whole, we can't just go by our own. It's a constant struggle. HN is large enough that if the outcome had been wildly different, other users would be thinking that had been obvious all along, and telling us so. Keep in mind that the important question was how the community would react, and complex social systems aren't straightforwardly predictable. I've been working with HN for years now, and a participant for years before that, and much of it remains counterintuitive to me.
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    We're supposed to be a community of hackers. Why can't we try weird and crazy ideas?
    - kristofferR 10y ago
      It's a good idea to think through ideas before attempting them. This experiment was like asking people to flag "news", and getting surprised that people were flagging tech news, when they really wanted to avoid crime news.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      > Why can't we try weird and crazy ideas? There's still the "should I really stick this knife in that electrical socket?" evaluation that should take place with weird/crazy ideas, though.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]

dang 10y ago

People tell us a lot of things, including a lot of contradictory ones. If it were simply a matter of being told, I could have just told myself, since I've made that argument myself on HN for years. But the point was to try the idea for a little while and see what happened. Now we have actual experience to point to.

kristofferR 10y ago
You can't argue that it's a weird idea to ban something you can't even define, even as a one week experiment.
- dang 10y ago
  Perhaps we're using the word "experiment" differently. I don't mean a controlled experiment, I mean making a change for a little while to see what happens. One doesn't need a precise definition to do that. In fact, if we had one it would have been useless, because in complex social systems like HN such information doesn't transmit. People would have flagged whatever they thought of as 'politics', no matter what we said. Which is what they did.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    But you've gotta have realised that a lot of non-problematic content about politics, like this story, would get flagged unnecessarily, then?
    - dang 10y ago
      I won't say it didn't cross my mind. But if you're arguing that everything should have been obvious, that was far from the case. People have very different, shockingly different, way-more-different-than-you'd-expect assumptions about things that seem obvious to you (i.e. any one of us); since our job is to serve the community as a whole, we can't just go by our own. It's a constant struggle. HN is large enough that if the outcome had been wildly different, other users would be thinking that had been obvious all along, and telling us so. Keep in mind that the important question was how the community would react, and complex social systems aren't straightforwardly predictable. I've been working with HN for years now, and a participant for years before that, and much of it remains counterintuitive to me.
- jdavis703 10y ago
  We're supposed to be a community of hackers. Why can't we try weird and crazy ideas?
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    It's a good idea to think through ideas before attempting them. This experiment was like asking people to flag "news", and getting surprised that people were flagging tech news, when they really wanted to avoid crime news.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > Why can't we try weird and crazy ideas? There's still the "should I really stick this knife in that electrical socket?" evaluation that should take place with weird/crazy ideas, though.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]