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I believe that not being able to see the "upvotes" on each comment is a good thing, and really cools down a lot of the intense vibes. People place way to much e

I believe that not being able to see the "upvotes" on each comment is a good thing, and really cools down a lot of the intense vibes. People place way to much emphasis on this number, and I'm glad we don't have them here. Also good: submissions cannot be downvoted. Flagging appears to be a kind of pseudo-downvoting in that it causes submissions to fall in rank, but does not effect the upvote score. Compare with other sites like reddit or the stackoverflows, it really sucks submitting stuff there and then having it be downvoted to oblivion. Once you attach a number to something, it heavily biases your opinion of that thing, be it number of followers, or dollars, or upvotes, or whatever. There's probably some psychology experiment I should be citing here...

oefrha 7y ago
Actually, submissions for certain controversial topics/opinions are often quickly flagged to death, not unlike downvoted to oblivion. To be fair, those topics tend to invite predictable “discussions” that aren’t very interesting.
- krapp 7y ago
  To be even more fair, however, plenty of technical discussions here fall into well-trodden paths of predictability as well. You can almost guarantee that any mention of WASM will include a comment writing it off as just another retread of Java or Flash, and another predicting it will lead to the death of the web. Lisp threads will include tedious discussions about parentheses. Anything to do with web dev will probably have a tangent about how the web was ruined by javascript and advertising. Go? No generics, lame. PHP? The memes about how bad PHP is are endless, and most are still a decade or so out of date.
  - Multicomp 7y ago
    I agree with your points. I will add two more 'HN tropes' in the forms of factions that are out there and tend to show up pretty often. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force and its close cousin (of which I admit to being a card-carrying member who tries not to be too pedantic / indiscriminate with my strikes) the F# Evangelism Strike Force. PS: I wonder if there is a recent listicle for Top 50 most common Hacker News comments / memes / tropes ? DDG says not much about it, just surfacing the nGate.com Hacker News weekly stuff.
    - krapp 7y ago
      I've sometimes thought it would be funny if someone wrote some kind of machine-learning algorithm that studied Hacker News comments and auto-completed threads when certain comments appeared. It would if nothing else make things more efficient. Also - paywalls. If a site has a paywalls it's all but guaranteed that most of the thread will be consumed by complaints about it.
      - satvikpendem 7y ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20150928214855/http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_296.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150928214855/http://news.ycomb... I found this Hacker News simulator in the archive. You could also look into /r/subredditsimulator for related stuff.

oefrha 7y ago

Actually, submissions for certain controversial topics/opinions are often quickly flagged to death, not unlike downvoted to oblivion. To be fair, those topics tend to invite predictable “discussions” that aren’t very interesting.

krapp 7y ago
To be even more fair, however, plenty of technical discussions here fall into well-trodden paths of predictability as well. You can almost guarantee that any mention of WASM will include a comment writing it off as just another retread of Java or Flash, and another predicting it will lead to the death of the web. Lisp threads will include tedious discussions about parentheses. Anything to do with web dev will probably have a tangent about how the web was ruined by javascript and advertising. Go? No generics, lame. PHP? The memes about how bad PHP is are endless, and most are still a decade or so out of date.
- Multicomp 7y ago
  I agree with your points. I will add two more 'HN tropes' in the forms of factions that are out there and tend to show up pretty often. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force and its close cousin (of which I admit to being a card-carrying member who tries not to be too pedantic / indiscriminate with my strikes) the F# Evangelism Strike Force. PS: I wonder if there is a recent listicle for Top 50 most common Hacker News comments / memes / tropes ? DDG says not much about it, just surfacing the nGate.com Hacker News weekly stuff.
  - krapp 7y ago
    I've sometimes thought it would be funny if someone wrote some kind of machine-learning algorithm that studied Hacker News comments and auto-completed threads when certain comments appeared. It would if nothing else make things more efficient. Also - paywalls. If a site has a paywalls it's all but guaranteed that most of the thread will be consumed by complaints about it.
    - satvikpendem 7y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20150928214855/http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_296.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150928214855/http://news.ycomb... I found this Hacker News simulator in the archive. You could also look into /r/subredditsimulator for related stuff.