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I’m sure you’re not being sarcastic at all. I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with interpreting/writing/improving security policies, which largely revolves aroun

I’m sure you’re not being sarcastic at all. I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with interpreting/writing/improving security policies, which largely revolves around the same sort of issues were discussing here. I would guess that you also have a fair bit of experience with that sort of thing. My main point was that I think a guideline that nobody follows is arguably less valuable than not having a guideline in the first place. I think I did a reasonable job of articulating what I think is wrong with it, but I guess whether I have any useful suggestions for improving it is a different matter. I find the process of writing a policy usually involves suggesting a lot of bad ideas before you come up with a set of good ones.

tptacek 6y ago
I think "don't talk about downvoting" is one of our better policies, because it works: complaints about getting downvoted are reliably punished and often flagged off the site. A thing the HN guidelines have to deal with that security policies definitely don't is minimalism. There's 1,000 additional guidelines I'd add if we could just have every guideline I want! "Don't dunk on programming languages in stories about unrelated programming languages"! "Don't write 2 line comments about how Google cancels every service it announces every time Google announces a new product"! "Don't correct other people's English usage"! If the HN guidelines were a security policy this would be a piece of cake. A thing I think you'll probably notice is that a lot of serious, enforced rules on HN aren't even in the guidelines, because there isn't a minimal way to express them that won't cause more drama than it eliminates. We've got a sort of English common law thing going on here, where there's a jurisprudence you can only pick up by following the mods. I think it's actually working out pretty OK that way.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  I would disagree about security policies not benefitting from a minimal approach. If they're exhaustive and tedious to read, then they won't be read or understood by the people who's decisions they're supposed to govern. Attempting to exhaustively enumerate the situations to which a policy could apply is a losing strategy. Making it as simple as possible for a person to know "what should I do here?" or "am I allowed to do this?" should be the ultimate goal.

tptacek 6y ago

I think "don't talk about downvoting" is one of our better policies, because it works: complaints about getting downvoted are reliably punished and often flagged off the site. A thing the HN guidelines have to deal with that security policies definitely don't is minimalism. There's 1,000 additional guidelines I'd add if we could just have every guideline I want! "Don't dunk on programming languages in stories about unrelated programming languages"! "Don't write 2 line comments about how Google cancels every service it announces every time Google announces a new product"! "Don't correct other people's English usage"! If the HN guidelines were a security policy this would be a piece of cake. A thing I think you'll probably notice is that a lot of serious, enforced rules on HN aren't even in the guidelines, because there isn't a minimal way to express them that won't cause more drama than it eliminates. We've got a sort of English common law thing going on here, where there's a jurisprudence you can only pick up by following the mods. I think it's actually working out pretty OK that way.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
I would disagree about security policies not benefitting from a minimal approach. If they're exhaustive and tedious to read, then they won't be read or understood by the people who's decisions they're supposed to govern. Attempting to exhaustively enumerate the situations to which a policy could apply is a losing strategy. Making it as simple as possible for a person to know "what should I do here?" or "am I allowed to do this?" should be the ultimate goal.