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This came up in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181560), it's pretty interesting. I have ne

This came up in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181560), it's pretty interesting. I have never heard of the sigh as a physiological function before.

yodon 5y ago
I know we're just supposed to upvote but I wanted to explicitly thank you for finding and posting this article (I too was captivated by the mention of the sigh as a psychological function in that previous HN post, but I didn't succeed at finding a summary like this one).
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I'm curious as to what psychological impacts we receive when a norm is to only express gratitude through a very anonymous and vague upvote. I think what the article explores is how a simple, seemingly meaningless, factor may influence us more than we think and I wonder how design decisions of HN do as well. So, I'll also break it and say thank you for inspiring me to wonder about this.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    I think the intentions behind the norm are for generic expressions of gratitude to be restricted to upvotes. When there are so many people communicating with each other in a shared environment, you kind of have to have a rule like that. If this website had private responses, that'd solve that issue, but it'd also make abusive behaviour easier. Then you'd need to have a report system that allowed people to provide context, and before you know it, you need a large moderation team rather than the very small one that Hacker News currently gets away with. I wonder whether there's a way to have it both ways.
    - jimkleiber 5y ago
      I appreciate you pointing out the nuances in how it might play out, not just for the user, but also for the moderation of it behind the scenes. The pains and scalability of moderation is something I've thought about a lot when I've been imagining myself as the admin/moderator, yet, oddly enough, I easily forget about it when I just think about myself as the user. For example, as a user on HN, I've often felt so lost in having conversations longer than a day, because I only notice upticks in my karma (is that what it's called here?) number and if someone replied to something not on the first page of my threads, then it may as well disappear. So I've wondered why HN doesn't have notifications, yet maybe there's a hidden moderation pain that I'm not imagining behind the scenes.
    - akkartik 5y ago
      Where are y'all seeing this norm? I regularly see shallow praise on HN, and I think it's great. Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, I don't actually see any restrictions on saying nice things. Knock yourself out! It's only if you're criticizing that you have to give yourself a high bar. It's true that a lot of praise would get tiresome. But that's never a problem in practice. I usually have a clear field any time I want to send someone a compliment.
  - sufficer 5y ago
    Are you high?
    - jimkleiber 5y ago
      No, I work in human communication.

yodon 5y ago

I know we're just supposed to upvote but I wanted to explicitly thank you for finding and posting this article (I too was captivated by the mention of the sigh as a psychological function in that previous HN post, but I didn't succeed at finding a summary like this one).

jimkleiber 5y ago
I'm curious as to what psychological impacts we receive when a norm is to only express gratitude through a very anonymous and vague upvote. I think what the article explores is how a simple, seemingly meaningless, factor may influence us more than we think and I wonder how design decisions of HN do as well. So, I'll also break it and say thank you for inspiring me to wonder about this.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  I think the intentions behind the norm are for generic expressions of gratitude to be restricted to upvotes. When there are so many people communicating with each other in a shared environment, you kind of have to have a rule like that. If this website had private responses, that'd solve that issue, but it'd also make abusive behaviour easier. Then you'd need to have a report system that allowed people to provide context, and before you know it, you need a large moderation team rather than the very small one that Hacker News currently gets away with. I wonder whether there's a way to have it both ways.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I appreciate you pointing out the nuances in how it might play out, not just for the user, but also for the moderation of it behind the scenes. The pains and scalability of moderation is something I've thought about a lot when I've been imagining myself as the admin/moderator, yet, oddly enough, I easily forget about it when I just think about myself as the user. For example, as a user on HN, I've often felt so lost in having conversations longer than a day, because I only notice upticks in my karma (is that what it's called here?) number and if someone replied to something not on the first page of my threads, then it may as well disappear. So I've wondered why HN doesn't have notifications, yet maybe there's a hidden moderation pain that I'm not imagining behind the scenes.
  - akkartik 5y ago
    Where are y'all seeing this norm? I regularly see shallow praise on HN, and I think it's great. Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, I don't actually see any restrictions on saying nice things. Knock yourself out! It's only if you're criticizing that you have to give yourself a high bar. It's true that a lot of praise would get tiresome. But that's never a problem in practice. I usually have a clear field any time I want to send someone a compliment.
- sufficer 5y ago
  Are you high?
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    No, I work in human communication.