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Hacker News Guidelines

386 points by tomrod 5y ago

dmatech 5y ago
My favorite aspect of this site is that one might voice an unorthodox or troubling idea so long as one does it respectfully. Rather than an expectation that everyone be highly emotional all the time, people are expected to be a bit more logical and keep their emotions a bit more restrained. I know a lot of people are made upset by that aspect of HN (often because we don't get as visibly upset at stuff), but I find it a refreshing change. Other sites tend to politicize pretty much everything. This site has some politics, but it doesn't seem to dominate the discussion.
kosolam 5y ago
- kosolam 5y ago
  The guidelines cut off the third finger emoji that followed, apparently
sillysaurusx 5y ago
It would be interesting if someone posted an archive.org link of 2009 vs now, then diff the two.
- 3PS 5y ago
  Here's the oldest snapshot, from 2014. Diffing is left as an exercise for the reader. https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
  - dang 5y ago
    2014 is just when kogir made everything be HTTPS and also moved the static URLs under news.ycombinator.com. You can get earlier like this: https://web.archive.org/web/2021*/http://www.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/2021*/http://www.ycombinator.com...
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Thanks! Also surprising that archive.org only caught the post-pg era. I was curious how the guidelines evolved afterwards. There have been a few great additions.
- dreadlordbone 5y ago
  Here you go: https://www.diffchecker.com/ya8PjzNT https://www.diffchecker.com/ya8PjzNT
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    This is fantastic. Thank you! It looks like that link will expire in 7 days; is there a way to make it permanent? I’d like to share it.
    - greyface- 5y ago
      Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20220423012954/https://www.diffchecker.com/ya8PjzNT https://web.archive.org/web/20220423012954/https://www.diffc...
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        Hat tip for the clever solution. :) “If only there were a way to get a snapshot of any website at a given date..”
  - ternaryoperator 5y ago
    Interesting tool. It would be even better if it recognized shifted lines, like line 12 in the original is line 16 in the present version.
    - aaron695 5y ago
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-04-22 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-04-22
nabaraz 5y ago
I wish HN had some kind of labels. I want to filter out web development related posts. I am just bored with the usual "one line of css", "visual code", "icons for web" etc. I'd subscribe to just tech, personal projects, psychology and history if I could.
- rtpg 5y ago
  One alternative mechanism used on a site is to allow for filtering _out_ of tags. You still discover stuff but you can totally opt out of anything tagged “rant”. Imagine if you never had to read another substack post about cancel culture ending everything on your tech forum…
- flatiron 5y ago
  That’s basically subreddits
  - nabaraz 5y ago
    Not really. You can already filter out posts like: https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew
    - dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/r/show https://news.ycombinator.com/r/show https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask/new https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask/new
    - chrononaut 5y ago
      Filter for posts like those, or filter out posts like those? I don't see the ability filter out those in my account settings, although I could be missing something.
  - aordano 5y ago
    Is this satire? It says right there on the guidelines, which are also the TFA: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
hammock 5y ago
The guidelines suggest correcting "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X.” In fact, if you title a post with “How to…” the site will automatically crop those words too, leaving e.g. “Do X.”
wvenable 5y ago
This might be as good a thread as any to ask this: What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticing it more often. Most recently with the Elon Musk Twitter purchase thread and today with a relatively benign article about Netflix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31120094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31120094 Hacker News is really not setup for such long threads -- you basically get one top-level comment for the entire page! That's not very engaging. It's just a feeling but it seems some topics are getting an order of magnitude more comments than usual.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  > What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticing it more often Higher number of active users?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Yep. Exponential growth over N decades will do that. You can see it in the IDs. HN recently rolled over to 30m. I remember posting a comment about it. That was like a month ago. It’s now past 31m.
    - mplanchard 5y ago
      Possible I’m missing something obvious, but how do you see someone’s user ID? If I click on my or someone else’s profile, I just get a link with id=<username>.
      - chrononaut 5y ago
        I had the same thought and I realized that they were referring to comment IDs. Yours is 31131117 for example.
        mplanchard 5y ago
        Ah, that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification!
WhitneyLand 5y ago
Are there many sizable communities out there left that rival HN’s s/n ratio, civility and substance? I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Various well-manicured gardens tucked away in Reddit are quite nice. And honestly I don't think HN is as nice as it used to be now that more and more culture war topics are creeping in.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma. It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.) So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
    - SantalBlush 5y ago
      If every reddit user had a tag displaying their age, it would help shed light on why that site is such a joke. I suspect it's largely teenagers and young 20-somethings playing expert in a wide variety of fields.
twofornone 5y ago
- darkteflon 5y ago
  This is so vague that it’s impossible to meaningfully engage. What’s a discussion that needs to be had? “Free speech” doesn’t mean freedom from people telling you you’re being juvenile, selfish or paranoid and that we’d like you to do something for the community that supports you.
  - RajT88 5y ago
    I think I get it. I have noticed some commonalities across both liberal and conservative leaning forums. You can get dog piled for saying the wrong thing in polite words. Or using the wrong words. Or the wrong tone. Or sometimes failing to say something in a post. People react less to what you said, but what it sounds like you might be saying, treating it as though you had plainly said that thing. It feels very "Tribalist". The way you speak about things is a shibboleth for the "team" you are on, regardless of what you write. And that is how the community reacts often, regardless of the content of your post. I definitely think internet trolls bear some blame for it, because this is basically communities being on high alert for bad faith actors and becoming more insular as a result.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell, as you did with this one. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle because we ban accounts that do that, regardless of what flavor of ideology they're for or against. Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31130736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31130736.
- wvenable 5y ago
johnnyanmac 5y ago
Does this get posted periodically, or was there some recent shenanigans I missed that prompted this?
- Pxtl 5y ago
  The "Google docs now starts making inclusive word replacement suggestions like motherboard=>mainboard" thread was kind of a mess, and I'm not sure dang scales.
  - MBCook 5y ago
    I’m not surprised, I didn’t even read that one because of that. Although I was happy the article itself was about the failures of the implementation at its goals and not just the goals themselves. I’ve also seen some individual comments on other threads that really just attack the author of the article in question with ad hominems and totally unnecessary insinuations. Not even political posts but things like the Python typing post from the other day.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I'm not sure dang scales They should choose some other infrastructure than whatever the dang system is then. Or maybe open source it and hope AWS makes a dang multi-instance auto-scaling service. I've seen it's bot moderation posts though and I have to say it's quality work, passes the Turing test for me. Which makes it all the more surprising that no one has spun it into a real product. I'm not a 10x programmer but if they let me have a go at it I could probably throw one together in a weekend in my garage.
    - dexwell 5y ago
      Dang is a person; the main moderator on HN, but thanks for the laugh :D
usrn 5y ago
>Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did I wonder if this is the most routinely violated rule.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Personally, I think the most routinely violated rule is "don't discuss voting in comments".
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I’m kinda saddened by this one because occasionally someone brings up an interesting point about voting, but are typically buried.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      IMO, in 99.999% of cases, the part about voting could be cropped and the comment would be stronger. I’ll sometimes come across comments like: > [very insightful, interesting, well thought out comment here.] Edit: Why am I being downvoted?! I don’t know why it was downvoted, but I would have upvoted if not for the ending. Unfortunately, now I feel obliged to downvote it too.
- Semiapies 5y ago
  That or not using submissions primarily for self-promotion. But then, it always was that way.
- MBCook 5y ago
  > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. This is the one that gets my vote. If anything is posted from Twitter it’s almost HN law that 80% of comments have to be complaining about the fact that it’s on Twitter.
8bitsrule 5y ago
Cartoon HN thread : [https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/682281458145116160 https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/682281458145116160]
alberth 5y ago
There’s a subtle irony about HN. It’s a site that gathers people together to post & comment on all the newest tech while at the same time HN itself is host on some of the most basic and boring tech - a flat file based forum.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Boring tech is reliable tech.
  - dt3ft 5y ago
    This is why mainframe will probably never die.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Mainframes are actually the opposite of boring relative to a standard desktop. Boring jobs? Yes, but IBM have some extremely talented people working on them.
    - threeseed 5y ago
      Mainframes are only reliable because companies stopped making changes to them. It's just too hard to find experienced talent to add new features let along troubleshoot complex issues. I work for a large bank and one thing is for sure that everyone wants to move away from mainframes but it's just such a perilous journey.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    No it's not. Oracle, Windows, C etc are very much older, boring technologies. And more modern variants are far more reliable.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- sph 5y ago
  Seasoned engineers go for simple and effective tech. You can find a good amount of those on here. A few might browse the site from lynx or Emacs. The other "fancy" tech forum full of new tech and slow as molasses (Reddit) is mostly frequented by the younger, more inexperienced generation of hackers.
theknocker 5y ago
legitster 5y ago
What a weird community this is. It's so, so far from perfect - but I fear recommending any changes lest the delecate ecosystem collapse.
Thorentis 5y ago
Has anything changed in the guidelines that prompted this post?
- tomrod 5y ago
  No, I just like to refresh myself on them from time to time and figured others may appreciate the same.
- fsflover 5y ago
  There are rumors that Eternal September is starting on HN. This is probably the reason.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    I responded to the question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomrod https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomrod
    - fsflover 5y ago
      I don't see anything related in your link.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        The question was whether anything changed that prompted this post. I am the poster. I answered why I posted it. It didn't have anything to do with Eternal September.
        fsflover 5y ago
        It's not enough to just post something on HN. It also needs to be updated enough by other users.
zw123456 5y ago
The one thing in there I forgotten or overlooked is to put [pdf] on the end, I just assumed it did that automatically. I can't recall if I have ever posted a pdf but if I do in the future I will have to try to remember to do that. Although, it would be a small suggestion that it could be automated.
SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics I wish this was still the case. Talking about politics used to be avoided here, and certainly engaging in reddit-tier partisan arguing was extremely rare. Now there are political posts almost every day that have comment sections full of mud slinging. I'm guilty of it too, even as recently as today, so I'm not taking a holier than thou position, but man those threads are just incredibly strong flamebait. There has been a noticeable shift in the way HN engages with political topics over the last couple of years, and more recently in particular.
- dang 5y ago
  HN isn't more political now than it used to be. Arguments about HN getting more political / getting ruined by politics go all the way back to 2008 at least. This is a common enough misconception that I put some effort into writing a standard post for it some years ago—maybe we should put it in the FAQ, I don't know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 One has to be careful not to fall prey to whatever bias it is that always makes it feel like things are getting worse.
- icelancer 5y ago
  Agreed. Would be pleased if they were all deleted, automatically if possible.
- technocratius 5y ago
  I agree and would be in favor of more heavy moderation on this. I strongly suspect HN will descend into a kind off reddit if this is not put a halt to. Curious to hear the views of the HN mods on this, but I expect they won't publicly engage in that discussion.
- keerthiko 5y ago
  I think it's simply a reflection of the shift of how educated society engages with political topics. If it affects quality of life of humans, it is political. This has always been true, it's fundamentally the point of politics. However, the effects on the QoL of many humans is not a concern to those of us who have the privilege to simply look away and not notice a difference to our own quality of life. This privileged demo has drastically shrunk (ie, politics directly and noticeably impacts the QoL of far more people) today, mostly because the rest of the people have deservedly been given more of a voice. Policy in its present state can mean the difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago, and talking about it is an option for people who were silenced and closeted 10 years ago. Even those of us who wilfully try to plug their ears and come up a system of rules and restricted topics that are "political" and "to be avoided" will find it incredibly hard to enforce, because someone or other will break the rule, and it's physically impossible for everyone else to keep their peace until a moderator brings the banhammer. The world is going through shared turmoil right now and politics is naturally a first stop to look for society-level resolutions, or at least adjustments to existing rules to improve QoL.
creakingstairs 5y ago
Is there a way to find out why a submission got flagged? For my first submission, I’ve submitted a BBC article about Elon’s bid for Twitter (after checking new/front page for duplicate) and it got promptly flagged. I don’t think I’ve broke any rules listed in this, so I’m not sure what I did wrong there.
- keerthiko 5y ago
  I believe anyone with a high enough karma can flag submissions, so it might not be that rule-enforced. It won't get banned or hidden unless a moderator is involved, who probably follows a set of rules. I'm not sure at what point the [flagged] tag is added to the submission.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  It was probably considered a re-post if there was no significant new information. Other HN users flag. If you think it was flagged in error you can email HN.
- detaro 5y ago
  there was an earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061, so I assume that was the cause. checking frontpage and new is not enough to find dupes, use the search function.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Use the contact email to ask. My experience is you’ll receive a response from dang.
  - dang 5y ago
    You should receive a response unless your email goes to spam and I fail to fish it out. But the response to the GP question will probably say "Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but" - followed by what is at best a guess.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
coconuthacker42 5y ago
As a young person who has often been exposed to reddit and the rest of the internet's political flame wars, HN has really taught me how to communicate respectfully with people who I don't agree with, which often leads to better understanding of a topic. Thank you, mods
- simonh 5y ago
  As an old person that's also seen political debate polarise into either flame wars or ideological echo chambers, I also highly value HN as one of the few remaining places where meaningful political discourse is possible. Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly, and where I can even ask questions and get useful responses.
  - shreyshnaccount 5y ago
    Sometimes I realise a flaw in my thought process when trying to write a HN comment, something that almost never happens on twitter and reddit. And i think its because the community has decided that curiosity is the prime virtue of HN, I really like that.
  - samizdis 5y ago
    > Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly ... Yes, this. "one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves the rights and the means of changing them." - a comment by Christopher Hitchens, referencing a Thomas Paine commentary on a John Milton pamphlet, in a 2006 debate about free expression. Full transcript (v long): https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expression-must-include-the-license-to-offend-2006-full-transcript/ https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expr...
  - d0mine 5y ago
    Could you link to an example HN thread of "meaningful political discourse" in your opinion.
blenderdt 5y ago
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." It's sad this is true for the world as well. Almost all news is off-topic for your life. A good question to ask: does this have any impact on my life? If you are unsure or the answer is no: skip that news.
- accountLost 5y ago
  Not a good heuristic for me as it would make me skip most of the science stuff. For example the Webb space telescope. It certainly won't have any impact of my life.
nuker 5y ago
No mention of shadow-bans? Guidelines incomplete.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  minimaxir made a list of undocumented parts of HN https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
stevage 5y ago
>Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. This is a great point, I should try to remember to do this in general.
sgt 5y ago
Dang, these are some good guidelines!
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
What baffles me that paywalled sites are allowed. HN seems to be trying to establish a culture where people actually read the article before discussing it, and allowing paywalled sites (to which the majority of readers won't have access) directly conflict with this.
- samizdis 5y ago
  Good point, and a seeming paradox. But I'd suggest that it's mitigated by the clear preponderance of tech-savvy users on HN. Paywalls are flimsy, and can be circumvented pretty easily by people keen to get at the content. I often browse "active" on HN, and if a comment thread is interesting, but based on a paywalled article, I'll get around the paywall to read the article. Often, an HN commenter will have added a link to a non-paywalled version of said article anyway. [Edit to add: Sometimes, though, I'm already a subscriber to the paywalled content. I'm not a complete leech.]
aendruk 5y ago
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. This is the one we most desperately need a reminder of. The frequent cascades of strawmanning after strawmanning are exhausting to read. And too often it looks like voting on comments is used for simple agree/disagree, as if we’re a committee needing to form consensus. More often than not, the answer to something is “it’s complicated” and we’d have more meaningful discussions if we had the discipline to judge contributions by helpful/unhelpful.

386 points by tomrod 5y ago

My favorite aspect of this site is that one might voice an unorthodox or troubling idea so long as one does it respectfully. Rather than an expectation that everyone be highly emotional all the time, people are expected to be a bit more logical and keep their emotions a bit more restrained. I know a lot of people are made upset by that aspect of HN (often because we don't get as visibly upset at stuff), but I find it a refreshing change. Other sites tend to politicize pretty much everything. This site has some politics, but it doesn't seem to dominate the discussion.

kosolam 5y ago

kosolam 5y ago
The guidelines cut off the third finger emoji that followed, apparently

sillysaurusx 5y ago

It would be interesting if someone posted an archive.org link of 2009 vs now, then diff the two.

3PS 5y ago
Here's the oldest snapshot, from 2014. Diffing is left as an exercise for the reader. https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
- dang 5y ago
  2014 is just when kogir made everything be HTTPS and also moved the static URLs under news.ycombinator.com. You can get earlier like this: https://web.archive.org/web/2021*/http://www.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/2021*/http://www.ycombinator.com...
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Thanks! Also surprising that archive.org only caught the post-pg era. I was curious how the guidelines evolved afterwards. There have been a few great additions.
dreadlordbone 5y ago
Here you go: https://www.diffchecker.com/ya8PjzNT https://www.diffchecker.com/ya8PjzNT
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  This is fantastic. Thank you! It looks like that link will expire in 7 days; is there a way to make it permanent? I’d like to share it.
  - greyface- 5y ago
    Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20220423012954/https://www.diffchecker.com/ya8PjzNT https://web.archive.org/web/20220423012954/https://www.diffc...
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      Hat tip for the clever solution. :) “If only there were a way to get a snapshot of any website at a given date..”
- ternaryoperator 5y ago
  Interesting tool. It would be even better if it recognized shifted lines, like line 12 in the original is line 16 in the present version.
  - aaron695 5y ago
throwaway2048 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-04-22 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-04-22

nabaraz 5y ago

I wish HN had some kind of labels. I want to filter out web development related posts. I am just bored with the usual "one line of css", "visual code", "icons for web" etc. I'd subscribe to just tech, personal projects, psychology and history if I could.

rtpg 5y ago
One alternative mechanism used on a site is to allow for filtering _out_ of tags. You still discover stuff but you can totally opt out of anything tagged “rant”. Imagine if you never had to read another substack post about cancel culture ending everything on your tech forum…
flatiron 5y ago
That’s basically subreddits
- nabaraz 5y ago
  Not really. You can already filter out posts like: https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew
  - dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/r/show https://news.ycombinator.com/r/show https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask/new https://news.ycombinator.com/r/ask/new
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    Filter for posts like those, or filter out posts like those? I don't see the ability filter out those in my account settings, although I could be missing something.
- aordano 5y ago
  Is this satire? It says right there on the guidelines, which are also the TFA: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

hammock 5y ago

The guidelines suggest correcting "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X.” In fact, if you title a post with “How to…” the site will automatically crop those words too, leaving e.g. “Do X.”

wvenable 5y ago

This might be as good a thread as any to ask this: What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticing it more often. Most recently with the Elon Musk Twitter purchase thread and today with a relatively benign article about Netflix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31120094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31120094 Hacker News is really not setup for such long threads -- you basically get one top-level comment for the entire page! That's not very engaging. It's just a feeling but it seems some topics are getting an order of magnitude more comments than usual.

chrononaut 5y ago
> What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticing it more often Higher number of active users?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Yep. Exponential growth over N decades will do that. You can see it in the IDs. HN recently rolled over to 30m. I remember posting a comment about it. That was like a month ago. It’s now past 31m.
  - mplanchard 5y ago
    Possible I’m missing something obvious, but how do you see someone’s user ID? If I click on my or someone else’s profile, I just get a link with id=<username>.
    - chrononaut 5y ago
      I had the same thought and I realized that they were referring to comment IDs. Yours is 31131117 for example.
      - mplanchard 5y ago
        Ah, that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification!

WhitneyLand 5y ago

Are there many sizable communities out there left that rival HN’s s/n ratio, civility and substance? I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.

Pxtl 5y ago
Various well-manicured gardens tucked away in Reddit are quite nice. And honestly I don't think HN is as nice as it used to be now that more and more culture war topics are creeping in.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma. It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.) So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    If every reddit user had a tag displaying their age, it would help shed light on why that site is such a joke. I suspect it's largely teenagers and young 20-somethings playing expert in a wide variety of fields.

twofornone 5y ago

darkteflon 5y ago
This is so vague that it’s impossible to meaningfully engage. What’s a discussion that needs to be had? “Free speech” doesn’t mean freedom from people telling you you’re being juvenile, selfish or paranoid and that we’d like you to do something for the community that supports you.
- RajT88 5y ago
  I think I get it. I have noticed some commonalities across both liberal and conservative leaning forums. You can get dog piled for saying the wrong thing in polite words. Or using the wrong words. Or the wrong tone. Or sometimes failing to say something in a post. People react less to what you said, but what it sounds like you might be saying, treating it as though you had plainly said that thing. It feels very "Tribalist". The way you speak about things is a shibboleth for the "team" you are on, regardless of what you write. And that is how the community reacts often, regardless of the content of your post. I definitely think internet trolls bear some blame for it, because this is basically communities being on high alert for bad faith actors and becoming more insular as a result.
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell, as you did with this one. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle because we ban accounts that do that, regardless of what flavor of ideology they're for or against. Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31130736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31130736.
wvenable 5y ago

johnnyanmac 5y ago

Does this get posted periodically, or was there some recent shenanigans I missed that prompted this?

Pxtl 5y ago
The "Google docs now starts making inclusive word replacement suggestions like motherboard=>mainboard" thread was kind of a mess, and I'm not sure dang scales.
- MBCook 5y ago
  I’m not surprised, I didn’t even read that one because of that. Although I was happy the article itself was about the failures of the implementation at its goals and not just the goals themselves. I’ve also seen some individual comments on other threads that really just attack the author of the article in question with ad hominems and totally unnecessary insinuations. Not even political posts but things like the Python typing post from the other day.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I'm not sure dang scales They should choose some other infrastructure than whatever the dang system is then. Or maybe open source it and hope AWS makes a dang multi-instance auto-scaling service. I've seen it's bot moderation posts though and I have to say it's quality work, passes the Turing test for me. Which makes it all the more surprising that no one has spun it into a real product. I'm not a 10x programmer but if they let me have a go at it I could probably throw one together in a weekend in my garage.
  - dexwell 5y ago
    Dang is a person; the main moderator on HN, but thanks for the laugh :D

usrn 5y ago

>Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did I wonder if this is the most routinely violated rule.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Personally, I think the most routinely violated rule is "don't discuss voting in comments".
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I’m kinda saddened by this one because occasionally someone brings up an interesting point about voting, but are typically buried.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    IMO, in 99.999% of cases, the part about voting could be cropped and the comment would be stronger. I’ll sometimes come across comments like: > [very insightful, interesting, well thought out comment here.] Edit: Why am I being downvoted?! I don’t know why it was downvoted, but I would have upvoted if not for the ending. Unfortunately, now I feel obliged to downvote it too.
Semiapies 5y ago
That or not using submissions primarily for self-promotion. But then, it always was that way.
MBCook 5y ago
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. This is the one that gets my vote. If anything is posted from Twitter it’s almost HN law that 80% of comments have to be complaining about the fact that it’s on Twitter.

8bitsrule 5y ago

Cartoon HN thread : [https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/682281458145116160 https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/682281458145116160]

alberth 5y ago

There’s a subtle irony about HN. It’s a site that gathers people together to post & comment on all the newest tech while at the same time HN itself is host on some of the most basic and boring tech - a flat file based forum.

forgotmypw17 5y ago
Boring tech is reliable tech.
- dt3ft 5y ago
  This is why mainframe will probably never die.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Mainframes are actually the opposite of boring relative to a standard desktop. Boring jobs? Yes, but IBM have some extremely talented people working on them.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    Mainframes are only reliable because companies stopped making changes to them. It's just too hard to find experienced talent to add new features let along troubleshoot complex issues. I work for a large bank and one thing is for sure that everyone wants to move away from mainframes but it's just such a perilous journey.
- threeseed 5y ago
  No it's not. Oracle, Windows, C etc are very much older, boring technologies. And more modern variants are far more reliable.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sph 5y ago
Seasoned engineers go for simple and effective tech. You can find a good amount of those on here. A few might browse the site from lynx or Emacs. The other "fancy" tech forum full of new tech and slow as molasses (Reddit) is mostly frequented by the younger, more inexperienced generation of hackers.

theknocker 5y ago

legitster 5y ago

What a weird community this is. It's so, so far from perfect - but I fear recommending any changes lest the delecate ecosystem collapse.

Thorentis 5y ago

Has anything changed in the guidelines that prompted this post?

tomrod 5y ago
No, I just like to refresh myself on them from time to time and figured others may appreciate the same.
fsflover 5y ago
There are rumors that Eternal September is starting on HN. This is probably the reason.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I responded to the question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomrod https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomrod
  - fsflover 5y ago
    I don't see anything related in your link.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      The question was whether anything changed that prompted this post. I am the poster. I answered why I posted it. It didn't have anything to do with Eternal September.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        It's not enough to just post something on HN. It also needs to be updated enough by other users.

zw123456 5y ago

The one thing in there I forgotten or overlooked is to put [pdf] on the end, I just assumed it did that automatically. I can't recall if I have ever posted a pdf but if I do in the future I will have to try to remember to do that. Although, it would be a small suggestion that it could be automated.

SturgeonsLaw 5y ago

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics I wish this was still the case. Talking about politics used to be avoided here, and certainly engaging in reddit-tier partisan arguing was extremely rare. Now there are political posts almost every day that have comment sections full of mud slinging. I'm guilty of it too, even as recently as today, so I'm not taking a holier than thou position, but man those threads are just incredibly strong flamebait. There has been a noticeable shift in the way HN engages with political topics over the last couple of years, and more recently in particular.

dang 5y ago
HN isn't more political now than it used to be. Arguments about HN getting more political / getting ruined by politics go all the way back to 2008 at least. This is a common enough misconception that I put some effort into writing a standard post for it some years ago—maybe we should put it in the FAQ, I don't know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 One has to be careful not to fall prey to whatever bias it is that always makes it feel like things are getting worse.
icelancer 5y ago
Agreed. Would be pleased if they were all deleted, automatically if possible.
technocratius 5y ago
I agree and would be in favor of more heavy moderation on this. I strongly suspect HN will descend into a kind off reddit if this is not put a halt to. Curious to hear the views of the HN mods on this, but I expect they won't publicly engage in that discussion.
keerthiko 5y ago
I think it's simply a reflection of the shift of how educated society engages with political topics. If it affects quality of life of humans, it is political. This has always been true, it's fundamentally the point of politics. However, the effects on the QoL of many humans is not a concern to those of us who have the privilege to simply look away and not notice a difference to our own quality of life. This privileged demo has drastically shrunk (ie, politics directly and noticeably impacts the QoL of far more people) today, mostly because the rest of the people have deservedly been given more of a voice. Policy in its present state can mean the difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago, and talking about it is an option for people who were silenced and closeted 10 years ago. Even those of us who wilfully try to plug their ears and come up a system of rules and restricted topics that are "political" and "to be avoided" will find it incredibly hard to enforce, because someone or other will break the rule, and it's physically impossible for everyone else to keep their peace until a moderator brings the banhammer. The world is going through shared turmoil right now and politics is naturally a first stop to look for society-level resolutions, or at least adjustments to existing rules to improve QoL.

creakingstairs 5y ago

Is there a way to find out why a submission got flagged? For my first submission, I’ve submitted a BBC article about Elon’s bid for Twitter (after checking new/front page for duplicate) and it got promptly flagged. I don’t think I’ve broke any rules listed in this, so I’m not sure what I did wrong there.

keerthiko 5y ago
I believe anyone with a high enough karma can flag submissions, so it might not be that rule-enforced. It won't get banned or hidden unless a moderator is involved, who probably follows a set of rules. I'm not sure at what point the [flagged] tag is added to the submission.
srcreigh 5y ago
It was probably considered a re-post if there was no significant new information. Other HN users flag. If you think it was flagged in error you can email HN.
detaro 5y ago
there was an earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061, so I assume that was the cause. checking frontpage and new is not enough to find dupes, use the search function.
1123581321 5y ago
Use the contact email to ask. My experience is you’ll receive a response from dang.
- dang 5y ago
  You should receive a response unless your email goes to spam and I fail to fish it out. But the response to the GP question will probably say "Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but" - followed by what is at best a guess.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago

coconuthacker42 5y ago

As a young person who has often been exposed to reddit and the rest of the internet's political flame wars, HN has really taught me how to communicate respectfully with people who I don't agree with, which often leads to better understanding of a topic. Thank you, mods

simonh 5y ago
As an old person that's also seen political debate polarise into either flame wars or ideological echo chambers, I also highly value HN as one of the few remaining places where meaningful political discourse is possible. Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly, and where I can even ask questions and get useful responses.
- shreyshnaccount 5y ago
  Sometimes I realise a flaw in my thought process when trying to write a HN comment, something that almost never happens on twitter and reddit. And i think its because the community has decided that curiosity is the prime virtue of HN, I really like that.
- samizdis 5y ago
  > Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly ... Yes, this. "one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves the rights and the means of changing them." - a comment by Christopher Hitchens, referencing a Thomas Paine commentary on a John Milton pamphlet, in a 2006 debate about free expression. Full transcript (v long): https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expression-must-include-the-license-to-offend-2006-full-transcript/ https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expr...
- d0mine 5y ago
  Could you link to an example HN thread of "meaningful political discourse" in your opinion.

blenderdt 5y ago

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." It's sad this is true for the world as well. Almost all news is off-topic for your life. A good question to ask: does this have any impact on my life? If you are unsure or the answer is no: skip that news.

accountLost 5y ago
Not a good heuristic for me as it would make me skip most of the science stuff. For example the Webb space telescope. It certainly won't have any impact of my life.

nuker 5y ago

No mention of shadow-bans? Guidelines incomplete.

gus_massa 5y ago
minimaxir made a list of undocumented parts of HN https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

stevage 5y ago

>Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. This is a great point, I should try to remember to do this in general.

sgt 5y ago

Dang, these are some good guidelines!

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

What baffles me that paywalled sites are allowed. HN seems to be trying to establish a culture where people actually read the article before discussing it, and allowing paywalled sites (to which the majority of readers won't have access) directly conflict with this.

samizdis 5y ago
Good point, and a seeming paradox. But I'd suggest that it's mitigated by the clear preponderance of tech-savvy users on HN. Paywalls are flimsy, and can be circumvented pretty easily by people keen to get at the content. I often browse "active" on HN, and if a comment thread is interesting, but based on a paywalled article, I'll get around the paywall to read the article. Often, an HN commenter will have added a link to a non-paywalled version of said article anyway. [Edit to add: Sometimes, though, I'm already a subscriber to the paywalled content. I'm not a complete leech.]

aendruk 5y ago

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. This is the one we most desperately need a reminder of. The frequent cascades of strawmanning after strawmanning are exhausting to read. And too often it looks like voting on comments is used for simple agree/disagree, as if we’re a committee needing to form consensus. More often than not, the answer to something is “it’s complicated” and we’d have more meaningful discussions if we had the discipline to judge contributions by helpful/unhelpful.