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If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.
by codeddesign 3y ago
If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.
- elefanten 3y agoI find consistently higher quality commentary and discussion here than any other open access, broad topic forum out there. Sure, it’s not perfect but nothing is. Can you name any alternatives that you’ve enjoyed more? Genuinely curious.
- stuartjohnson12 3y agoMy least favorite part of Hacker News are the folk who complain about the invention of slate tablets because it means people will no longer remember things because they can write them down. Not automatically wrong, but the top comment on every new thing being "this isn't new, the old thing was better, just [niche Linux sysadmin stuff]" is a bit tiring.
- dang 3y agoWhat do you think we could do differently? Serious question. I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
- kolbe 3y agoI consistently wonder why posts critical of HN-affiliated companies that have stats like upvotes per hour and number of comments that would theoretically make them the top story getting pushed off the front page. Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed
- dang 3y agoI'm afraid I don't understand the first bit - but in case this is what you meant: we definitely don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC-funded startups. That's actually the #1 thing of all things we don't do. There's tons of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... but the short version is that we know the community's good will is the only value HN has, so we try never to do anything that would damage that. Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore. * By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.
- MacsHeadroom 3y agoThis makes me think twice about upvoting dying comments that I think are constructive but just happen to go against popular consensus. I have a lot of karma and an account over a decade old. So I probably have nothing to worry about. But is agreeing with comments killed by down vote really a red flag?
- dang 3y agoYour account's fine and the posts you've been upvoting (I took a quick look) seem fine. What we're really trying to avoid is garden-variety flamewar. > is agreeing with comments killed by down vote really a red flag? On the contrary, that's a good contribution and we hope everyone will do it when good comments (that don't break the site guideline) have been unfairly downvoted. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corrective%20upvote https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... p.s. It's always the good users who worry about these things!
- 3y ago
- yCombLinks 3y agoDownweight posts and comments based on the frequency and positive sentiment. IE things that are posted often and with high positive comments should bubble to the top less often.
- dang 3y agoOther people want us to downweight negative sentiment. I wonder what happens if you downweight all the sentiments.
- yCombLinks 3y agoWell my intuition is topics with high negative sentiment won't saturate the front page for long periods of time, unlike topics with high positive sentiment. The latest thing is obviously AI and chatGPT. I'm interested in both, but if there was an increasing downweight based on how long it is popular, and how popular it is, they would still show up on the front page, but not quite so frequently.
- dang 3y agoI agree with you that popularity is a diminishing curve and at some point becomes annoying. With the current AI tsunami, we're well past that point for some people, but not others. From an admin point of view it's tricky because (unless I'm high on koolaid?) this is a major technical development, so genuine advances are happening all at once. Too many for me to keep up with.
- somenameforme 3y agoOutside of the UI difficulties in keeping a clean look, would different ways of providing response to a post or topic not help to solve this? For instance if there was some way to mark something as repetitious that could be contrasted against e.g. upvotes to get dynamic and 'automatic' feedback on the perceived 'freshness' of a topic. In general downvotes seem like a relatively poor feedback mechanism because there's no shared agreement on how they should be used. This [1], perhaps ironically flagged, post offered feedback on why people downvote, and it's just all over the place. Even if there are guidelines, people will be people. At least with something like clear adjectives, the percent of 'intended' feedback would be higher. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23997697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23997697
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI keep starting and deleting a reply here. My moderating experience is with much smaller entities, but I've been here more than a minute and I think probably the best thing one can do is keep putting out accurate info about how the site actually works. A lot of people who are stomping mad are mad because they think, for example, that you personally flagged #Thing and don't realize that's not how that works. A lot of that -- the best antidote is calm, cool education without getting cranky, etc. In my experience and similar provisos.
- dang 3y agoThanks—I appreciate your wisdom and I know that you're largely right. But I'm scared of unintended consequences. It may be that there's a level-up here that we haven't achieved yet. But answering complaints and pushback is such a big part of what I do, and takes so much energy, that I'm scared to make more of the admin stuff public. I know it would explain things and have a settling effect for some; but others would misinterpret the information and get even more riled up by it. What the total effect of such a change would be is impossible to predict, but if it were 10x of the latter (the nightmare scenario), I'm not sure my heart could take it.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI think if it were me, I would not reveal more than is already on the public record. I would wonder how to do repetition (of the already public bits) well for a smart crowd, knowing that smart people tend to loathe repetition. For example, I might contemplate translating the guidelines into a few major languages (emphasizing in an intro that the site is in English and the translated guidelines are only intended to ease the onboarding process for a global audience). I think a lot of people fail to grasp how multicultural HN is and that a lot of dust ups are rooted in cultural and language barriers.
- eslaught 3y agoI second not sharing anything that isn't already public. But there is this pattern where these discussions get hashed out either (a) when someone misbehaves and dang posts a reply to remind them about the guidelines or (b) like this, we have an impromptu comment thread on HN's mechanisms. In either case, the content gets buried pretty quickly and we're relying essentially on human memories to keep this institutional knowledge alive. I wonder if it would help to explicitly collate this information somewhere. Think, something parallel to the guidelines. But the guidelines answer the question, "how should I behave on HN?" whereas this would be answering "how is HN run?" (Or perhaps, how is it not run.) It's a half-baked thought, so don't take it too seriously, but I figured I'd mention it.
- 2718i314 3y agoReset karma for everyone. Your top karma people abuse their authority and you don't even notice. If a post is flagged, show who flagged it and for how long.
- twblalock 3y agoWhat authority? It doesn't take much karma to vote or flag. Well under 100 points IIRC. Past that point, having more karma has no effect on what you can do on the site.
- dang 3y agoCorrect. Flagging takes 30 (well, 31) and downvoting takes 500 (well, 501). After 250 you get to set your topcolor. I think that's about it for now.
- eru 3y ago> Your top karma people abuse their authority and you don't even notice. What authority do 'top karma people' have? I have 25,772 karma, for what it's worth, and you have 2. I don't think there's anything I can do here on HN that you can't do? (Hah, and I just noticed that my account is two days older than dang's!)
- eru 3y agoHave you ran some experiments with giving different people different front pages? To explain a bit more: On the one hand, you need a critical mass of people to have a discussion. On the other hand, large group dynamics seem to be a problem. HN is generally many multiples larger than the critical mass for the former, at least on the front page. Attention drops off a lot if you go further. So as an experiment, you could do something like 'rendezvous hashing' to show each user a random 10% subset of submissions. (If you want to gradually introduce it, run the experiment on 20% of the users only, but show them a 50% subset, so that each of the longer tail items still gets 10% of total users? You can play with the numbers.) You could make this opt-out, too, so that people don't create ten accounts in the hope of seeing everything. Direct links would also still work.
- dang 3y agoWe ran an experiment something like that a few years ago, but mostly people got pissed off that they were seeing random stuff on the front page. What's not clear to me in your comment is what we would be testing for. If you're going to A/B test different front pages, what's the fitness function?
- eru 3y agoThanks for already having run the experiment! In vague terms, the idea is to suffer less from 'how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default)' while still having enough eyeballs per front-page submission to have a discussion. Now how would we operationalise that? A simple measurement is to check whether engagement per submission is having a longer, fatter tail. But that would be merely something that's easy to measure, not something we directly care about. You'd need to have some proxies for drawbacks of 'large group dynamics on the internet'. Perhaps check civility of discussion or so? > [...] but mostly people got pissed off that they were seeing random stuff on the front page. I guess if you'd want to check again, you'd either have to educate people better (ie better PR) or you'd have to be more sneaky. An idea for the latter: instead of restricting users to 10% of submissions, as a test run you can reduce them to 80% of submissions. That way the front-page would still look pretty similar to before and you wouldn't drive people too far into the long tail of submissions. Of course, any effect you could measure would also be weaker. What did you measure (or hope to measure) when you ran this experiment a few years ago?
- harry8 3y agoHow do you attempt to counter groups who deliberately game things? Newer, widely purposed tech that hasn't taken hold yet is the one I see most often. Where people have invested non-trivial time. Eg the rust crew which I choose as an example because I quite like rust so I'm not bashing the tech here. There are bogus "here's a cool library/app/thing" articles which get to the front page where I scratch my head and then discover "oh, it's boring as hell but in rust." I see people expressing legitimate points of view (which I frequently disagree with) about cases where C might be a better choice or where a rust re-write doesn't buy the user much that are immediately massively downvoted. It's mob mentality, is it organised or self-organising? Doesn't matter either way. Makes rustaceans look pretty stupid though. And yes you can do this for non-rust stuff and it happens. And it's easy to see why. You invest a ton of time into a tech you really want it to succeed to maximise the payoff for doing so. What do you do to counter it? Anything at all? HN is gamified on karma - an idea taken from slashdot with a mildly different implementation but a really good idea that has been under-applied accross the web. In this game popular in the zeitgeist massively trumps interesting, well written, thought provoking and well supported. Sure by the time you've got 50 points you probably should stop caring and you've got karma to burn to be thoughtfully unpopular, but if you take the time you probably want that seen and it's the stuff you want to see - which is kind of the point. The other question I have is why has there been next to nothing here (that I've noticed - maybe I missed it?) About the twitter files revelations and their importance or lack thereof? Intervention? If so please would you share the thinking behind it? The point being, to suggest what you could do differently requires a clue on what you actually do now, which I'm not at all sure I have.
- dang 3y agoWe've worked a ton on trying to prevent that sort of gaming. I would never say that we're catching all of it. If you see a case that you think has broken through our defences, the best thing to do is to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. Re the Twitter stuff: there have been quite a few major threads. They also attract a ton of user flags. I'm personally open to the topic but the chalice is so poisoned that I'm not sure HN can discuss it in an interesting way, and interestingness is what we're going for here.
- ilsombsotb 3y agoAdd “transparency” logging for all users. From then on, whenever a user takes an action on the site (posting, commenting, voting, flagging, etc.) they are prompted to provide an explanation as to how their action contributes to the community. All actions and their transparency notes are stored in this log. Make it so that it can be skipped, but where applicable the action is delayed, marked with a sigil, and down-weighted.
- dang 3y agoHelp me understand how this would make things better.
- ilsombsotb 3y agoIn my perfect world, it would prompt people to reflect on their contributions before actually submitting them. Ideally this would be a moment to think about whether the contributions meet the guidelines or otherwise move discussion forward. Edit: to be perfectly clear, I’m asking people to justify their contributions.
- dang 3y agoI appreciate the intention but unfortunately I don't think that's realistic. It would just lead to a plethora of extremely low quality "explanations".
- anigbrowl 3y agoIt's Jira for forums
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI chose to make this comment to say, in the nicest possible way, that I do not understand what the parent comment's author intends to accomplish with this idea. I hope I have said enough about my comment to convince everyone that making it was worthwhile, and not motivated by personal animus or sarcasm. I also hope that everyone reading it will like it enough to vote me some more karma, which I will not abuse, but simply glow a little brighter from. Thanks for reading my explanation of my comment, and I hope you agree that I helped make HN a better place.
- HopenHeyHi 3y agoMake humor legal again on HN for a start? And either ban "this is offensive" comments or politics altogether.
- dang 3y agoHumor has always been "legal" on HN! But it's a tricky business because most people vastly overestimate how funny their jokes are. I always refer to scott_s about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289. Re politics: it's not possible to ban that altogether, nor would it fit HN's mandate of intellectual curiosity to do so. For past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If there are questions I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to answer them.
- HopenHeyHi 3y ago[dead]
- jamal-kumar 3y agoI don't really feel like reddit is a fair thing to compare this site to. I dunno, something about the text-only medium seems to keep a lot of junk at bay.
- BystanderX 3y agoIt can really come down to who you're talking to. I use old.reddit.com and have a heavily filtered r/all for general news (which I could do without), and specifically participating in discussions that are almost entirely text around what may or may not be a text post. Other people use it like an image board or video feed. I do agree that reducing the amount of media can mitigate junk, though.
- p-e-w 3y agoWhat HN is missing above all else is a section for meta posts, i.e. posts discussing HN itself, where questions like yours can be elaborated in detail. It's ridiculous that this impromptu feedback session is happening here in a sub comment of a trivia thread that many users will just overlook. Feedback and community engagement should be an ongoing, (semi-)formalized process, not an ad hoc, once in a blue moon type of thing that will have been buried under a deluge of garbage by tomorrow morning.
- noobermin 3y agoTo be honest, meta subforums are however almost always toxic where people publicly hang their beef with other members out to dry. Not all requests of dang et al need to be public, you can email them (I have in the past).
- p-e-w 3y agoI've seen a tremendous amount of positive action coming from StackExchange's Meta forums over the years. Best of all, you don't have to visit them if you don't care about meta stuff. It's really weird how two of the most important platforms of the open source world (HN and GitHub) have no feedback process in the commonly accepted sense. Every niche Python package has an issue tracker nowadays where problems are collected, discussed, and often resolved, with the synergy of the community of users. But the grand systems underlying all of this are somehow exempt from needing anything like that, and "email the moderators" is good enough? I don't buy that, sorry.
- dang 3y agoI don't know what the commonly accepted sense is but we have two active feedback channels: HN comments, and the inbox at hn@ycombinator.com. Active enough that I spend my days dealing with them.
- p-e-w 3y agoThe "commonly accepted" system in this day and age would be an issue tracker where the public can collect, discuss, contribute ideas, and rank issues by voting. Issues can be sorted, searched, filtered, and, most importantly, closed when they have been addressed or rejected. There are many variations of this feedback system, but comments randomly interspersed in unrelated discussions, never to be found again, is not one of them. And neither is a private mailbox.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoDon't change anything. I would wish the HN crowd would not be "Only the US exists" but it is what it is. Left a dozen times b/c of hate comments over the last decades, but always came back (with different accounts) because there are comments that are gold nuggets.
- mdp2021 3y ago> Don't change anything There where there is still work to do, there is work waiting.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoTry browsing HN at different times of day. As someone living in the EU, I honestly don't see HN as being all that user-centric. I attribute it to the fact that I browse when most USians are asleep, Earth being spherical-ish and timezones being what they are.
- codeddesign 3y agoI was being a little facetious. You can’t do anything about voting mob mentality, it’s just internet culture. You guys have been great at moderating verbal assaults and bullying. If I could say anything, it would be to stand by your TOS and limit political threads. We are here for tech related news. That’s what HN is great at. 10 years now on HN.
- mdp2021 3y ago> We are here for "Intellectual curiosity" naturally calling for the technically inclined.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoAllow me to chime in: - the voting behaviour is just like reddit or rather just as bad - it is herd voting, flippant voting (but I really don't think how this can be fixed; maybe it can't be - but that is how it is to be honest and maybe it's time we acknowledged it) - there is a sense of "aura/legend" attached to certain users, I find it maybe a bit extra weird because I am not from the US (later about it), and maybe not from the "in" crowd that I can't understand the why of it (I would not have known even if I knew of those users) - useless/meaningless/contentless comments get upvoted and reach the top -- not showing showing rank/voting might be a great idea imho (again, I really don't know how this can be fixed or whether this has to be fixed) - HN seems like a "US only" forum largely, maybe that's the intention, I am not sure. I mean some comments and even posts just make it look like everything and everywhere works as it works in the USA - Brigading or soft-brigading either just happens or maybe allowed as well - esp. on political threads - maybe just do not allow politics at all (no exceptions!) or those might need extra attention. I mean there is no point in allowing a political post when it ends up just getting raided. Also I often feel political posts specifically about USA are more kosher than political posts about other places. - Encourage non-technical discussions more (but with the exception of political posts :P) - personally my best experiences on hn have actually been on non-tech/sw/hw posts really One of the things I like about hn is its simplicity but maybe wouldn't mind "sections" or "categories" for different types of posts. Again this has its own trade offs. I mean it's not so bad and whatever is bad maybe cannot even be fixed.
- dang 3y agoRe voting: I agree - it's a weakness of the mechanism. I've posted a lot about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Re "certain users": I don't see it that way! I'd prefer this to be a place where anyone can post about anything, and if their comment is insightful, that is what matters. Re "US only": last I checked, US users were only 50% of the community. It may be less than that now. Re brigading: it's definitely not allowed, and we've worked a lot on trying to stop it, but it's a hard problem. Re non-technical discussions: I couldn't agree more, and we work hard to encourage that. Even to the point of various secret agendas. Re sections or categories: no, I don't think that's in HN's DNA. For better or worse, this site is organized around a single front page that everyone sees the same way. Past explanations here if anyone is interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20site%20silo&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- mdp2021 3y agoI take this occasion: I think some extra way should be devised to avoid losing important submissions in the flow of new ones. Some of them are not exactly idle: just a few hours ago I submitted a piece about an epidemic of "voice scams", AI boosted: the idea was that it is not simply "intellectually interesting", but important, urgent and pressing, and especially calling for the awareness of the community. I have put some consideration on the matter to come up with proposals, but no good idea yet.
- dang 3y agoHow should we distinguish important submissions from the others?
- mdp2021 3y ago> How should we distinguish important submissions I meant that, remaining on the assumption that the users will upvote submissions thus determining the perceived degree of importance, the fast flow of the news makes important ones go lost. Extra mechanisms to facilitate that "somebody notices the important" should be there. This said, other mechanisms that differentiate submissions besides user upvote are not impossible. As said, I do not have good proposals at the moment, but surely if I come up with anything sound I will contact you and present the idea.
- IanCal 3y agoA potentially small change, since there's a lot of space on the page where you reply. People tend to adjust behavior from small nudges - could adding a summary of the rules/hn guidelines on the reply page help avoid some less useful comments? This could go after the reply button, before it, before the comment box even. Or, to get fancy, positioned based on karma (a little more in the way when it's low, more out of the way as it climbs). No functional change. I've found myself delete a lot of less useful comments when I stop and say "is this really helpful? Or am I trying to 'win' a discussion".
- dang 3y agoI worry that it's the sort of thing that people would tune out as background noise after a while. Maybe it could show up randomly or if a mod notices discussion going haywire or something.
- IanCal 3y agoQuite possibly, though I wouldn't be so sure. Even small changes may be useful (if there's a chain reaction as it were) to stop things escalating either so much or so quickly, even if it's mostly ignored. I don't have any info on whether it's mostly new accounts or randomly anyone that is likely to post rule breaking stuff so I'm aware I'm guessing on a lot of this. Being able to turn it on for a particular thing makes sense (e.g. any political story) - my first thought on top of your suggestions is * Show if under X karma * Show if discussion has more than N flagged comments Things seem to work pretty well here, hopefully there's some tweaks that don't change that but lower the burden for you and others.
- ChrisRR 3y agoHow is it determined what posts reach the first page? I visit hacker news so that I can avoid current affairs news, but all too often non "hacker" stories appear on the feed and it feels like they shouldn't have made it out of New
- dang 3y agoIt's just what's described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html: upvotes, time, software actions, and moderator actions. There's no easy way to distinguish between "hacker" and "non hacker" stories because different people evaluate these expressions completely differently.
- thisiswrongggg 3y agoRemove downvote.
- dang 3y agoDownvotes have an important function: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20white%20blood%20cells&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- nailer 3y agoI have no idea what current tech is, but here's something from 20 years ago: Slashdot makes downvotes have a reason, and has a metamoderation. So I post a well-researched article that refutes something the parent says. There's no reason that should be downvoted past 1. - On HN someone downvotes it because they don't like the article - On Slashdot someone downvotes it because they don't like the article. The pick "-1 flamebait" as the reason because "I disagree" isn't available, and because they are happy to lie. Then someone else metamoderates - "is this flamebait Y/N?" they say it isn't. The moderator then has their moderation judged as unfair and their moderation powers limited.
- PennRobotics 3y agoSome users submit via "shotgun" method, posting 20 or 30 articles per day. It reminds me of my former neighbor's dating strategy. A few times I used Python and the HN API because I was interested in the average karma per submission for top users and whether it matches my own opinion about their post quality. It led me to believe maybe a good metric for limiting the number of submissions someone makes: daily submissions allowed = average karma per submission (once you've reached 20 or 100 submissions) It's not something I can relate to---why people do this shotgun thing; shoving a mound of potentially interesting (and often not self-written) articles in hope that two or three land on the front page. The karma doesn't do anything except give you validation that your contributions "mattered", but if you repost someone else's work (or even your own from the past) you're basically getting validation that other people might care about this thing you care about... which feels empty, to me. I personally can't develop something technical and interesting more than once per week, and then I doubt how many users want to read about my really obscure and often futile interests (automating cloud publishing of ABC files, trying/failing disassembling an obscure DOS game, random SCAD files for one-off minor life improvements, buggy Python libraries for poker/tailoring/instrument tuning, learning just enough to almost push a stylus driver for two unpopular Linux laptops) Mostly, I like reading the articles by people who do something technically cool and new and put a lot of effort diving into that thing and sharing its secrets, like this CAN injection post. The expectation is that those users can only post a few times a month unless doing cool stuff and writing about it is their full-time passion/job. Another expectation is that there are enough of these people that the front page can stay full with technically cool/new posts. The third---and by far, the hardest---expectation is that great* (by my own flawed definition) posts need to be promoted reliably and without bias from /newest to / while also working to reject only-fanboy-/self-voted content or poor quality wikipedia links and seventh "own repost" in four years and New Yorker articles about hip-hop... I used to flag bullshit articles right away, but they arrive like waves on the beach, and I've learned to filter past the stuff I dislike rather than bother losing some unseen privilege because I get put on a "user who flags too much for bad reasons" list. To elaborate my skimming: in this moment, there are two reasonably popular but reasonably "not so techy" Wikipedia articles in the front page 30. There are two non-tech (historical) posts---one by a hit-or-miss "often poster" and another by someone who basically only posts non-tech/historical subjects---although in this case, once every two weeks. Five users I recognize as "I post all the damn time" users, although I only consider one of those in the "I post all the damn time and it's annoying" camp. I instantly recognize one repost, but it's one I would find interesting if I saw it for the first time. The majority is stuff I find appropriate for HN, and a minority of that is stuff I personally find interesting. If I get two or three decent articles on the front page and one from /newest, that's still 20 minutes of content that I enjoy, and the HN status quo gives me this. "GPT, express all the above thoughts and sentiments but only using 30% of the characters I used and with far fewer personal pronouns."
- spookybones 3y agoI’d appreciate if you made it transparent in the rules how many points are required to post in Ask HN. I recently posted a job related question there, but it never posted. I didn’t even receive a response as to why. Felt like I wrote a letter, handed it to someone, and they tossed it into the trash without even opening it.
- dang 3y agoAnyone can post to Ask HN. There's no karma limit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35326541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35326541 certainly posted, and would have shown up on both /newest and /asknew. But it wouldn't have ranked on /ask (or not for long) because the upvotes on it were mostly dropped by our anti-voting-ring software. It looks like that was a false positive. I'm sorry! We don't know how to write anti-abuse code that doesn't have false positives.
- pwpw 3y agoSome preliminary ideas that could probably be refined: 1. Remove non-hacker type content (i.e. news concerning the death of the Queen and anything Trump). Or move it to an off-topic list that doesn’t appear on the front page or other lists. It’s not in the spirit of the site, and I come to this site to avoid it. I treasure the actual hacker discussions on this site and feel like those articles do not add to or even diminish the value. Plus many of those stories that make it to the front page tend to be very focused on America / the English-speaking world. 2. Remove karma or deemphasize it. Discussion is important. Arbitrary numbers are not and (unintentionally) influence how people engage. 3. Add a higher barrier of entry. It’s great how you have to earn 501 karma before you can downvote. Perhaps up that limit and/or require a year old account. Prevent new accounts from posting for a period such as 3 months. This would allow people to pick up on the culture and etiquette before they begin commenting; like an apprentice studying under a master before beginning his own work. I’d even consider adding a simple quiz to create an account. Something that proves you’re a hacker in spirit. The purpose of all this is to prevent the website from stooping to Reddit standards and keeping the quality of content high. Those who engage in discourse on this site should be here because they really want to be part of the community and are willing to jump through a few hoops. 4. Create smaller communities. Find a way to group people across time zones into smaller pockets. A classic issue on Reddit is that smaller subreddits for niche hobbies are often great until they reach critical mass. Past a certain number of users, the culture is lost and everything appeals to the lowest common denominator. If hn is to grow too large, perhaps there could be a way to artificially divide it up. 5. Increase the damn font size! Thanks for all that you do :)
- jquery 3y agoHi dang, I hope this message finds you well. Although my reply may not directly address the original question, I believe it is relevant to the topic at hand. As a dedicated and experienced contributor to Hacker News for the past 14 years, I have occasionally participated in passionate discussions that have turned somewhat heated, and I have also submitted low-quality content on occasion. As a result, my account was placed in a restricted status, and I frequently encounter a "you are posting too fast" notification that hinders my ability to engage in discussions. I would like to suggest that you consider implementing an expiration date for this "special status" for users like myself. This ongoing "you are posting too fast" notification has significantly impeded my participation in meaningful conversations. For instance, during a recent debate on the implications of artificial intelligence in the job market, I found it challenging to effectively engage with other users due to this restriction. Similarly, in another thread discussing the merits of various statistical approaches to a subject, my contributions were stifled by the same limitation. I kindly ask that the administrators of Hacker News consider adopting a more flexible approach to managing user interactions. This approach should accommodate the occasional expression of strong opinions while preserving a respectful and productive environment for all community members. (Ironically, this very comment was subject to the "you are posting too fast" limitation, which is why I could not respond sooner.)
- philipkglass 3y agoSend email to hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules and requesting removal of the penalty status. I too once accrued an account penalty due to actions I took in heated threads, and an email cleared it up. The chances of dang seeing your request as a comment (even in a post about him) are much lower.
- dang 3y agoYes. It's definitely on our list to implement a feedback system for that. In fact I just mentioned that at the end of the comment I just wrote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35472465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35472465) before seeing yours. For now the decidedly low-tech way to deal with it is as philipkglass says, to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look. We're happy to remove the rate limit when we see people using HN as intended. I'd be happy to take the penalty off your account - you've been a valuable and valued contributor for many years. Unfortunately I'm still seeing flamewar comments in your feed. I know that people have strong and valid reasons for posting that kind of thing but we just can't have that on HN, regardless of how right someone is or how legitimately they feel. It leads directly to this place burning itself to a crisp and preventing that from happening, or at least trying to stave it off, is our #1 job. What I tell people in this position when they email us is that if they want to build up a track record of using HN as intended, they'd be welcome to email again after a while and we can take another look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
- roflyear 3y agoThis isn't true. I'm a member of a sailing forum and this doesn't go on there. Karma is probably part of it. Hard to interpret and subjective rules are another. No value outside of to YC is another. Etc etc. This isn't a community. It's a news aggregate.
- dang 3y agoHow large is the sailing forum? Size is the biggest factor in my experience. I don't know what you mean by "no value outside of to YC" but I think—in fact I know—that HN has added massive value to lots of people's lives, and not just by providing interesting reading material. I know this because people tell me how HN changed their life, and I also know that HN changed my life (long before I started as a mod).
- roflyear 3y agoIt's pretty big, but not massive. A fraction of HN. But I'm members of other communities that always have at least 100-200 people online at the same time. I guess that is still a fraction of HN? But They all work well.
- Tommstein 3y agoAn obvious thing that comes to mind is how downvoted comments are grayed and purposely made difficult to read, and flagged comments aren't readable at all. Being downvoted or flagged means (regardless of what they're supposed to mean) literally nothing other than "goes against the mob's mentality," so comments are penalized in a functional manner for going against the mob. They shouldn't have the power to artificially make opposing thoughts more difficult or impossible to read. Maybe control it with settings similar to showdead, for those who like the mob to curate the thoughts and ideas they're exposed to for them.
- dang 3y agoI don't like mob behaviors either, but there are plenty of reasons why comments get downvoted and flagged besides that. Low-quality flamewar comments, for example, deserve both downvotes and flags, for reasons that have nothing to do with mobs. You've unfortunately been posting some of these yourself - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35429902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35429902. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we have to ban accounts that keep doing it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- yucky 3y agoI disagree with this completely. I've been spanked a couple times by dang and it was warranted both times. And although I felt I was correct in what I posted, the tone wasn't right for this place, hence the warnings. That sort of thing is precisely why HN hasn't become Reddit-like.
- whateveracct 3y agoagreed - the times dang called me out were fair i was mad about it at the time tho lol
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThe fact that dang responded to this snarky, trolling, needlessly argumentative post with a thoughtful and genuinely curious reply highlights what a very unique person he is, in the best possible way. And I guess my response here highlights why I could never deal with trolls with the firm yet understanding tone that he's so good at.
- dang 3y agoThe idea is to optimize for the community as a whole. It turns out responding to trolls (edit: yes I meant moderators responding, sorry) is good for that. Or at least I think it is. The other aspect (which is hard for a lot of people to admit) is that trolls often have good points. They're mostly standing up for things that have been excluded by the majority. Edit: they're also usually not trolls, in the sense of deliberately trying to stir up drama. Mostly they're people with strong feelings who (let's call it) underestimate how they come across to others.
- noobermin 3y agoIt's considered bad form to make meta comments but since this entire post is a meta comment, I will say it is upsetting to take a post which is supposed to celebrate a good faith and hard working moderator and turn it into a complaint about the orange site. HN has its annoying bros but it has many bright spots (generally tech posts are almost always enlightening). Hating it sometimes is understandable, but there is a time and place for that and it certainly isn't in this thread of all places!
- mdp2021 3y agoA container of some degree of R- mob mentality for haters of R- mob mentality? Interesting project. Gentlemembers, let us not make that post disappear and lose the chain it spawned.