7 ms·

Hacker Smacker: Friend/foe individual writers on Hacker News

66 points by swyx 3y ago

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2011)
hirundo 3y ago
With some tweaks this could functionally replace top down moderation with bottom up moderation, while improving the results for most people. A Bubble Construction Kit.
- arwineap 3y ago
  I think that this would replace top down moderation with: Judge each post based on person who wrote the post and how I felt about their first post I saw I think that the goal of moderation should be to judge each post based on it's own individual content; I think this is the best way to propagate good ideas
- 1270018080 3y ago
  There's already downvotes and flagging.
  - WicWacWok 3y ago
    Downvotes are neutral at best, they aren't a replacement for moderation.
neumann 3y ago
Never heard of this although it seems to be around for years. The firefox xpi is not working on recent firefox with "The add-on could not be installed because it appears to be corrupted"
- lapcat 3y ago
  Also, Safari dropped support for the .safariextz format years ago.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Won’t this reinforce filter bubbles? One of the nice things about hn is hearing people you disagree with make polite arguments, even when you aren’t in the mood to hear it
- omniglottal 3y ago
  Dissenting opinion is one thing. Corporate/nationalistic shills, another entirely.
  - goda90 3y ago
    Many people will use it for dissenting opinion anyway.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      those that don't have an open mind to dissenting opinions are probably not worth talking to either.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I maintain mental lists similar to this tool, and my mental "foes" list isn't people I tend to disagree with, it's people whose style of discourse is inflammatory and counterproductive. This style has tended to get more upvotes lately than it used to, and it creates whole subtrees that aren't worth reading because emotions are running hot. Having this mental list helps me in exactly the way TFA describes: if I see one of the bad names I can immediately collapse the whole subtree and avoid the whole argument that ensues. Edit: To be clear, I wouldn't use a tool like this, I think it's healthier for the list to remain in my head. It's less permanent that way, so if a user improves over time then their "foe" status will naturally fade. I'm just explaining how someone could use a tool like this for non-ideological reasons.
  - adsharma 3y ago
    Then why not run the comment through a classifier and label the comment instead of the person? Like this one: https://huggingface.co/alexgshaw/hyperpartisan-classifier https://huggingface.co/alexgshaw/hyperpartisan-classifier
globalnode 3y ago
HN already has an upvote system. This form of censorship is unnecessary unless people are willing to accept a possibly compromised view of a topic to save time. If you're that strapped for time though perhaps don't delve too deeply into HN comments anyway.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  This isn't censorship.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm very tired of seeing this cry of "censorship!" all the time. Private individuals and organizations voluntarily curating / moderating content is not censorship. You can still call things bad - and I think this tool is a bad idea - without calling them censorship.
maxbond 3y ago
The other day I reread the comments I'd favorited. I discovered several of them were from people I'd gotten into debates and arguments with. I'll admit there are people here I don't like, but the day I call them my foes is the day I pack up and leave. But on the other hand, if someone didn't want to hear from me and wanted to use this tool to filter me out of their feed, then I suppose I wouldn't want to impose on them.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Well put! I agree with all three of these paragraphs. I hope people won't use this tool, but I like how you put this about not wanting to impose on people.
uoaei 3y ago
It's always seemed like the style and design choices of HN heavily demoted the importance of authors, instead focusing on content. Color contrast and font size in the comments section are surely intentional. dang et al are extremely thoughtful with their moderation and if they wanted it to be different they would have changed it. Clearly they found a system they like. With bubble maintenance techniques like this one, they tend to regress toward a sterile mean, like mixing all the Play-Dohs together to get that universal gray-brown-purple. I personally prefer the splashes of color (sometimes being one myself). On the other hand, such a system would incentivize being a splash of color in nonetheless palatable ways, which may be a good kind of social pressure.
ggm 3y ago
I worry about how this would impact my bubble tendency. I don't like Trumpian world views and might well tend to upmark views I can adhere to, about him and his behaviour. But, I might then miss interesting critique on the real world consequences of his government's foreign trade policy. I am not sure it's possible to turn this kind of flagging into something I can use without over filtering. Some people say interesting things badly, annoyingly and I feel I need to see them and understand this difference between "you are annoying" and "what you said is annoyingly wrong headed" and "God, could you have said that more nicely but good on you for saying it" I know my style of replying annoys others. I reflect on how many of them might filter me!
jawon 3y ago
I did something similar on Metafilter - a Greasemonkey script to hide comments with a low number of favourites - and they were outraged.
bjord 3y ago
Seems like an interesting concept, but both the firefox and chrome versions are corrupted in some capacity, and are not installable.
squarefoot 3y ago
Please don't turn HN into the usual social network; let people value the content first. The risk of this being turned into a digital ad-hominem machine is too high even for the mostly well educated people dwelling over here.
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  HN is not special. It's full of shit comments that is love to be able to hide. Tagging some 10s of people would probably make this an actually useful place.
  - joemi 3y ago
    I think HN is indeed special because it's noticeably less full of shit comments than many other forums. I might even go so far as to say shit comments typically make up a minority of the comments here instead of the majority. That said, I wouldn't want to stop anyone who wants to use this tool from using it. I'm just not convinced it's necessary or helpful.
ryukoposting 3y ago
I hate it. The entire thing that makes HN special is the lack of ideological silos and relatively high level of discourse despite that. I want to have debates with strangers I disagree with. I want them to disagree with the things I say. I want stimulating conversation, not a bunch of golf claps from people who like me. I get wanting to "filter bots and/or corporate shills" but a tool like this encourages all kinds of behaviors outside that scope.
- zer8k 3y ago
  It is no worse than the voting system being used to beat people down that don't subscribe to the dogmatic view of the world HN readers do. In fact, this is almost better, because at least people will continue to see a dissenting post. At worse it functions as a third party shadow ban. HN already shadow bans, so again, it's no worse. New users in particular are forced into making ideologically aligned posts in order to get enough karma to avoid the insta-shadowban new accounts can get. No different if you're trying to play the game with this stupid plugin. I do not understand the idolization of HN as some bastion of spirited debate and nuance. It is objectively no better than Reddit and subject to the same hivemind mentality. If you want legitimate spirited debate and can learn to ignore trolls removing the voting system would bring HN closer to the fantasy it's readers seem to believe it is. Unfortunately taking away internet points from the terminally online is akin to making an addict go cold turkey. It wouldn't end well.
  - pipeline_peak 3y ago
    > I do not understand the idolization of HN as some bastion of spirited debate and nuance. HN is the closest thing there is to a news aggregator with civil, open discussions. If there’s one closer, I’d love to know.
    - krapp 3y ago
      Many well moderated technical forums like /r/AskHistorians are not only civil and open, but have a higher degree of technical and intellectual merit related to the subject at hand, by virtue of being more focused. On HN you can expect at least median technical competence when the subject is web development, but beyond that (and definitely with non-tech related subjects) people tend to be "aggressively ignorant" to the point that you can tell who the few actually knowledgeable people are by how angry they are at everyone else.
andsoitis 3y ago
This seems to be over 9 years old, but it is the first time I hear of it. For the reasons other mention, it seems like the idea isn't very popular.
tlb 3y ago
This seems like a great feature for a forum for doing ideological battle, like Twitter on hot-button social or political issues. In such forums, it's important not to agree on any minor issues with someone with whom you disagree on a major issue, lest you give aid and comfort to the enemy. But it seems wrong for HN.
yongjik 3y ago
It's kinda ironic that an example of "great HN comments to start a collection of friends" was written by someone who so thoroughly and publicly nuked their own career at Google that everyone who was at Google at that time would still remember the shenanigans. I guess that's a lesson for something... what it is exactly, I'm not sure.
- stavros 3y ago
  What were the shenanigans? I'm not familiar.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Michael-O-Church-well-known-at-Google https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Michael-O-Church-well-known-at-... Sounds like he's someone who's still a punching bag for some people even after more than a decade. I'll let you decide if that speaks more to his actions or the mindset of the people who still bring them up.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Ah, I had no idea, thanks. Most people on the link seem to say that he criticized a product and was ostracized for it.
SubiculumCode 3y ago
The Slashdot-ization of HN. lolz
pdntspa 3y ago
The real meat and potatoes here is, how can I find out who has added me to their foe list?
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  Make a second fake account and friend everyone, so that you can see everyone's foes?
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
sfink 3y ago
One of those things that I'd like to have for myself, but don't want everyone else to have. (Magic power is another, fwiw.) I want it because I want to improve the SNR of my HN time. I'm never going to read the vast majority of what's on HN, so some imperfect degree of separation of wheat from chaff sounds great. I don't want it because it's a push in the direction of focusing on writers rather than content, and once that ball gets rolling downhill it won't stop until it smashes the previous community to bits. For myself, I don't worry about missing out on an insightful post here and there because the author took a cheap shot at someone in the past. I would rather not miss such posts, but I'm already missing tons of equally valuable posts because of the number of hours in the day. Besides, I intentionally pay attention to people who make cogent points that I disagree with but cannot easily refute. I mean, I am always Right, but sometimes it's helpful to have someone who is Wrong reveal to me that i don't know why I'm right in a particular case. I would only ding people for bad basic logic, uncharitable interpretations, or otherwise wasting my time. ...but isn't that what we all think?
ghusto 3y ago
> Server: the Node.js ... aaand g'bye :) I'm sure this is the kind of thing that would get me on the black list.

66 points by swyx 3y ago

(2011)

With some tweaks this could functionally replace top down moderation with bottom up moderation, while improving the results for most people. A Bubble Construction Kit.

arwineap 3y ago
I think that this would replace top down moderation with: Judge each post based on person who wrote the post and how I felt about their first post I saw I think that the goal of moderation should be to judge each post based on it's own individual content; I think this is the best way to propagate good ideas
1270018080 3y ago
There's already downvotes and flagging.
- WicWacWok 3y ago
  Downvotes are neutral at best, they aren't a replacement for moderation.

neumann 3y ago

Never heard of this although it seems to be around for years. The firefox xpi is not working on recent firefox with "The add-on could not be installed because it appears to be corrupted"

lapcat 3y ago
Also, Safari dropped support for the .safariextz format years ago.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

Won’t this reinforce filter bubbles? One of the nice things about hn is hearing people you disagree with make polite arguments, even when you aren’t in the mood to hear it

omniglottal 3y ago
Dissenting opinion is one thing. Corporate/nationalistic shills, another entirely.
- goda90 3y ago
  Many people will use it for dissenting opinion anyway.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    those that don't have an open mind to dissenting opinions are probably not worth talking to either.
lolinder 3y ago
I maintain mental lists similar to this tool, and my mental "foes" list isn't people I tend to disagree with, it's people whose style of discourse is inflammatory and counterproductive. This style has tended to get more upvotes lately than it used to, and it creates whole subtrees that aren't worth reading because emotions are running hot. Having this mental list helps me in exactly the way TFA describes: if I see one of the bad names I can immediately collapse the whole subtree and avoid the whole argument that ensues. Edit: To be clear, I wouldn't use a tool like this, I think it's healthier for the list to remain in my head. It's less permanent that way, so if a user improves over time then their "foe" status will naturally fade. I'm just explaining how someone could use a tool like this for non-ideological reasons.
- adsharma 3y ago
  Then why not run the comment through a classifier and label the comment instead of the person? Like this one: https://huggingface.co/alexgshaw/hyperpartisan-classifier https://huggingface.co/alexgshaw/hyperpartisan-classifier

globalnode 3y ago

HN already has an upvote system. This form of censorship is unnecessary unless people are willing to accept a possibly compromised view of a topic to save time. If you're that strapped for time though perhaps don't delve too deeply into HN comments anyway.

lamontcg 3y ago
This isn't censorship.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm very tired of seeing this cry of "censorship!" all the time. Private individuals and organizations voluntarily curating / moderating content is not censorship. You can still call things bad - and I think this tool is a bad idea - without calling them censorship.

maxbond 3y ago

The other day I reread the comments I'd favorited. I discovered several of them were from people I'd gotten into debates and arguments with. I'll admit there are people here I don't like, but the day I call them my foes is the day I pack up and leave. But on the other hand, if someone didn't want to hear from me and wanted to use this tool to filter me out of their feed, then I suppose I wouldn't want to impose on them.

sanderjd 3y ago
Well put! I agree with all three of these paragraphs. I hope people won't use this tool, but I like how you put this about not wanting to impose on people.

uoaei 3y ago

It's always seemed like the style and design choices of HN heavily demoted the importance of authors, instead focusing on content. Color contrast and font size in the comments section are surely intentional. dang et al are extremely thoughtful with their moderation and if they wanted it to be different they would have changed it. Clearly they found a system they like. With bubble maintenance techniques like this one, they tend to regress toward a sterile mean, like mixing all the Play-Dohs together to get that universal gray-brown-purple. I personally prefer the splashes of color (sometimes being one myself). On the other hand, such a system would incentivize being a splash of color in nonetheless palatable ways, which may be a good kind of social pressure.

ggm 3y ago

I worry about how this would impact my bubble tendency. I don't like Trumpian world views and might well tend to upmark views I can adhere to, about him and his behaviour. But, I might then miss interesting critique on the real world consequences of his government's foreign trade policy. I am not sure it's possible to turn this kind of flagging into something I can use without over filtering. Some people say interesting things badly, annoyingly and I feel I need to see them and understand this difference between "you are annoying" and "what you said is annoyingly wrong headed" and "God, could you have said that more nicely but good on you for saying it" I know my style of replying annoys others. I reflect on how many of them might filter me!

jawon 3y ago

I did something similar on Metafilter - a Greasemonkey script to hide comments with a low number of favourites - and they were outraged.

bjord 3y ago

Seems like an interesting concept, but both the firefox and chrome versions are corrupted in some capacity, and are not installable.

squarefoot 3y ago

Please don't turn HN into the usual social network; let people value the content first. The risk of this being turned into a digital ad-hominem machine is too high even for the mostly well educated people dwelling over here.

ahahahahah 3y ago
HN is not special. It's full of shit comments that is love to be able to hide. Tagging some 10s of people would probably make this an actually useful place.
- joemi 3y ago
  I think HN is indeed special because it's noticeably less full of shit comments than many other forums. I might even go so far as to say shit comments typically make up a minority of the comments here instead of the majority. That said, I wouldn't want to stop anyone who wants to use this tool from using it. I'm just not convinced it's necessary or helpful.

ryukoposting 3y ago

I hate it. The entire thing that makes HN special is the lack of ideological silos and relatively high level of discourse despite that. I want to have debates with strangers I disagree with. I want them to disagree with the things I say. I want stimulating conversation, not a bunch of golf claps from people who like me. I get wanting to "filter bots and/or corporate shills" but a tool like this encourages all kinds of behaviors outside that scope.

zer8k 3y ago
It is no worse than the voting system being used to beat people down that don't subscribe to the dogmatic view of the world HN readers do. In fact, this is almost better, because at least people will continue to see a dissenting post. At worse it functions as a third party shadow ban. HN already shadow bans, so again, it's no worse. New users in particular are forced into making ideologically aligned posts in order to get enough karma to avoid the insta-shadowban new accounts can get. No different if you're trying to play the game with this stupid plugin. I do not understand the idolization of HN as some bastion of spirited debate and nuance. It is objectively no better than Reddit and subject to the same hivemind mentality. If you want legitimate spirited debate and can learn to ignore trolls removing the voting system would bring HN closer to the fantasy it's readers seem to believe it is. Unfortunately taking away internet points from the terminally online is akin to making an addict go cold turkey. It wouldn't end well.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  > I do not understand the idolization of HN as some bastion of spirited debate and nuance. HN is the closest thing there is to a news aggregator with civil, open discussions. If there’s one closer, I’d love to know.
  - krapp 3y ago
    Many well moderated technical forums like /r/AskHistorians are not only civil and open, but have a higher degree of technical and intellectual merit related to the subject at hand, by virtue of being more focused. On HN you can expect at least median technical competence when the subject is web development, but beyond that (and definitely with non-tech related subjects) people tend to be "aggressively ignorant" to the point that you can tell who the few actually knowledgeable people are by how angry they are at everyone else.

andsoitis 3y ago

This seems to be over 9 years old, but it is the first time I hear of it. For the reasons other mention, it seems like the idea isn't very popular.

tlb 3y ago

This seems like a great feature for a forum for doing ideological battle, like Twitter on hot-button social or political issues. In such forums, it's important not to agree on any minor issues with someone with whom you disagree on a major issue, lest you give aid and comfort to the enemy. But it seems wrong for HN.

yongjik 3y ago

It's kinda ironic that an example of "great HN comments to start a collection of friends" was written by someone who so thoroughly and publicly nuked their own career at Google that everyone who was at Google at that time would still remember the shenanigans. I guess that's a lesson for something... what it is exactly, I'm not sure.

stavros 3y ago
What were the shenanigans? I'm not familiar.
- lolinder 3y ago
  https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Michael-O-Church-well-known-at-Google https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Michael-O-Church-well-known-at-... Sounds like he's someone who's still a punching bag for some people even after more than a decade. I'll let you decide if that speaks more to his actions or the mindset of the people who still bring them up.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Ah, I had no idea, thanks. Most people on the link seem to say that he criticized a product and was ostracized for it.

SubiculumCode 3y ago

The Slashdot-ization of HN. lolz

pdntspa 3y ago

The real meat and potatoes here is, how can I find out who has added me to their foe list?

CameronNemo 3y ago
Make a second fake account and friend everyone, so that you can see everyone's foes?

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

sfink 3y ago

One of those things that I'd like to have for myself, but don't want everyone else to have. (Magic power is another, fwiw.) I want it because I want to improve the SNR of my HN time. I'm never going to read the vast majority of what's on HN, so some imperfect degree of separation of wheat from chaff sounds great. I don't want it because it's a push in the direction of focusing on writers rather than content, and once that ball gets rolling downhill it won't stop until it smashes the previous community to bits. For myself, I don't worry about missing out on an insightful post here and there because the author took a cheap shot at someone in the past. I would rather not miss such posts, but I'm already missing tons of equally valuable posts because of the number of hours in the day. Besides, I intentionally pay attention to people who make cogent points that I disagree with but cannot easily refute. I mean, I am always Right, but sometimes it's helpful to have someone who is Wrong reveal to me that i don't know why I'm right in a particular case. I would only ding people for bad basic logic, uncharitable interpretations, or otherwise wasting my time. ...but isn't that what we all think?

ghusto 3y ago

> Server: the Node.js ... aaand g'bye :) I'm sure this is the kind of thing that would get me on the black list.