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Mercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit? Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophant

by ryandvm 15y ago

Mercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit? Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...

Jebus 15y ago
This! +1 I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.
p4bl0 15y ago
Your last remark is not incompatible with what OP asks for. Maybe HN could test that during a trial week?
astrec 15y ago
60 minutes doesn't seem quite long enough. I'd look at perhaps 0.5 * mean ttl on the front page.
barefoot 15y ago
That sounds like an interesting idea. If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"? Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".
- route66 15y ago
  User identification with the short comments usually found on HN might be difficult. The challenge still stands if I'm not mistaken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592
chc 15y ago
Although that works for some very trivial discussions†, it's unrealistic to think that every comment has easily quantified value without respect to the author's expertise. Not all opinions are equal. That's the kind of malarky that you hear from school districts that want to teach creationism and evolution as two equal theories. It's simply ludicrous to suggest that a comment from somebody who just read 40% of the Wikipedia article deserves the same standing as a comment from somebody who has devoted two decades of his life to the subject. † The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference.
- waqf 15y ago
  "Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".
  - chc 15y ago
    If comments can stand purely on their own merits, then one person's opinions must be equal to another person's — otherwise something outside of the comment matters. If the only thing that matters is what you say and not the actual expertise that causes you to say it, then your doctor telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away" is equal to a drunk bum telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away." That is obviously not true. Thus comments cannot stand solely on their own merits. QED
    - waqf 15y ago
      What you're saying now is reasonable (though I still don't agree that HN needs identities). Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.

by ryandvm 15y ago

Jebus 15y ago

This! +1 I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.

p4bl0 15y ago

Your last remark is not incompatible with what OP asks for. Maybe HN could test that during a trial week?

astrec 15y ago

60 minutes doesn't seem quite long enough. I'd look at perhaps 0.5 * mean ttl on the front page.

barefoot 15y ago

That sounds like an interesting idea. If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"? Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".

route66 15y ago
User identification with the short comments usually found on HN might be difficult. The challenge still stands if I'm not mistaken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592

chc 15y ago

Although that works for some very trivial discussions†, it's unrealistic to think that every comment has easily quantified value without respect to the author's expertise. Not all opinions are equal. That's the kind of malarky that you hear from school districts that want to teach creationism and evolution as two equal theories. It's simply ludicrous to suggest that a comment from somebody who just read 40% of the Wikipedia article deserves the same standing as a comment from somebody who has devoted two decades of his life to the subject. † The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference.

waqf 15y ago
"Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".
- chc 15y ago
  If comments can stand purely on their own merits, then one person's opinions must be equal to another person's — otherwise something outside of the comment matters. If the only thing that matters is what you say and not the actual expertise that causes you to say it, then your doctor telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away" is equal to a drunk bum telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away." That is obviously not true. Thus comments cannot stand solely on their own merits. QED
  - waqf 15y ago
    What you're saying now is reasonable (though I still don't agree that HN needs identities). Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.