15 ms·

A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors

653 points by ssgodderidge 3y ago

latchkey 3y ago
I've noticed a shadowbanned behavior. If you submit a link that is a banned domain, you will notice that the 'discuss' link is missing and the post doesn't show up at all (but you see it).
- ssgodderidge 3y ago
  Any examples? I didn’t know about this one
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    Turn on show dead in your profile and visit the "new" link (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest). You'll see a lot of [dead] links, those are the sort GP is referencing. [flagged][dead] are killed by user action (flags).
  - bookofjoe 3y ago
    https://www.sciencealert.com/ https://www.sciencealert.com/
    - tptacek 3y ago
      There's lot of articles from this site on HN, including recently. But: * It seems low-quality, at times almost like the Weekly World News. On HN, we sometimes replace even high-quality science writing with primary sources (when the paper is recent and the writing is just a summary). * It's high-volume, which is problematic in that it incentivizes users to submit lots and lots of stuff from this one site; front page slots are the scarcest resource on HN and everything competes for it, so high-volume low-mid-quality sites tend to get downweighted. * It's slathered with ads and bait-y gimmicks. If there's something on this site that you think would make a good thread for HN, you can probably just find whatever it's blogspamming and submit that instead.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    LinkedIn, as I discovered earlier this year. (I'd emailed mods after noting that my submission seemed to have been autokilled. They revived it, though the submission didn't see much action.)
ulrischa 3y ago
Is the 501 karma level true? I heard 801?
- jjulius 3y ago
  It's 501.
XCabbage 3y ago
The list at https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors is definitely not "the complete set of colors users have set" as claimed. I know this because it doesn't include my top color (namely #64BFBD).
- XCabbage 3y ago
  Perplexingly, my color appeared there shortly after I posted this. Does that link contain colors of recently active users, perhaps?
  - dang 3y ago
    Yes; users who have recently posted.
    - XCabbage 3y ago
      Ah, nice - so "my color doesn't appear on the list" is a problem that fixes itself automatically when you complain on HN about it!
      - dang 3y ago
        A suitably recursive property for an internet forum, which I doubt pg had in mind when he wrote that code.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      (For the curious, this is because HN only loads profiles into memory whenever users post. Then they stay in memory until a server reboot, which seems to happen every day or two.)
      - GreenWatermelon 3y ago
        Everything I hear about HN makes me feel like it's a hobby side project hosted on an old laptop in someones basement, and not literally the PR arm of a giant venture capital company.
aragonite 3y ago
I'm not sure if this is undocumented, but I've noticed that submitted links sometimes have either the pathname or search parameters portion of their URL truncated or stripped entirely. Sometimes the truncation happens after a slight delay. For example, if you try to submit a link to a particular Google Books page, say the one I just tried: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Albert_Einstein_Collection_Volume_On/XdTkDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT102 https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Albert_Einstein_Col... the link will remain intact for a short while before losing its search parameters and turning into a link to the book itself rather than to a page in it.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Possibly canonical links. HN looks at the submissions and updates the links to the canonical link if present. I'm on mobile so not able to double check the Google books page at the moment, but if you view source check to see if there's a canonical link in there. This also bites some blogging sites that end up with a canonical link to their base http://blog.example.com http://blog.example.com on all their posts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element
  - aragonite 3y ago
    Just checked and you are exactly right (it's not in the raw source but the element is found in the DOM tree). This explains the delay also!
- dang 3y ago
  Jtsummers's answer is correct, but we turn off canonicalization for some classes of URLs and I think you've found a good example of that. I've exempted Google Books links for the future and put your submitted URL back in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38774261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38774261.
  - aragonite 3y ago
    Thanks dang!
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Minor nit: I've posted about this before, but I wish folks would not refer to dang as a "moderator" or say stuff about "the HN moderators". If anything, I think it's more appropriate to refer to dang as the site admin. The reason this is a pet peeve of mine is I often see people complaining about "the HN moderators" (e.g. "the HN mods are on a power trip and keep flagging my submissions!" or some such), where they are clearly taking this conceptual model from Reddit, and they seem to think there is a shadowy cabal of "mods" who control what gets downvoted/flagged (and, in fairness, this does and can happen in subreddits). In other words, when you see your submissions being flagged or comments being downvoted or flagged, 99.9% of the time it's not "the HN mods" who are downvoting you. It's just other, normal HN users (who have earned 501+ karma as TFA explains) who simply don't like what you have to say. Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > and I've only seen it for Speculation/intuition, but I figure it happens in ways specifically designed to evade the type of detection you're basing your claim on, akin to shadow banning, whereas on Reddit there's often more visible evidence like corpses of deleted comments.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    You can see all of those deleted/flagged comments if you turn on "showdead" in your options.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    You can see the [dead] comments if you go to your profile and enable "showdead". Most of them are very bad, but from time to time you can find a false positive and vouch it.
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      Yes, I keep that enabled. I guess I provided poor examples but what I'm saying is that it seems like on Reddit moderation activities are quite obvious (i.e., a giant chain of deleted comments tends to indicate moderation and elicit resentment) and here they're less obvious (there's an air of strong moderation but little to point at directly, which is great IMHO as it evades resentment).
nyjah 3y ago
The second chance pool blew my mind the first time I got an email to resubmit. You figure if a post gets no traction, that’s just how it is. But I’ll never forget getting that email.
- susam 3y ago
  +1 My post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956065 got no traction when I posted it and quickly disappeared from "/new" without many people noticing it. The next day, I received an email that this post was entered into the second chance pool. Then sometime later, it got picked for the front page and led to a good amount of community participation! Thanks to the second chance pool, I received several interesting demo submissions to my hobby project!
lossolo 3y ago
Your ability to download or upvote comments and stories can also be shadowbanned, rendering these actions ineffective.
alberth 3y ago
Missing “Classic” It’s missing the relatively recent new list called “Classic”. https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic Classic: Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts
- TheCleric 3y ago
  I see it there: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md#hacker-news-classic https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
- n2d4 3y ago
  Not relatively recent! The feature is from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
isoprophlex 3y ago
It's missing "highlights" at https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights ... which, anecdotally, I learned about JUST after getting a comment on there. Imagine my surprise at learning about this (in a manner totally unrelated to the post I wrote that made it to the list), and seeing my own writing as the most recent item on the list. Truman show vibes for sure.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Interesting! Is there something similar for stories?
  - aragonite 3y ago
    There's "best" (Highest-voted recent links), "classic" (Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts) and "active" (Most active current discussions): https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
    - oblio 3y ago
      I wonder how you'd qualify for "classic".
      - aragonite 3y ago
        Apparently the account must be created before 2/13/2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker-news-classic https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
        dang 3y ago
        That was because HN got its public start in Feb 2007 and pg wanted to look at users who had joined in the first year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779197
  - 3y ago
cantSpellSober 3y ago
H
- godelski 3y ago
  I actually really hate this feature. The landscape has changed and I've been seriously contemplating asking @dang to nuke my account.
  - goles 3y ago
    I would greatly encourage you to not nuke (but do contact) despite having had this thought myself. But I appreciate the fact the consequences for everyone are not the same, and potentially even fatal in current times. I believe I understand why it's done in the way it's done, but also this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large. Without speaking out of turn, which may just create more work, they can help. Contact hn@ycombinator.com.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      > this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large. I suppose it depends on one's perspective. We used to call self-censorship "decorum." The nature of human beings didn't change when we went online, and sometimes it behooves a person to just read the room before speaking. Because of the karma system, the upvote downvote system, and the user curated flagging system, I would classify Hacker News as a "decorum-friendly" message board where a certain amount of pre-filtering is not only necessary but highly encouraged.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - godelski 3y ago
      > but also this can drive self-censorship. Actually, this is the motivation __to__ nuke. It's what I mean about the environment changing. HN is one of the big places that get scraped and everyone is scraping all data that they can these days. It's very reasonable to believe you can be de-anonymized much more easily and that it's only going to get easier. It's not unreasonable to think that someone can mimic my speech and this creates a new vulnerability. I am thinking much more about self-censorship now and being more measured now than I have in the past. I do agree with you that self-censorship is a growing problem. But I'm not sure how to solve this when we're entering a world where it is the language you use that becomes a fingerprint. I appreciate the records because there is a lot of valuable information here but at the same time these records make us vulnerable in a way we haven't been before. And that it is in a way that not just worrying about nation states being able to do this but that we're posting these records to huggingface. The processing is just getting easier and that's about all that's needed now.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Seems to be missing comment vote manipulation. Users can see the number of votes their own comments get but can't see the number of votes other comments get, or even if their vote changes the vote count on a comment, which allows shadowbanning of unwanted comments by vote count alteration by mods/admins.
- godelski 3y ago
  https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
  - photochemsyn 3y ago
    That only covers downvoting comments, it doesn't mention why comment vote counts aren't publicly visible. Keeping comment vote counts invisible makes sense if upvotes on some comments are not being recorded as a form of shadowbanning those comments/users.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Other people's vote counts are invisible because they led to constant bickering about the merits of any given comment's "spot" vote count (this is also the reason there's a guideline that asks you not to write these kinds of comments, but changing the affordances so you can't see them at all was a much more effective solution to the problem). (My confidence in this explanation comes in part from the fact that I'm pretty sure I had a hand in this coming to pass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716). The conspiracist rationale here doesn't make much sense, because the site operators also control the displayed comment count and the registration of votes.
      - godelski 3y ago
        I thought a lot was about preventing bandwagoning or manipulation. In both directions, but especially downvoting.
fmx 3y ago
Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 Nice to see that some of the suggestions from there, like listing the hidden URLS (/leaders, etc.) seem to have been implemented.
- dang 3y ago
  Let's document it shall we: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments) Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)
b8 3y ago
There's other moderators than daang and some users help out with site stuff sometimes.
stormed 3y ago
A lot of these backend features/behaviors are super interesting to read through, especially in regards to the "flame war detector" section. I've only ever seen link aggregator websites such as Reddit relying on community moderation & spam detectors rather than anything to improve the quality of the discourse.
CharlesW 3y ago
I'm curious about the full list of automatic headline changes. They seem reasonable, but it's worth knowing that if they change a headline for the worse, you can immediately edit the submission and restore the original headline (or an "in the spirit of" edit that fits within HN's character limit).
DiabloD3 3y ago
My favorite is /leaders. Shame I'm not in the top 50 anymore, but there just ain't a lot of good content to submit anymore and karma whoring seems like a waste of time.
drfuchs 3y ago
I accidentally hit “hide” on an item I want to see. Where’s the documentation on how to unhide?
- aragonite 3y ago
  If you see it on this page (not accessible to anyone except you, logged in), you can just click "unhide" https://news.ycombinator.com/hidden?id=drfuchs https://news.ycombinator.com/hidden?id=drfuchs
  - drfuchs 3y ago
    Very cool, thanks. How does one become aware of this class of magic? It seems completely undiscoverable, not being in the FAQ, nor in the present "List of Hacker News's undocumented features..."
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  Your view of your profile page https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drfuchs https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drfuchs should have a “hidden” link where each story has an “un-hide” link instead of “hide.”
  - drfuchs 3y ago
    Thanks. For those wondering how someone may have missed this: Evidently I had not in fact accidentally done a "hide", so nothing was in my hidden list, and thus my profile page cleverly didn't have a "hidden" link at all.
    - cwillu 3y ago
      Things expire off the hidden list over time as well, presumably based on when the link itself disappears, but such links will then show up on hn's historical view.
- cozzyd 3y ago
  Yeah it's very easy to accidentally hide (or flag!) posts on my phone. Wish there was an option for a confirm screen. Every once in a while I check what I've accidentally flagged and unflag it. I'm sure I'm not the only one...
voytec 3y ago
1) I enjoy figuring out how HN works over time by noticing certain patterns. Still haven't figured out (please don't spoil) why I can't downvote certain comments in threads where I see both arrows on other comments. HN feels like games in the past - you're given some docs but over time you'd go "ooooh" about something undocumented. Good stuff. 2) voting system works well for just users but HN is infested with corporate voting manipulation. It seems that an entity monitoring eg. brand's name is able to use just a few 501+ karma accounts to bury, or a few more to strongly boost, any post 3) based on what I learned about posts' scores (more than a grain of salt - as I mentioned - I'm still figuring things out) it seems a little out of place that sometimes a few hours-old posts (not as old to qualify for the "second chance" thing) with barely any comments and points are positioned higher on the top page than younger posts with more activity (higher score and more comments). I've noticed it more than once with substack and my assumption is that HN may be boosting YC-backed products
- tptacek 3y ago
  They do the opposite thing: they're extra hands-off with YC-backed things, and quicker to turn off flags on stories critical of YC-backed things. I don't see much evidence of voting manipulation (and a lot of evidence of HN being hair-trigger about suppressing vote manipulation).
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  It may not even be official corporate manipulation. HN is frequented by a lot of industry insiders, and if they see something that doesn't resonate with what they know to be true they'll downvote.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Exactly: there's a ton of people here who work at the big ad-tech companies, so of course they're going to downvote anything that promotes ad-blocking since that harms their own paycheck in a way. Imagine a discussion forum for medical topics (science, research, etc.) where 1/3 the users work for companies that sell homeopathic "remedies", and how that would influence moderation there.
goplayoutside 3y ago
Are there any browser extensions that provide a user tag feature, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite? There are so many notable tech people on HN, it would be useful to be able to recognize their posts and comments.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends
divbzero 3y ago
When did Hacker News start applying topcolor to the YC logo? I just noticed it today but am curious if it’s been there for awhile.
- dang 3y ago
  I did it a couple days ago because a user had been emailing since 2016 that the orange Y doesn't look good when the bar is changed to Christmas red. Btw, that's not the record for how long a bug fix has taken. We get there eventually.
  - JorgeGT 3y ago
    This update broke my workflow!
    - dang 3y ago
      I did warn him that people might complain about side effects Edit: believe it or not, we got more complaints about this. Some people picked their top color specifically to go nicely with the orange Y! So I've reverted this change, except for the Christmas case. Users who have set their topcolor don't see the Christmas top bar anyhow, so don't have to worry.
      - slymax 3y ago
        is it possible that NetNewsWire (possibly other rss readers as well) don't show the favicon for https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss anymore because of this change? I noticed this a few days ago
        dang 3y ago
        HN is still serving the orange Y for favicons. Only the Y to the left of "Hacker News" in the top bar now has a transparent background. However, there was a brief period where we were serving the transparent Y for favicons before I noticed that and corrected it; I wonder if the transparent Y somehow got into a cache? Is there a way to force-refresh?
ilamont 3y ago
Thank you for compiling this list. I have been using the site since 2007 and had never looked into the classic page (assumed it was an old stylesheet or something similar). Also had no idea about some of those special URLs such as noobcomments. If a user has 31 Karma, they can also vouch for a [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored (and potentially improved as the vouch can counteract the effects of flags). Is this consistent? I recently vouched for something on the New page and it wasn't restored. One other thing I would like to ask: I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this?
- gnicholas 3y ago
  > I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this? I don't know if it still works, but I used this a few years ago for this exact reason: https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends
  - swyx 3y ago
    val.town has a hnfollow thingy that i use now, but tbh i dont know when it doesnt work
minimaxir 3y ago
fine, I'll update the list today
- ssgodderidge 3y ago
  Thanks for putting this together. I’ve been on HN for a while (even before getting an account) and learned a ton with this list
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Guilt Driven Development
  - mayormcmatt 3y ago
    Ha, truly! I read his comment, refreshed the GitHub repo and saw the "changes made < 1 minute ago" flag.
    - minimaxir 3y ago
      I needed an excuse to be productive. :)
      - ishanhegde 3y ago
        This is legitimately useful for new folks. Nice work
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    This is the only paradigm I follow :( If DMs about web site bug > X then push fix lol
- tech234a 3y ago
  I figured this list was on the front page again when I was notified that my PR [1] was finally merged :) [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/60 https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/6...
- 3y ago
StevenNunez 3y ago
Guess I need to figure out how to get more Karma! I didn't know there were more features to this site since I'm essentially a lurker.
- system2 3y ago
  This mindset turns this place into Reddit. I think the features should be enabled after a certain time rather than how likable the person is.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I'd propose participation for X days and a very loose karma metric (e.g. non-negative karma to block out consistent hecklers) as a compromise. You don't want someone who posted once and disappears for months to be given elevated permissions, because the idea of the karma gate is to adjust to how the community works before getting more features. semi-artbituarily, I'd say 2-3 months worth of distinct days making a comment or post should be enough time.
  - fader 3y ago
    Yeah, the karma requirements mean you frequently see people adding noise to discussions rather than signal, just to get out there and seen. I rarely comment and haven't hit the 501 threshold to downvote despite being here for a number of years, mostly because I just upvote what I agree with rather than posting a "me too". (And I'm now concerned that this comment will feel like a "me too" :) )
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  HN points are a function of time and posting frequency.
MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
One undocumented heuristic that I wish was documented better is that repeated submissions to the same domain, especially without discussion activity, leads to an automated shadow ban. This is just from what I’ve observed browsing /new with Show Dead turned on. There are lots of people submitting their own blog posts or repeated posts from their favorite news outlets who have been shadow banned. Vouching provides a mechanism for restoring posts of particular quality, but most of these people aren’t trying to spam, they just don’t know this unspoken rule.
- dang 3y ago
  That's connected to this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." If people submit primarily their own stuff, our software eventually starts classifying the account as "promotional" and starts filtering the posts. People are totally welcome to submit their own work—that's great—but to use HN as intended, they should do that as part of a diverse set of submissions on unrelated/interesting things. There are too many bloggers/marketers/writers out there that use HN merely as yet-another-channel for the content they're pushing, and that's definitely not in the curious spirit which is supposed to animate HN.
  - raldi 3y ago
    As we used to say at the other site, it’s okay to be a redditor with a website; it’s not okay to be a website with a reddit account.
    - dang 3y ago
      That's a nice way to put it!
  - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
    there's a slight difference between "your own stuff" and "same domain"... I don't know how many false positives would fans/people with narrow sharing interest make, but slight editing of the guideline might help make them less "false"
cloudking 3y ago
Idea: 1000 karma should get custom CSS as a setting.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  and a dark mode button ;)
  - cloudking 3y ago
    I'd settle for that too!
    - system2 3y ago
      Why don't you use Dark Reader extension instead?
      - jessekv 3y ago
        But I sometimes use Hacker News from remote machines, and it would be a pain to configure all of them with custom extensions!
        cloudking 3y ago
        Yeah this is the reason. I want a solution that works from any browser/device without the need to use extensions.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    You and parent might enjoy checking my profile for customised HN CSS. (I apply those using the Stylus CSS manager browser extension.)
charcircuit 3y ago
HN also has rate limits on making comments for certain users. The limit is easy to hit and takes hours to go away. This results in having to ignore people's questions because it will waste a comment contributing to one's rate limit. One can also respond to people by editing one's comment, but that has poor ux.
- joecool1029 3y ago
  Had it in the past on my acct. It always showed up when I posted on topics about trees and commented faster than normal. Wasn't aware it was a thing until emailing HN and dang mentioned it. I'd maybe suggest updating the message to include some approximate time the limit expires. 'Come back in a few hours' or something. I say this because it was unusual enough for me to hit that I'd rewrite my comments thinking it was some kind of word flag I'd tripped, then try to repost it in 5-10 minutes only to have it fail again.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  This is an annoying feature which I have encountered. I know it is to calm heated discussions, but the ambiguity of the message is belittling. I'm not overwhelming the database; just tell me how long I have if you're going to put me in timeout for a few hours. It isn't a frequent issue, but putting duct tape on someone's mouth when they're talking about something they care about does not calm them down, even if it achieves the primary goal.
- xienze 3y ago
  You’re talking about the “you’re posting too fast, please slow down” message? IME it’s not a rate limit but a passive-aggressive way of banning someone from a conversation for some amount of time.
  - paganel 3y ago
    Not the OP but I think that's what the OP had in mind, yeah. It's interesting because that limit has made me even more "radical" (by the unwritten standards of HN), i.e. when I know that I only have a limited amount of comments per day to make my point I use those comments in a more "push-y" manner by responding to the most provocative replies to what I had previously said, while also ignoring replying to comments that are too bland. Which means that I go by the logic of "why should I reply to this reasonable comment when there's this other more radical comment that's a lot more thorough and violent when trying to debunk what I had just written? I should use my limited number of comments by answering to the latter, not the former". One of the many paradoxes of confrontation ("war") at work, that is if you regard many of the discussions in here as confrontation (even "war") of ideas.
submeta 3y ago
Would like to mention Dang here, he is doing an extraordinary job in keeping this place sane and civilised. I really am wondering how he can read and react to so many comments quickly. Dang, care to elaborate? Do you see a flat list of new comments, review them quickly? Do you use a moderation tool that scans the mood / tone / aggresiveness of a post? How do you do the screening and the replies? Manually?
- core_dumped 3y ago
  Dang is just a 10x moderator
  - Zuiii 3y ago
    He's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if he was literally 10x moderators. Thank you dang (dangs?) for what you do.
    - jader201 3y ago
      Not sure if you were (half) joking, but in case you weren’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 (Spoiler alert: it’s all Dan G.)
  - revskill 3y ago
    Even if you said 100x, he wont upvote you, hehe
- _8j50 3y ago
  I used to think so until the shadow restriction/moderation stuff. I must agree with the quality part though, just not the methods. But like reddit and other platform, the majority of users don't give a shit about this stuff until it's their turn. Oh well, shit is.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
Y-bar 3y ago
> Inclusivity […] Unfortunately. (Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks). Why would this be described as “unfortunate”? For example tings like LLM:s being trained on flawed/biased data is a known real and unfortunate thing which can hurt already marginalised groups in society if used for eg. policy derisions.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  The “unfortunately” refers to the preceding text rather than the following. > However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately.
  - Y-bar 3y ago
    That’s my point, I think. It seems to me that moderators are doing the right thing by HN rules and context by tagging such discussions are not off-topic. Why is it described as “unfortunate” then?
    - djur 3y ago
      I think you're reading it as "Unfortunately, moderators occasionally unkill such threads..." when it's meant as "...they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless, unfortunately".
      - Y-bar 3y ago
        I think so too perhaps and hopefully, but there is no comma As in your example. Just a period suggesting the previous sentence has ended.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        True. But the following phrase is set off by both a period and a set of parentheses. I think it’s pretty clear the author’s intent is for there to be a complete sentence about the behavior of HN users and then a complete thought saying that was unfortunate. (Then a parenthetical about the moderator behavior.)
orenlindsey 3y ago
This list is pretty nice, I learned a lot from it.
- atomicfiredoll 3y ago
  I've lurked here and on other discussion/aggregation sites for years (I've apparently been here 10--oof) and only recent started commenting a little more. This whole time I didn't realize the top color could be set. I noticed it in my profile a couple days ago and thought it was an entirely new site feature. Seeing all this info I was unaware of laid out in front of me makes me wish there was a docs page linked in the footer, like Tildes has.
cinntaile 3y ago
Another undocumented feature is that flagging posts/submissions very likely is weighted differently for different users.
spencerchubb 3y ago
The 'over' url parameter is a great feature and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it until now
javajosh 3y ago
There is another hidden feature, a "weak shadowban" which places your comment lower on the page than default. I think it is a manual flag set by some unknown heuristic, basically a "we don't like you but not enough to ban you" signal. This happened to me several months ago after a heated political debate and still is in effect (I'm sure it will happen to this comment, for example).
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  You're rate limited. So am I. Even emailed dang about it. I suppose my case is similar enough: started happening some time after some discussion that went wrong. I really don't remember which but I don't deny participating in them. Truth be told it's probably a good thing for someone like me. HN is addictive and getting kicked out after 5 posts is essentially a better noprocrast setting. I actually thought it was the noprocrast setting at first since at the time I had just begun experimenting with it. It's the automatic downranking of posts that hurt me. Noticed it recently. I've been trying to be more selective towards which posts I reply to but it feels pointless since any and all comments immediately sink towards the bottom of the page, unseen. A smaller problem with this system: taking the time to write a comment, submitting it and only then being denied. I actually wasn't sure if this comment was going to go through but the timer must have reset. I hesitate to suggest some kind of indicator. It would be very helpful but it would also create a timed reward schedule not entirely dissimilar from those Skinner's box simulators they call mobile games.
  - pests 3y ago
    Are you sure you're not just hitting the post timer limits? You can't immediately reply to deep threads
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Dang confirmed it. The following message is returned after the 5th post: > You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
_8j50 3y ago
Any hidden feature to get past shadow moderation? I know I am not entitled to anything and no one cares unless they are affected directly but it would be nice if "you're posting too fast" restrictions (could mean 3 or 4 times in one day) showed up before I spend like half an hour composing a reply to someone, not after. But alas, not owed anything, hn is a social engagement site for a VC at the end of the day. But the non-transparent moderation stuff speaks volumes about the culture and all. Will try to post non-FUD, high quality comments and posts (read between the lines lol).
- fragmede 3y ago
  I believe the hidden feature is to email dang at hn@ycombinator.com and promise you'll never ever shit post again.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    But then I have to use email! You're right though.
- dang 3y ago
  I hear you and am willing to meet you on this, but you simply can't post things to HN like "you are just an ageist tribal presumptive jerk" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769241) without getting penalized and/or banned. I understand that the other person was being provocative, but a lot of this is about how we handle provocation—i.e. it's about learning to get hit by provocation (whether intentional or unintentional), absorbing the shock in oneself, and then not responding in kind. You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is, and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while, we can definitely take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    @dang, the "jerk" part was over the line and I was in the wrong. However, my problem is not with the rules or in the restriction but with the fact that your restrictions where not transparent (shadow moderation) and you didn't think simply asking me to refrain would not work. In the past for example, you asked me to avoid brigading and I have avoided it since. You used a humorous comment I made (like I've seen others do once in a while) as an example of low quality comment so I avoid any sort of humor on HN now. I will assume in cases such as what you quoted, you would treat the person I replied to with the same level of non-transparent hostility? If so I will avoid defending myself, else I will just avoid using "over the line" terms like "jerk" and use more tolerable terms like "unkind". > and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while You tolerate political topics on HN. On such threads, it seems my problem is that I do not understand what you mean by that. My expectation is either you tell me or others flag my comment if it is inappropriate. I never attack someone's character and try to focus on technical analysis of things, what you quoted there was in response to someone attacking my character (will refrain). I will read your rules again. Perhaps I should avoid sensitive topics entirely on HN but truth be told, I make them in anticipation of a healthy discourse (which if you note on that comment thread was had). This is the only site I know of where that is actually possible these days. But I'd hate to think simply sharing my views is causing such a burden. > You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is I don't think that is true. But no worries, I undersrand your perspective well enough. At least I now know that this isn't in my head, thanks for confirming. I sincerely hope you reconsider this approach and inform others (if they exist) of your disapproval or measures instead of shadow/secret approaches. You absolutley have the right to moderate content and tell people to stop any behavior, just like this. I'll seriously consider stopping active participation as a 2024 resolution. Happy new years!
averageRoyalty 3y ago
Unfortunately it still doesn't mention "rate limited" accounts[0], which is extremely confusing when it happens to you. It's happened to me on this account, I can't comment more than 5 times per some arbitrary period - I'm guessing 24 hour UTC. No explanation or information is given - you don't even know until HN seems broken and you go searching. dang mentioned that's something they'd like to impove, but given the slow movement of HN features, I doubt it will. Note that none of this is meant as a slight on dang - I respect the work he does and really like the site, but it doesn't make it less frustrating. The result will be me rolling a new account (against site guidelines), as I have no other privacy preserving way of handling the issue. 0. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues/21#issuecomment-668062012 https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
- jorvi 3y ago
  Beautifully stated at your link: > dang often says that he's concerned about protecting HN as a vessel. But he seems less concerned about the truthfulness of the contents of the vessel. So IMO, HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics. has HN ever claimed to be a place for "free" discussion? I feel the sentiment of "free speech forums" was cracking at the seams some 18-20 years ago, and compeltely fell apart around 9-10 years ago. If you want unfiltered opinions, you go to a place with minimal moderation. HN was never that.
  - dang 3y ago
    > But he seems less concerned about the truthfulness of the contents of the vessel. It puzzles me when people say such things. We don't have a truth meter [1]; how are we supposed to decide what's true vs. false? By definition, there's zero consensus on any contentious topic. Should we pick one view and impose it? Whose would that be? my own? Even if I thought I knew the truth about everything (and I am very far from feeling that way), I can tell you how well that would go over: everyone would hate it. There's another level too: are we supposed to ban people for being wrong? Being wrong is part of finding out the truth; of being curious. No one makes it to the truth in a single jump, nor on their own. Obviously people need the freedom to be wrong about things. And another level: HN is about intellectual curiosity and interesting conversation. Interesting conversation is not always a pure sequence of true statements. Curiosity wants to figure out the truth, of course—but optimizing for curiosity [2] is not the same thing as optimizing for truth. The latter would mean excluding speculation, for example. That would be less interesting! When someone wants the mods to decide what is true and moderate by that, I can't fathom what they mean, unless they just want moderators to support whatever they agree with and ban whatever they disagree with. No one would put it that crudely, but no one has explained what else is being advocated. One needn't consider this for very long at the general level (i.e. the level of the entire community) to realize how it could never work. The very people making this point about the "contents of the vessel" would be at each other's throats if one asked them to declare what the truth actually is, since the first thing they'd discover is they have wildly differing views of it. That's why this point can only be made, or agreed with, in the abstract. The moment you cross into claiming any specific truth about a contentious topic, others will immediately protest that it is not a truth at all and that the opposite is true. Figuring out the truth is a social process—it happens by discourse, communication, exchange. This is everyone's job together, not some special power of the admins. The admins' job is to facilitate that process. This does not involve declaring what the truth is and imposing it on those who disagree, any more than it's a referee's job to decide which net the ball or the puck should go into. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22truth%20meter%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
dang 3y ago
Here are a few things that could be corrected or added. Corrections: * These URLs aren't public - you can only see them if you're logged in as $name: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=[name] https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=[name] https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=[name] https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=[name] * > Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks Moderators sometimes turn off the flags on posts like this, in which case the thread will usually stay on the front page. * > Hacker News allows users to see what the front page looks like at any point in time This wording makes me squeamish because the /front pages don't show what the front page looked like at any point in time - they're a blended average of the frontpage stories from a particular day. At no point did the front page actually look like that, but that's because you can't get a 24 hour view from any particular snapshot. Additions: * /next (or /prev) link on comments jumps to the next (or previous) comment at the same nesting level * /root links (on item pages) jump to the top-level GP comment (this may be renamed to /top in the future) * /context on a comment (when not on the original /item page) links to the comment in its place on the original /item page * in the RSS section, could include: https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss maps the frontpage and up to 9 pages after that * HN's software auto-edits titles to make them less linkbaity, but if it gets the edit wrong, you can change it after you submit (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38775366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38775366) * the bookmarklet could probably be added, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778787 Also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779156 because that's another undocumented aspect. How to sum it up in a sentence? Maybe: "If you only use HN to submit your own stuff, the software will eventually start filtering your submissions." But then I need a second sentence: "It's fine to submit your own stuff, but it should be part of a diverse mix of unrelated/interesting things."
- yawnxyz 3y ago
  Does your use of "moderators" imply "dang" is actually a collective of moderators all using one username?
  - dang 3y ago
dsubburam 3y ago
Ought the bookmarklet for submitting links[1] be mentioned? Granted not exactly undocumented, as it is linked on the /submit page. But I think worth including, as it is not in the Guidelines or FAQ. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html
- dang 3y ago
  I added that to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778450. We'll see if minimaxir goes for it :)
notatoad 3y ago
>Hacker News allows people to use the old front page ranking algorithm, which only counts votes from early users. Early users are defined as being created before Feb 13, 2008. anybody remember the significance of that date? i apparently joined five days later, and i'm guessing i was part of some wave of new signups triggered by some event.
- dang 3y ago
  It was "users who joined in the first year": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
nadermx 3y ago
Wait, so you're telling me that after 501 karma points it's all just as meaningless as before 501?
- oblio 3y ago
  Well, yeah. There are not extra perks except for the leaderboard. I've run forums with various types of tiered systems and you don't gain much by having "ranks".
  - nadermx 3y ago
    And here I was just under the impression it allowed me to reach zen.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      True zen is having less karma, not more.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Assuming one has full vouch privileges, why do some flagged comments have vouch links but others can not. Perhaps one can check the source code to answer questions like this, or perhaps the code is constantly changing.
- dang 3y ago
  'vouch' links only show up on [dead] posts, and [dead] and [flagged] are not the same thing. A post can be both [flagged] and [dead], in which case there will be a 'vouch' link—but not when a post is [flagged] but not [dead]. This makes sense once you understand that [dead] means "not generally visible"*, and the purpose of 'vouch' is to restore a post to general visibility. * that is, they're visible, but only to users who have 'showdead' turned on in their profile.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    Thank you. Is it correct to conclude that [vouch] links only appear on [flagged] submissions that are below the flag threshhold for [dead]. Maybe three flags or something. Are the [vouch] rules the same for both submissions and replies, i.e., comments. I inadvertently used the term "flagged comments"; I was actually curious about flagged submissions. For instance, as I type this there is a submission in /active that's [flagged] but not [dead], but there's no [vouch] link.
    - dang 3y ago
      > Is it correct to conclude that [vouch] links only appear on [flagged] submissions that are below the flag threshhold for [dead] Mostly yes, but there are also other (rarer) ways for a submission to end up both [flagged] and [dead]. > Are the [vouch] rules the same for both submissions and replies, i.e., comments Yes. > For instance, as I type this there is a submission in /active that's [flagged] but not [dead], but there's no [vouch] link. That's expected. Vouch links only show up on [dead] posts, as I explained above.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
      A. [vouch] links "only" appear on [dead] submissions. B. [vouch] links appear on [flagged] submissions that are not [dead]. A and B appear to contradict.
system2 3y ago
I don't see anything related to IP protection. For example, if I log out and log in with another user, can I upvote a comment? If so, this can lead to vote manipulation. Browser fingerprints are useless if the user is using Adblockers or an extension stripping that information while submitting data. What is preventing vote manipulation here? Signing up is so easy without email so I think there should be something.
jules-jules 3y ago
Another little discussed feature is that the 'active' list shows flagged submissions. For this reason I almost exclusively use this list.
wkjagt 3y ago
I just learned that a username in green means it’s a new account. I’d noticed green usernames before but always kinda assumed they were some kind of “higher status” accounts. Like verified accounts on Xitter.
rkagerer 3y ago
Hidden Reply Links If the comment depth is 3 or more, reply links are withheld until the comments age a while. The amount of aging is a function of the depth. You can get around it by clicking on the comment's timestamp to go to its own page. Is there a reason for the workaround? Like, it's a super secret way for gurus to avoid the friction?
- Doxin 3y ago
  Presumably the feature is there to avoid low effort replies to bait. Just about any amount of friction is good enough to make most people give up in that use case.
niutech 3y ago
How to search for the best HN stories with two different search terms in one search query, e.g. `webkit OR blink`?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

653 points by ssgodderidge 3y ago

I've noticed a shadowbanned behavior. If you submit a link that is a banned domain, you will notice that the 'discuss' link is missing and the post doesn't show up at all (but you see it).

ssgodderidge 3y ago
Any examples? I didn’t know about this one
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Turn on show dead in your profile and visit the "new" link (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest). You'll see a lot of [dead] links, those are the sort GP is referencing. [flagged][dead] are killed by user action (flags).
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  https://www.sciencealert.com/ https://www.sciencealert.com/
  - tptacek 3y ago
    There's lot of articles from this site on HN, including recently. But: * It seems low-quality, at times almost like the Weekly World News. On HN, we sometimes replace even high-quality science writing with primary sources (when the paper is recent and the writing is just a summary). * It's high-volume, which is problematic in that it incentivizes users to submit lots and lots of stuff from this one site; front page slots are the scarcest resource on HN and everything competes for it, so high-volume low-mid-quality sites tend to get downweighted. * It's slathered with ads and bait-y gimmicks. If there's something on this site that you think would make a good thread for HN, you can probably just find whatever it's blogspamming and submit that instead.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  LinkedIn, as I discovered earlier this year. (I'd emailed mods after noting that my submission seemed to have been autokilled. They revived it, though the submission didn't see much action.)

ulrischa 3y ago

Is the 501 karma level true? I heard 801?

jjulius 3y ago
It's 501.

XCabbage 3y ago

The list at https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors is definitely not "the complete set of colors users have set" as claimed. I know this because it doesn't include my top color (namely #64BFBD).

XCabbage 3y ago
Perplexingly, my color appeared there shortly after I posted this. Does that link contain colors of recently active users, perhaps?
- dang 3y ago
  Yes; users who have recently posted.
  - XCabbage 3y ago
    Ah, nice - so "my color doesn't appear on the list" is a problem that fixes itself automatically when you complain on HN about it!
    - dang 3y ago
      A suitably recursive property for an internet forum, which I doubt pg had in mind when he wrote that code.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    (For the curious, this is because HN only loads profiles into memory whenever users post. Then they stay in memory until a server reboot, which seems to happen every day or two.)
    - GreenWatermelon 3y ago
      Everything I hear about HN makes me feel like it's a hobby side project hosted on an old laptop in someones basement, and not literally the PR arm of a giant venture capital company.

aragonite 3y ago

I'm not sure if this is undocumented, but I've noticed that submitted links sometimes have either the pathname or search parameters portion of their URL truncated or stripped entirely. Sometimes the truncation happens after a slight delay. For example, if you try to submit a link to a particular Google Books page, say the one I just tried: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Albert_Einstein_Collection_Volume_On/XdTkDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT102 https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Albert_Einstein_Col... the link will remain intact for a short while before losing its search parameters and turning into a link to the book itself rather than to a page in it.

Jtsummers 3y ago
Possibly canonical links. HN looks at the submissions and updates the links to the canonical link if present. I'm on mobile so not able to double check the Google books page at the moment, but if you view source check to see if there's a canonical link in there. This also bites some blogging sites that end up with a canonical link to their base http://blog.example.com http://blog.example.com on all their posts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element
- aragonite 3y ago
  Just checked and you are exactly right (it's not in the raw source but the element is found in the DOM tree). This explains the delay also!
dang 3y ago
Jtsummers's answer is correct, but we turn off canonicalization for some classes of URLs and I think you've found a good example of that. I've exempted Google Books links for the future and put your submitted URL back in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38774261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38774261.
- aragonite 3y ago
  Thanks dang!

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Minor nit: I've posted about this before, but I wish folks would not refer to dang as a "moderator" or say stuff about "the HN moderators". If anything, I think it's more appropriate to refer to dang as the site admin. The reason this is a pet peeve of mine is I often see people complaining about "the HN moderators" (e.g. "the HN mods are on a power trip and keep flagging my submissions!" or some such), where they are clearly taking this conceptual model from Reddit, and they seem to think there is a shadowy cabal of "mods" who control what gets downvoted/flagged (and, in fairness, this does and can happen in subreddits). In other words, when you see your submissions being flagged or comments being downvoted or flagged, 99.9% of the time it's not "the HN mods" who are downvoting you. It's just other, normal HN users (who have earned 501+ karma as TFA explains) who simply don't like what you have to say. Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.

hunter2_ 3y ago
> and I've only seen it for Speculation/intuition, but I figure it happens in ways specifically designed to evade the type of detection you're basing your claim on, akin to shadow banning, whereas on Reddit there's often more visible evidence like corpses of deleted comments.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  You can see all of those deleted/flagged comments if you turn on "showdead" in your options.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  You can see the [dead] comments if you go to your profile and enable "showdead". Most of them are very bad, but from time to time you can find a false positive and vouch it.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    Yes, I keep that enabled. I guess I provided poor examples but what I'm saying is that it seems like on Reddit moderation activities are quite obvious (i.e., a giant chain of deleted comments tends to indicate moderation and elicit resentment) and here they're less obvious (there's an air of strong moderation but little to point at directly, which is great IMHO as it evades resentment).

nyjah 3y ago

The second chance pool blew my mind the first time I got an email to resubmit. You figure if a post gets no traction, that’s just how it is. But I’ll never forget getting that email.

susam 3y ago
+1 My post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956065 got no traction when I posted it and quickly disappeared from "/new" without many people noticing it. The next day, I received an email that this post was entered into the second chance pool. Then sometime later, it got picked for the front page and led to a good amount of community participation! Thanks to the second chance pool, I received several interesting demo submissions to my hobby project!

lossolo 3y ago

Your ability to download or upvote comments and stories can also be shadowbanned, rendering these actions ineffective.

alberth 3y ago

Missing “Classic” It’s missing the relatively recent new list called “Classic”. https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic Classic: Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts

TheCleric 3y ago
I see it there: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md#hacker-news-classic https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
n2d4 3y ago
Not relatively recent! The feature is from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271

isoprophlex 3y ago

It's missing "highlights" at https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights ... which, anecdotally, I learned about JUST after getting a comment on there. Imagine my surprise at learning about this (in a manner totally unrelated to the post I wrote that made it to the list), and seeing my own writing as the most recent item on the list. Truman show vibes for sure.

CharlesW 3y ago
Interesting! Is there something similar for stories?
- aragonite 3y ago
  There's "best" (Highest-voted recent links), "classic" (Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts) and "active" (Most active current discussions): https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
  - oblio 3y ago
    I wonder how you'd qualify for "classic".
    - aragonite 3y ago
      Apparently the account must be created before 2/13/2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker-news-classic https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
      - dang 3y ago
        That was because HN got its public start in Feb 2007 and pg wanted to look at users who had joined in the first year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779197
- 3y ago

cantSpellSober 3y ago

godelski 3y ago
I actually really hate this feature. The landscape has changed and I've been seriously contemplating asking @dang to nuke my account.
- goles 3y ago
  I would greatly encourage you to not nuke (but do contact) despite having had this thought myself. But I appreciate the fact the consequences for everyone are not the same, and potentially even fatal in current times. I believe I understand why it's done in the way it's done, but also this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large. Without speaking out of turn, which may just create more work, they can help. Contact hn@ycombinator.com.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    > this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large. I suppose it depends on one's perspective. We used to call self-censorship "decorum." The nature of human beings didn't change when we went online, and sometimes it behooves a person to just read the room before speaking. Because of the karma system, the upvote downvote system, and the user curated flagging system, I would classify Hacker News as a "decorum-friendly" message board where a certain amount of pre-filtering is not only necessary but highly encouraged.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - godelski 3y ago
    > but also this can drive self-censorship. Actually, this is the motivation __to__ nuke. It's what I mean about the environment changing. HN is one of the big places that get scraped and everyone is scraping all data that they can these days. It's very reasonable to believe you can be de-anonymized much more easily and that it's only going to get easier. It's not unreasonable to think that someone can mimic my speech and this creates a new vulnerability. I am thinking much more about self-censorship now and being more measured now than I have in the past. I do agree with you that self-censorship is a growing problem. But I'm not sure how to solve this when we're entering a world where it is the language you use that becomes a fingerprint. I appreciate the records because there is a lot of valuable information here but at the same time these records make us vulnerable in a way we haven't been before. And that it is in a way that not just worrying about nation states being able to do this but that we're posting these records to huggingface. The processing is just getting easier and that's about all that's needed now.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Seems to be missing comment vote manipulation. Users can see the number of votes their own comments get but can't see the number of votes other comments get, or even if their vote changes the vote count on a comment, which allows shadowbanning of unwanted comments by vote count alteration by mods/admins.

godelski 3y ago
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  That only covers downvoting comments, it doesn't mention why comment vote counts aren't publicly visible. Keeping comment vote counts invisible makes sense if upvotes on some comments are not being recorded as a form of shadowbanning those comments/users.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Other people's vote counts are invisible because they led to constant bickering about the merits of any given comment's "spot" vote count (this is also the reason there's a guideline that asks you not to write these kinds of comments, but changing the affordances so you can't see them at all was a much more effective solution to the problem). (My confidence in this explanation comes in part from the fact that I'm pretty sure I had a hand in this coming to pass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716). The conspiracist rationale here doesn't make much sense, because the site operators also control the displayed comment count and the registration of votes.
    - godelski 3y ago
      I thought a lot was about preventing bandwagoning or manipulation. In both directions, but especially downvoting.

fmx 3y ago

Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 Nice to see that some of the suggestions from there, like listing the hidden URLS (/leaders, etc.) seem to have been implemented.

dang 3y ago
Let's document it shall we: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments) A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments) Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)

b8 3y ago

There's other moderators than daang and some users help out with site stuff sometimes.

stormed 3y ago

A lot of these backend features/behaviors are super interesting to read through, especially in regards to the "flame war detector" section. I've only ever seen link aggregator websites such as Reddit relying on community moderation & spam detectors rather than anything to improve the quality of the discourse.

CharlesW 3y ago

I'm curious about the full list of automatic headline changes. They seem reasonable, but it's worth knowing that if they change a headline for the worse, you can immediately edit the submission and restore the original headline (or an "in the spirit of" edit that fits within HN's character limit).

DiabloD3 3y ago

My favorite is /leaders. Shame I'm not in the top 50 anymore, but there just ain't a lot of good content to submit anymore and karma whoring seems like a waste of time.

drfuchs 3y ago

I accidentally hit “hide” on an item I want to see. Where’s the documentation on how to unhide?

aragonite 3y ago
If you see it on this page (not accessible to anyone except you, logged in), you can just click "unhide" https://news.ycombinator.com/hidden?id=drfuchs https://news.ycombinator.com/hidden?id=drfuchs
- drfuchs 3y ago
  Very cool, thanks. How does one become aware of this class of magic? It seems completely undiscoverable, not being in the FAQ, nor in the present "List of Hacker News's undocumented features..."
erik_seaberg 3y ago
Your view of your profile page https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drfuchs https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drfuchs should have a “hidden” link where each story has an “un-hide” link instead of “hide.”
- drfuchs 3y ago
  Thanks. For those wondering how someone may have missed this: Evidently I had not in fact accidentally done a "hide", so nothing was in my hidden list, and thus my profile page cleverly didn't have a "hidden" link at all.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    Things expire off the hidden list over time as well, presumably based on when the link itself disappears, but such links will then show up on hn's historical view.
cozzyd 3y ago
Yeah it's very easy to accidentally hide (or flag!) posts on my phone. Wish there was an option for a confirm screen. Every once in a while I check what I've accidentally flagged and unflag it. I'm sure I'm not the only one...

voytec 3y ago

1) I enjoy figuring out how HN works over time by noticing certain patterns. Still haven't figured out (please don't spoil) why I can't downvote certain comments in threads where I see both arrows on other comments. HN feels like games in the past - you're given some docs but over time you'd go "ooooh" about something undocumented. Good stuff. 2) voting system works well for just users but HN is infested with corporate voting manipulation. It seems that an entity monitoring eg. brand's name is able to use just a few 501+ karma accounts to bury, or a few more to strongly boost, any post 3) based on what I learned about posts' scores (more than a grain of salt - as I mentioned - I'm still figuring things out) it seems a little out of place that sometimes a few hours-old posts (not as old to qualify for the "second chance" thing) with barely any comments and points are positioned higher on the top page than younger posts with more activity (higher score and more comments). I've noticed it more than once with substack and my assumption is that HN may be boosting YC-backed products

tptacek 3y ago
They do the opposite thing: they're extra hands-off with YC-backed things, and quicker to turn off flags on stories critical of YC-backed things. I don't see much evidence of voting manipulation (and a lot of evidence of HN being hair-trigger about suppressing vote manipulation).
shadowgovt 3y ago
It may not even be official corporate manipulation. HN is frequented by a lot of industry insiders, and if they see something that doesn't resonate with what they know to be true they'll downvote.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Exactly: there's a ton of people here who work at the big ad-tech companies, so of course they're going to downvote anything that promotes ad-blocking since that harms their own paycheck in a way. Imagine a discussion forum for medical topics (science, research, etc.) where 1/3 the users work for companies that sell homeopathic "remedies", and how that would influence moderation there.

goplayoutside 3y ago

Are there any browser extensions that provide a user tag feature, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite? There are so many notable tech people on HN, it would be useful to be able to recognize their posts and comments.

gnicholas 3y ago
https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends

divbzero 3y ago

When did Hacker News start applying topcolor to the YC logo? I just noticed it today but am curious if it’s been there for awhile.

dang 3y ago
I did it a couple days ago because a user had been emailing since 2016 that the orange Y doesn't look good when the bar is changed to Christmas red. Btw, that's not the record for how long a bug fix has taken. We get there eventually.
- JorgeGT 3y ago
  This update broke my workflow!
  - dang 3y ago
    I did warn him that people might complain about side effects Edit: believe it or not, we got more complaints about this. Some people picked their top color specifically to go nicely with the orange Y! So I've reverted this change, except for the Christmas case. Users who have set their topcolor don't see the Christmas top bar anyhow, so don't have to worry.
    - slymax 3y ago
      is it possible that NetNewsWire (possibly other rss readers as well) don't show the favicon for https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss anymore because of this change? I noticed this a few days ago
      - dang 3y ago
        HN is still serving the orange Y for favicons. Only the Y to the left of "Hacker News" in the top bar now has a transparent background. However, there was a brief period where we were serving the transparent Y for favicons before I noticed that and corrected it; I wonder if the transparent Y somehow got into a cache? Is there a way to force-refresh?

ilamont 3y ago

Thank you for compiling this list. I have been using the site since 2007 and had never looked into the classic page (assumed it was an old stylesheet or something similar). Also had no idea about some of those special URLs such as noobcomments. If a user has 31 Karma, they can also vouch for a [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored (and potentially improved as the vouch can counteract the effects of flags). Is this consistent? I recently vouched for something on the New page and it wasn't restored. One other thing I would like to ask: I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this?

gnicholas 3y ago
> I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this? I don't know if it still works, but I used this a few years ago for this exact reason: https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends
- swyx 3y ago
  val.town has a hnfollow thingy that i use now, but tbh i dont know when it doesnt work

minimaxir 3y ago

fine, I'll update the list today

ssgodderidge 3y ago
Thanks for putting this together. I’ve been on HN for a while (even before getting an account) and learned a ton with this list
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Guilt Driven Development
- mayormcmatt 3y ago
  Ha, truly! I read his comment, refreshed the GitHub repo and saw the "changes made < 1 minute ago" flag.
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    I needed an excuse to be productive. :)
    - ishanhegde 3y ago
      This is legitimately useful for new folks. Nice work
- qingcharles 3y ago
  This is the only paradigm I follow :( If DMs about web site bug > X then push fix lol
tech234a 3y ago
I figured this list was on the front page again when I was notified that my PR [1] was finally merged :) [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/60 https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/6...
3y ago

StevenNunez 3y ago

Guess I need to figure out how to get more Karma! I didn't know there were more features to this site since I'm essentially a lurker.

system2 3y ago
This mindset turns this place into Reddit. I think the features should be enabled after a certain time rather than how likable the person is.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I'd propose participation for X days and a very loose karma metric (e.g. non-negative karma to block out consistent hecklers) as a compromise. You don't want someone who posted once and disappears for months to be given elevated permissions, because the idea of the karma gate is to adjust to how the community works before getting more features. semi-artbituarily, I'd say 2-3 months worth of distinct days making a comment or post should be enough time.
- fader 3y ago
  Yeah, the karma requirements mean you frequently see people adding noise to discussions rather than signal, just to get out there and seen. I rarely comment and haven't hit the 501 threshold to downvote despite being here for a number of years, mostly because I just upvote what I agree with rather than posting a "me too". (And I'm now concerned that this comment will feel like a "me too" :) )
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 3y ago
HN points are a function of time and posting frequency.

MatthiasPortzel 3y ago

One undocumented heuristic that I wish was documented better is that repeated submissions to the same domain, especially without discussion activity, leads to an automated shadow ban. This is just from what I’ve observed browsing /new with Show Dead turned on. There are lots of people submitting their own blog posts or repeated posts from their favorite news outlets who have been shadow banned. Vouching provides a mechanism for restoring posts of particular quality, but most of these people aren’t trying to spam, they just don’t know this unspoken rule.

dang 3y ago
That's connected to this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." If people submit primarily their own stuff, our software eventually starts classifying the account as "promotional" and starts filtering the posts. People are totally welcome to submit their own work—that's great—but to use HN as intended, they should do that as part of a diverse set of submissions on unrelated/interesting things. There are too many bloggers/marketers/writers out there that use HN merely as yet-another-channel for the content they're pushing, and that's definitely not in the curious spirit which is supposed to animate HN.
- raldi 3y ago
  As we used to say at the other site, it’s okay to be a redditor with a website; it’s not okay to be a website with a reddit account.
  - dang 3y ago
    That's a nice way to put it!
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  there's a slight difference between "your own stuff" and "same domain"... I don't know how many false positives would fans/people with narrow sharing interest make, but slight editing of the guideline might help make them less "false"

cloudking 3y ago

Idea: 1000 karma should get custom CSS as a setting.

isoprophlex 3y ago
and a dark mode button ;)
- cloudking 3y ago
  I'd settle for that too!
  - system2 3y ago
    Why don't you use Dark Reader extension instead?
    - jessekv 3y ago
      But I sometimes use Hacker News from remote machines, and it would be a pain to configure all of them with custom extensions!
      - cloudking 3y ago
        Yeah this is the reason. I want a solution that works from any browser/device without the need to use extensions.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  You and parent might enjoy checking my profile for customised HN CSS. (I apply those using the Stylus CSS manager browser extension.)

charcircuit 3y ago

HN also has rate limits on making comments for certain users. The limit is easy to hit and takes hours to go away. This results in having to ignore people's questions because it will waste a comment contributing to one's rate limit. One can also respond to people by editing one's comment, but that has poor ux.

joecool1029 3y ago
Had it in the past on my acct. It always showed up when I posted on topics about trees and commented faster than normal. Wasn't aware it was a thing until emailing HN and dang mentioned it. I'd maybe suggest updating the message to include some approximate time the limit expires. 'Come back in a few hours' or something. I say this because it was unusual enough for me to hit that I'd rewrite my comments thinking it was some kind of word flag I'd tripped, then try to repost it in 5-10 minutes only to have it fail again.
unethical_ban 3y ago
This is an annoying feature which I have encountered. I know it is to calm heated discussions, but the ambiguity of the message is belittling. I'm not overwhelming the database; just tell me how long I have if you're going to put me in timeout for a few hours. It isn't a frequent issue, but putting duct tape on someone's mouth when they're talking about something they care about does not calm them down, even if it achieves the primary goal.
xienze 3y ago
You’re talking about the “you’re posting too fast, please slow down” message? IME it’s not a rate limit but a passive-aggressive way of banning someone from a conversation for some amount of time.
- paganel 3y ago
  Not the OP but I think that's what the OP had in mind, yeah. It's interesting because that limit has made me even more "radical" (by the unwritten standards of HN), i.e. when I know that I only have a limited amount of comments per day to make my point I use those comments in a more "push-y" manner by responding to the most provocative replies to what I had previously said, while also ignoring replying to comments that are too bland. Which means that I go by the logic of "why should I reply to this reasonable comment when there's this other more radical comment that's a lot more thorough and violent when trying to debunk what I had just written? I should use my limited number of comments by answering to the latter, not the former". One of the many paradoxes of confrontation ("war") at work, that is if you regard many of the discussions in here as confrontation (even "war") of ideas.

submeta 3y ago

Would like to mention Dang here, he is doing an extraordinary job in keeping this place sane and civilised. I really am wondering how he can read and react to so many comments quickly. Dang, care to elaborate? Do you see a flat list of new comments, review them quickly? Do you use a moderation tool that scans the mood / tone / aggresiveness of a post? How do you do the screening and the replies? Manually?

core_dumped 3y ago
Dang is just a 10x moderator
- Zuiii 3y ago
  He's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if he was literally 10x moderators. Thank you dang (dangs?) for what you do.
  - jader201 3y ago
    Not sure if you were (half) joking, but in case you weren’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139 (Spoiler alert: it’s all Dan G.)
- revskill 3y ago
  Even if you said 100x, he wont upvote you, hehe
_8j50 3y ago
I used to think so until the shadow restriction/moderation stuff. I must agree with the quality part though, just not the methods. But like reddit and other platform, the majority of users don't give a shit about this stuff until it's their turn. Oh well, shit is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago

Y-bar 3y ago

> Inclusivity […] Unfortunately. (Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks). Why would this be described as “unfortunate”? For example tings like LLM:s being trained on flawed/biased data is a known real and unfortunate thing which can hurt already marginalised groups in society if used for eg. policy derisions.

sokoloff 3y ago
The “unfortunately” refers to the preceding text rather than the following. > However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately.
- Y-bar 3y ago
  That’s my point, I think. It seems to me that moderators are doing the right thing by HN rules and context by tagging such discussions are not off-topic. Why is it described as “unfortunate” then?
  - djur 3y ago
    I think you're reading it as "Unfortunately, moderators occasionally unkill such threads..." when it's meant as "...they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless, unfortunately".
    - Y-bar 3y ago
      I think so too perhaps and hopefully, but there is no comma As in your example. Just a period suggesting the previous sentence has ended.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        True. But the following phrase is set off by both a period and a set of parentheses. I think it’s pretty clear the author’s intent is for there to be a complete sentence about the behavior of HN users and then a complete thought saying that was unfortunate. (Then a parenthetical about the moderator behavior.)

orenlindsey 3y ago

This list is pretty nice, I learned a lot from it.

atomicfiredoll 3y ago
I've lurked here and on other discussion/aggregation sites for years (I've apparently been here 10--oof) and only recent started commenting a little more. This whole time I didn't realize the top color could be set. I noticed it in my profile a couple days ago and thought it was an entirely new site feature. Seeing all this info I was unaware of laid out in front of me makes me wish there was a docs page linked in the footer, like Tildes has.

cinntaile 3y ago

Another undocumented feature is that flagging posts/submissions very likely is weighted differently for different users.

spencerchubb 3y ago

The 'over' url parameter is a great feature and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it until now

javajosh 3y ago

There is another hidden feature, a "weak shadowban" which places your comment lower on the page than default. I think it is a manual flag set by some unknown heuristic, basically a "we don't like you but not enough to ban you" signal. This happened to me several months ago after a heated political debate and still is in effect (I'm sure it will happen to this comment, for example).

matheusmoreira 3y ago
You're rate limited. So am I. Even emailed dang about it. I suppose my case is similar enough: started happening some time after some discussion that went wrong. I really don't remember which but I don't deny participating in them. Truth be told it's probably a good thing for someone like me. HN is addictive and getting kicked out after 5 posts is essentially a better noprocrast setting. I actually thought it was the noprocrast setting at first since at the time I had just begun experimenting with it. It's the automatic downranking of posts that hurt me. Noticed it recently. I've been trying to be more selective towards which posts I reply to but it feels pointless since any and all comments immediately sink towards the bottom of the page, unseen. A smaller problem with this system: taking the time to write a comment, submitting it and only then being denied. I actually wasn't sure if this comment was going to go through but the timer must have reset. I hesitate to suggest some kind of indicator. It would be very helpful but it would also create a timed reward schedule not entirely dissimilar from those Skinner's box simulators they call mobile games.
- pests 3y ago
  Are you sure you're not just hitting the post timer limits? You can't immediately reply to deep threads
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Dang confirmed it. The following message is returned after the 5th post: > You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.

_8j50 3y ago

Any hidden feature to get past shadow moderation? I know I am not entitled to anything and no one cares unless they are affected directly but it would be nice if "you're posting too fast" restrictions (could mean 3 or 4 times in one day) showed up before I spend like half an hour composing a reply to someone, not after. But alas, not owed anything, hn is a social engagement site for a VC at the end of the day. But the non-transparent moderation stuff speaks volumes about the culture and all. Will try to post non-FUD, high quality comments and posts (read between the lines lol).

fragmede 3y ago
I believe the hidden feature is to email dang at hn@ycombinator.com and promise you'll never ever shit post again.
- _8j50 3y ago
  But then I have to use email! You're right though.
dang 3y ago
I hear you and am willing to meet you on this, but you simply can't post things to HN like "you are just an ageist tribal presumptive jerk" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769241) without getting penalized and/or banned. I understand that the other person was being provocative, but a lot of this is about how we handle provocation—i.e. it's about learning to get hit by provocation (whether intentional or unintentional), absorbing the shock in oneself, and then not responding in kind. You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is, and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while, we can definitely take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
- _8j50 3y ago
  @dang, the "jerk" part was over the line and I was in the wrong. However, my problem is not with the rules or in the restriction but with the fact that your restrictions where not transparent (shadow moderation) and you didn't think simply asking me to refrain would not work. In the past for example, you asked me to avoid brigading and I have avoided it since. You used a humorous comment I made (like I've seen others do once in a while) as an example of low quality comment so I avoid any sort of humor on HN now. I will assume in cases such as what you quoted, you would treat the person I replied to with the same level of non-transparent hostility? If so I will avoid defending myself, else I will just avoid using "over the line" terms like "jerk" and use more tolerable terms like "unkind". > and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while You tolerate political topics on HN. On such threads, it seems my problem is that I do not understand what you mean by that. My expectation is either you tell me or others flag my comment if it is inappropriate. I never attack someone's character and try to focus on technical analysis of things, what you quoted there was in response to someone attacking my character (will refrain). I will read your rules again. Perhaps I should avoid sensitive topics entirely on HN but truth be told, I make them in anticipation of a healthy discourse (which if you note on that comment thread was had). This is the only site I know of where that is actually possible these days. But I'd hate to think simply sharing my views is causing such a burden. > You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is I don't think that is true. But no worries, I undersrand your perspective well enough. At least I now know that this isn't in my head, thanks for confirming. I sincerely hope you reconsider this approach and inform others (if they exist) of your disapproval or measures instead of shadow/secret approaches. You absolutley have the right to moderate content and tell people to stop any behavior, just like this. I'll seriously consider stopping active participation as a 2024 resolution. Happy new years!

averageRoyalty 3y ago

Unfortunately it still doesn't mention "rate limited" accounts[0], which is extremely confusing when it happens to you. It's happened to me on this account, I can't comment more than 5 times per some arbitrary period - I'm guessing 24 hour UTC. No explanation or information is given - you don't even know until HN seems broken and you go searching. dang mentioned that's something they'd like to impove, but given the slow movement of HN features, I doubt it will. Note that none of this is meant as a slight on dang - I respect the work he does and really like the site, but it doesn't make it less frustrating. The result will be me rolling a new account (against site guidelines), as I have no other privacy preserving way of handling the issue. 0. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues/21#issuecomment-668062012 https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

jorvi 3y ago
Beautifully stated at your link: > dang often says that he's concerned about protecting HN as a vessel. But he seems less concerned about the truthfulness of the contents of the vessel. So IMO, HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics. has HN ever claimed to be a place for "free" discussion? I feel the sentiment of "free speech forums" was cracking at the seams some 18-20 years ago, and compeltely fell apart around 9-10 years ago. If you want unfiltered opinions, you go to a place with minimal moderation. HN was never that.
- dang 3y ago
  > But he seems less concerned about the truthfulness of the contents of the vessel. It puzzles me when people say such things. We don't have a truth meter [1]; how are we supposed to decide what's true vs. false? By definition, there's zero consensus on any contentious topic. Should we pick one view and impose it? Whose would that be? my own? Even if I thought I knew the truth about everything (and I am very far from feeling that way), I can tell you how well that would go over: everyone would hate it. There's another level too: are we supposed to ban people for being wrong? Being wrong is part of finding out the truth; of being curious. No one makes it to the truth in a single jump, nor on their own. Obviously people need the freedom to be wrong about things. And another level: HN is about intellectual curiosity and interesting conversation. Interesting conversation is not always a pure sequence of true statements. Curiosity wants to figure out the truth, of course—but optimizing for curiosity [2] is not the same thing as optimizing for truth. The latter would mean excluding speculation, for example. That would be less interesting! When someone wants the mods to decide what is true and moderate by that, I can't fathom what they mean, unless they just want moderators to support whatever they agree with and ban whatever they disagree with. No one would put it that crudely, but no one has explained what else is being advocated. One needn't consider this for very long at the general level (i.e. the level of the entire community) to realize how it could never work. The very people making this point about the "contents of the vessel" would be at each other's throats if one asked them to declare what the truth actually is, since the first thing they'd discover is they have wildly differing views of it. That's why this point can only be made, or agreed with, in the abstract. The moment you cross into claiming any specific truth about a contentious topic, others will immediately protest that it is not a truth at all and that the opposite is true. Figuring out the truth is a social process—it happens by discourse, communication, exchange. This is everyone's job together, not some special power of the admins. The admins' job is to facilitate that process. This does not involve declaring what the truth is and imposing it on those who disagree, any more than it's a referee's job to decide which net the ball or the puck should go into. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22truth%20meter%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

dang 3y ago

Here are a few things that could be corrected or added. Corrections: * These URLs aren't public - you can only see them if you're logged in as $name: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=[name] https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=[name] https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=[name] https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=[name] * > Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks Moderators sometimes turn off the flags on posts like this, in which case the thread will usually stay on the front page. * > Hacker News allows users to see what the front page looks like at any point in time This wording makes me squeamish because the /front pages don't show what the front page looked like at any point in time - they're a blended average of the frontpage stories from a particular day. At no point did the front page actually look like that, but that's because you can't get a 24 hour view from any particular snapshot. Additions: * /next (or /prev) link on comments jumps to the next (or previous) comment at the same nesting level * /root links (on item pages) jump to the top-level GP comment (this may be renamed to /top in the future) * /context on a comment (when not on the original /item page) links to the comment in its place on the original /item page * in the RSS section, could include: https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss maps the frontpage and up to 9 pages after that * HN's software auto-edits titles to make them less linkbaity, but if it gets the edit wrong, you can change it after you submit (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38775366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38775366) * the bookmarklet could probably be added, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778787 Also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779156 because that's another undocumented aspect. How to sum it up in a sentence? Maybe: "If you only use HN to submit your own stuff, the software will eventually start filtering your submissions." But then I need a second sentence: "It's fine to submit your own stuff, but it should be part of a diverse mix of unrelated/interesting things."

yawnxyz 3y ago
Does your use of "moderators" imply "dang" is actually a collective of moderators all using one username?
- dang 3y ago

dsubburam 3y ago

Ought the bookmarklet for submitting links[1] be mentioned? Granted not exactly undocumented, as it is linked on the /submit page. But I think worth including, as it is not in the Guidelines or FAQ. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

dang 3y ago
I added that to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778450. We'll see if minimaxir goes for it :)

notatoad 3y ago

>Hacker News allows people to use the old front page ranking algorithm, which only counts votes from early users. Early users are defined as being created before Feb 13, 2008. anybody remember the significance of that date? i apparently joined five days later, and i'm guessing i was part of some wave of new signups triggered by some event.

dang 3y ago
It was "users who joined in the first year": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

nadermx 3y ago

Wait, so you're telling me that after 501 karma points it's all just as meaningless as before 501?

oblio 3y ago
Well, yeah. There are not extra perks except for the leaderboard. I've run forums with various types of tiered systems and you don't gain much by having "ranks".
- nadermx 3y ago
  And here I was just under the impression it allowed me to reach zen.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    True zen is having less karma, not more.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Assuming one has full vouch privileges, why do some flagged comments have vouch links but others can not. Perhaps one can check the source code to answer questions like this, or perhaps the code is constantly changing.

dang 3y ago
'vouch' links only show up on [dead] posts, and [dead] and [flagged] are not the same thing. A post can be both [flagged] and [dead], in which case there will be a 'vouch' link—but not when a post is [flagged] but not [dead]. This makes sense once you understand that [dead] means "not generally visible"*, and the purpose of 'vouch' is to restore a post to general visibility. * that is, they're visible, but only to users who have 'showdead' turned on in their profile.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Thank you. Is it correct to conclude that [vouch] links only appear on [flagged] submissions that are below the flag threshhold for [dead]. Maybe three flags or something. Are the [vouch] rules the same for both submissions and replies, i.e., comments. I inadvertently used the term "flagged comments"; I was actually curious about flagged submissions. For instance, as I type this there is a submission in /active that's [flagged] but not [dead], but there's no [vouch] link.
  - dang 3y ago
    > Is it correct to conclude that [vouch] links only appear on [flagged] submissions that are below the flag threshhold for [dead] Mostly yes, but there are also other (rarer) ways for a submission to end up both [flagged] and [dead]. > Are the [vouch] rules the same for both submissions and replies, i.e., comments Yes. > For instance, as I type this there is a submission in /active that's [flagged] but not [dead], but there's no [vouch] link. That's expected. Vouch links only show up on [dead] posts, as I explained above.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    A. [vouch] links "only" appear on [dead] submissions. B. [vouch] links appear on [flagged] submissions that are not [dead]. A and B appear to contradict.

system2 3y ago

I don't see anything related to IP protection. For example, if I log out and log in with another user, can I upvote a comment? If so, this can lead to vote manipulation. Browser fingerprints are useless if the user is using Adblockers or an extension stripping that information while submitting data. What is preventing vote manipulation here? Signing up is so easy without email so I think there should be something.

jules-jules 3y ago

Another little discussed feature is that the 'active' list shows flagged submissions. For this reason I almost exclusively use this list.

wkjagt 3y ago

I just learned that a username in green means it’s a new account. I’d noticed green usernames before but always kinda assumed they were some kind of “higher status” accounts. Like verified accounts on Xitter.

rkagerer 3y ago

Hidden Reply Links If the comment depth is 3 or more, reply links are withheld until the comments age a while. The amount of aging is a function of the depth. You can get around it by clicking on the comment's timestamp to go to its own page. Is there a reason for the workaround? Like, it's a super secret way for gurus to avoid the friction?

Doxin 3y ago
Presumably the feature is there to avoid low effort replies to bait. Just about any amount of friction is good enough to make most people give up in that use case.

niutech 3y ago

How to search for the best HN stories with two different search terms in one search query, e.g. `webkit OR blink`?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]