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I figured as such. Can I ask that you change the website itself to make them visible to logged out accounts? I understand exactly why you did this but I feel li

I figured as such. Can I ask that you change the website itself to make them visible to logged out accounts? I understand exactly why you did this but I feel like if you showed them collapsed by default on the single-comment page and you have to actively click on a "banned" to expand them you really are out of line when you complain about how Hacker News hosts horrible content or whatever.

dang 2y ago
You mean for [dead] comments? Sorry, but strong no. Logged-in-with-showdead-turned-on has proven to be the correct height for that gate. Anyone who wants to can easily clear it, but the small amount of effort and information required means that most people become core community members before turning it on. If we lowered it, naive-casual readers would (through no fault of their own) misunderstand what they were looking at and the dynamic I just described would kick in. The longer I've worked on HN the more I've come to appreciate PG's design of this critical aspect of the site. No content is hidden from users who want to see it*, but the worst is (mostly) cordoned off so it doesn't destroy the community. Banned users can continue to post, but their comments are autokilled, so they're cordoned off by default. We're often asked: why allow banned users to continue to post? The answer is that if we didn't, they'd just create new accounts, and then they'd be posting with unbanned accounts until we caught them and banned them again: a strictly worse situation. This is one aspect of PG's design that took me years to appreciate and got me thinking it might even be optimal. The one major change we made to the original design was adding 'vouching' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512), which lets the community transfer cordoned-off posts back to the commons if there's nothing wrong with them. That bit has worked out really well. * (Except for [deleted] posts. If you see [deleted] it always means that either the author deleted it or asked us to do that for them.)

dang 2y ago

You mean for [dead] comments? Sorry, but strong no. Logged-in-with-showdead-turned-on has proven to be the correct height for that gate. Anyone who wants to can easily clear it, but the small amount of effort and information required means that most people become core community members before turning it on. If we lowered it, naive-casual readers would (through no fault of their own) misunderstand what they were looking at and the dynamic I just described would kick in. The longer I've worked on HN the more I've come to appreciate PG's design of this critical aspect of the site. No content is hidden from users who want to see it*, but the worst is (mostly) cordoned off so it doesn't destroy the community. Banned users can continue to post, but their comments are autokilled, so they're cordoned off by default. We're often asked: why allow banned users to continue to post? The answer is that if we didn't, they'd just create new accounts, and then they'd be posting with unbanned accounts until we caught them and banned them again: a strictly worse situation. This is one aspect of PG's design that took me years to appreciate and got me thinking it might even be optimal. The one major change we made to the original design was adding 'vouching' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512), which lets the community transfer cordoned-off posts back to the commons if there's nothing wrong with them. That bit has worked out really well. * (Except for [deleted] posts. If you see [deleted] it always means that either the author deleted it or asked us to do that for them.)