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I know what I _don't_ want to be able to customize. What I can and can't see. Similar sites give the ability to block submissions or comments from a particula

by tsally 18y ago

I know what I _don't_ want to be able to customize. What I can and can't see. Similar sites give the ability to block submissions or comments from a particular user. I think this is a horrible idea given the special nature of this community. The most defining aspect about Hacker News is its high quality. Any type of ignore feature is just going to take away from that. Just because you can't see the garbage doesn't mean it's not there. The flag feature is already sufficient; ignore functionality would be a huge mistake. EDIT: I just had another thought. I also believe that any type of functionality that allows the categorization or filtering of topics would be bad, for the reason outlined above. If there are too many high quality stories that people need to filter or categorize them, the rate at which stories fall off the front page should be increased. Having too many high quality stories is a fantastic problem, but it should be solved by being more selective, not by filtering.

sutro 18y ago
Why argue against a feature that you wouldn't have to use? I would appreciate the option to ignore certain users. In fact, you may eventually find it useful to ignore me and my future disagreements with your future anti-optional-feature advocacy.
- daleharvey 18y ago
  Because it has an impact on the community as a whole, if you have the ability to not view submissions, you dont get to downmod them if they arent "in the spirit" Look at loosely computer related obama articles, or techcrunch ones, they are inevitably posted and quite a lot of people dont like to see them. Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read, more likely to go on the frontpage. combine that with the impression of new users (who havent blocked anything) and its a cycle.
  - m0nty 18y ago
    "Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read" Errr ... downvote comments I understand, but downvote articles? It's unpossible! Personally, I'd like to be able to hide or filter articles I'm not interested in. User blocking, I would agree, is antisocial and not in the spirit of things.
  - sutro 18y ago
    You can't downmod submissions. And comment downmods already act as a filtering device by graying out the text of unpopular comments. I doubt many HN regulars would say that the site today suffers from a lack of comment downmods. Those who would choose these hypothetical filtering options would be choosing to passively consume HN as readers rather than as participants. Those who wished to remain active participants would be able to do so. This happens already, where a minority of "leaders" drive most participation and a silent majority consumes the site passively. The only difference would be that you'd be giving tools to the silent majority to make their experience more compelling by automating the filtering that they already do manually.

by tsally 18y ago

sutro 18y ago

Why argue against a feature that you wouldn't have to use? I would appreciate the option to ignore certain users. In fact, you may eventually find it useful to ignore me and my future disagreements with your future anti-optional-feature advocacy.

daleharvey 18y ago
Because it has an impact on the community as a whole, if you have the ability to not view submissions, you dont get to downmod them if they arent "in the spirit" Look at loosely computer related obama articles, or techcrunch ones, they are inevitably posted and quite a lot of people dont like to see them. Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read, more likely to go on the frontpage. combine that with the impression of new users (who havent blocked anything) and its a cycle.
- m0nty 18y ago
  "Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read" Errr ... downvote comments I understand, but downvote articles? It's unpossible! Personally, I'd like to be able to hide or filter articles I'm not interested in. User blocking, I would agree, is antisocial and not in the spirit of things.
- sutro 18y ago
  You can't downmod submissions. And comment downmods already act as a filtering device by graying out the text of unpopular comments. I doubt many HN regulars would say that the site today suffers from a lack of comment downmods. Those who would choose these hypothetical filtering options would be choosing to passively consume HN as readers rather than as participants. Those who wished to remain active participants would be able to do so. This happens already, where a minority of "leaders" drive most participation and a silent majority consumes the site passively. The only difference would be that you'd be giving tools to the silent majority to make their experience more compelling by automating the filtering that they already do manually.