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> it's not fair to the author To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actua
by lapcat 1y ago
> it's not fair to the author
To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors. You must be aware of this, yes?
I think it would be refreshing to have a summary from the submitter who, more likely than other commenters, read the article and appreciates it. As an article author, I say that I'm least worried about the submitter being unfair to me.
> We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting.
The community missed here is the people who not only don't read the article but don't comment either, who completely ignore the article, because the article title was uninformative.
I gave an example in another thread of a submission whose title is so vague as to be practically meaningless to those deciding whether to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966
In the absence of a useful title, the only way for someone to determine whether an article is worth reading is to check the upvotes and/or the comments. But that, I think, makes the anti-summary attitude ironic, because upvotes and comments don't come from the original author. Indeed, one of the reasons that many people go to the comments before reading the article—and HN users explicitly say this—is that they want to determine whether the article is worth reading. From my perspective, a brief summary or "pitch" if you will, would encourage more people to read the article and/or discourage people from reading an article that they come back and complain about having read.
And I would say, by the way, that one of the main reasons that submitters editorialize the article title is the title itself is not particularly informative.
> tacitly endorsed by HN
I'm not sure what this means exactly. In one sense, every submission and comment on HN, even the comments from people who haven't read the article, or comments that are otherwise inaccurate, is tacitly endorsed by HN, except perhaps those that have been specifically moderated by you. Indeed, you might even say that HN tacitly endorses every article that is linked by HN!
In another sense, though, a submission, and the proposed summary of the submission is not endorsed by HN but rather by the HN user who submitted it, whose username is attached to the submission. And I don't see a problem with that. This is always the case for a website with user-submitted content. Everyone can tell the difference between the site and the user.
By the way, while a moderator is here, the person who apparently summoned you here accused me of sealioning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008
- tptacek 1y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22work%20a%20little%22%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- lapcat 1y agoWas that link supposed to make a point? I think it needed a summary from you. ;-) As far as I can tell, HN receives a new submission on average every few minutes. Nobody can possibly click all the links and read all the articles. So, HN readers need some way(s) of determining which articles are likely interesting and which are likely not. Imagine if HN submissions included only the URL and not the article title. That would be silly, right? But why would it be silly? Because then you'd have little idea what the article is about, unless the URL itself encoded words that explain it. If we admit that HN readers need some kind of guide to the vast number of articles submitted, then I don't see why it's so far-fetched and seemingly unholy for the submission to add a brief summary. I actually want to read interesting articles. I'm perfectly willing to "work a little", as it were. There are interesting articles that I miss, that I would read, if not for the uninformative article titles, and that's unfortunate, I think.
- aspenmayer 1y ago[flagged]
- lapcat 1y ago> I mean, you kind of asked for a response from mods by asking me to speak to the guidelines I was requesting that you literally quote the relevant passage(s) from the guidelines or from other sources, which is simply copy and paste, not speaking for anyone. You claimed that something was in the guidelines, but I read the guidelines and didn't find the thing you claimed, so direct quotes would seem to be the natural next step, not emailing the moderators, which feels like overkill. > I don't think it's fair to call what I originally said an accusation per se, because I don't think it's necessarily up for debate what I was reminded of, as I am an authority on my own state of mind. You can be reminded of anything you like, in your own mind. When you publish it, as a reply to me, it becomes for all practical purposes an accusation. I have thoughts about various people, including you, that I refrain from publishing. > You yourself said you weren't finding it very entertaining, which to me seemed sarcastic and flippant No, I was quite honest and sincere, about that and about the purpose of HN itself. The HN guidelines say that on-topic is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting", "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." That's more or less entertainment. Highbrow, perhaps, but still entertainment. > If users and mods acknowledge your point as being worth discussing, yet disagree with your desired course of action, where would you like this conversation to go from here? I understand disagreement, which is fine. I also understand that summaries are subjective (which I also think is fine). What I did not understand was your comments about "bad actors", "charlatans", and "sophists". This is a threat model that does not seem very applicable or realistic in the context.