4 ms·
We need you to stop posting shallow dismissals and cynical, curmudgeonly, and snarky comments. We asked you about this just recently, but it's still most of wh
by dang 10mo ago
We need you to stop posting shallow dismissals and cynical, curmudgeonly, and snarky comments.
We asked you about this just recently, but it's still most of what you're posting. You're making the site worse by doing this, right at the point where it's most vulnerable these days.
Your comment here is a shallow dismissal of exactly the type the HN guidelines ask users to avoid here:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Predictably, it led to by far the worst subthread on this article. That's not cool. I don't want to ban you because you're also occasionally posting good comments that don't fit these negative categories, but we need you to fix this and stop degrading the threads.
- cheesecompiler 10mo agoOut of curiosity of someone who missed out on this, what is the site vulnerable to?
- dang 10mo agoCynical, curmudgeonly, dismissive comments that ruin it as a place for curiosity. If you're interested, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 are other places I wrote about this recently. It's the biggest problem facing HN, in my opinion.
- minimaxir 10mo ago> It's the biggest problem facing HN, in my opinion. Surprisingly the latest increase in polarization around generative AI has impacted Hacker News the least our of all tech social spaces.
- dang 10mo agoI respect your awareness of that, which I'm sure is much broader than mine is. HN consumes my attention; I'm all depth and no breadth. What I'm interested in is how well HN does at fulfilling its own mandate in its own terms. On that scale, it's getting worse—in this respect, at least, which is a big one. We're going to do something about it, the same way we've always tried to stave off the decline of this place (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=stave%20off%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you're right that the phenomenon is affecting other places even more than HN then I guess we get to be the-worst-internet-forum-except-for-all-the-others even more than before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494318, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=outrun%20the%20bear&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - not a bad outcome for HN, though I think it might be overly optimistic.
- maxbond 10mo ago> On that scale, it's getting worse... I don't mean to express doubt (you would know better than I) but what makes you say that? Do you think it's a consequence of external factors like the current political climate or of internal factors like HN getting larger?
- dang 10mo agoI think it's both external and internal, but the internal factors are more important because a compromised immune system is more vulnerable to outer pathogens. I'm not sure it's about HN getting larger, though. It's a bit hard to tell, but at least some of the upswing in cynical and curmudgeonly comments is coming from established users.
- casey2 10mo agoI'd rather HN become a much worse place than the world suffer though AI massive wealth theft, the BIG LIE that will convince elites to kill millions of people.
- dang 10mo agoObviously it's our job to ban accounts that make HN a much worse place, but I'm more curious to understand your thinking here. What's the connection between these two things? They don't seem related to me. How would making HN worse contribute to alleviating world suffering or saving millions of people?