4 ms·
That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own percep
by dang 3mo ago
That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.
I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800
- mh- 3mo ago(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.) The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead. I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with. I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines. Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc. I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here. I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
- defrost 3mo ago> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead. Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead]. I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist. I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
- mh- 3mo agoI always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings.. But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.
- defrost 3mo ago> I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. It's a rare individual that reads all the comments .. my impression is they appreciate on point heads up emails about accidentally auto-binned comments and are happy to reverse flagging on good comments, even those that try and make the dark side of a case. Probably best not to try and flood the zone with anti/pro pet subject matter karen emails though. FWiW I semi frequently pick apart comments supporting cases I'm in favour of .. because I want to see better arguments being made and to discourage weak easily dismissed shallow support.
- mh- 3mo agoI agree with that, the ones I see flagged are frequently espousing viewpoints I disagree with. But they should be debated then, and flagging them denies everyone that opportunity.
- wizzwizz4 3mo agoI try to flag only bad-faith arguing. I need to get more disciplined about flagging bad-faith arguing for stances I agree with: I don't flag those comments nearly as much, perhaps because I simply don't perceive them as bad-faith if I agree with them. Then again, I'm perfectly capable of perceiving bad-faith comments opposing generative AI. I had dismissed the possibility out of hand, so it's possible that the reason I don't see many bad-faith agrees-with-me comments, AI-bashing aside, is because there aren't many: maybe people who agree with me tend to act in good faith.
- archagon 3mo agoPersonally, I've never seen a dead comment come back to life. I'm not sure using the vouch button does anything. (It does for submissions, though.)
- dang 3mo agoI'd need to see specific links, but many of those posts are probably being killed because our software classified them as being genai, which is not allowed on HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.)
- archagon 3mo agoFine. Looking at today's /active, it's more than half just based on the titles. (Likely 2/3 or more in practice, but I did not delve into each post.) And this does not feel particularly unusual.