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It just feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water; I can understand where you're coming from but I think the focus should be on penalising fluff and
by ig1 13y ago
It just feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water; I can understand where you're coming from but I think the focus should be on penalising fluff and incivility (maybe some kind of sinbin to encourage positive behaviour ?).
Often major issues are contentious; the interplay between personal and professional life is a major issue and one that many HN contributors deal with on a daily basis (for that matter many personal comments on HN result in professional relationships). If we can't discuss contentious topics in a reasonable manner then we're already in trouble.
If you look at Usenet or Digg historically even minor issues often burst into flamewars (remember Emacs vs Vim wars?) - it's not the issues that cause incivility. It's the people.
- mkr-hn 13y agoMost Usenet readers at least supported comment tree folding. In a contentious HN thread, I have to hold page down for a few minutes to reach the second top level comment. My experience with Reddit tells me the substantive discussion happens a few trees down from the top, and that part of these threads is effectively inaccessible.
- dang 13y agoI fully agree, except re baby/bathwater, which is to say we see the tradeoffs differently. If we can't discuss contentious topics in a reasonable manner then we're already in trouble. Precisely—and it's clear that we can't, and that we're in trouble. I regard this as, perhaps not a crisis, but certainly an existential issue for HN. Because of it, the site has drifted away from its values: intellectual substance and personal civility. Those values are why I'm here. They are our priority and not open for negotiation. But everything else is open. There's nothing we're doing right now (including these feedback comments I've been posting) that isn't just an experiment. If we get better data or better ideas for genuinely improving HN, nothing would make us happier. We don't claim to know the answers—it's all about seeing what works.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]