18 ms·

An Update on Hacker News

331 points by nicklovescode 12y ago

JoshTriplett 12y ago
> First, we lowered the threshold for flags to kill inappropriate comments. Excellent. > Second, we've started indicating in the UI which comments/stories have been killed by user flags. What does this look like in the UI? I haven't seen any examples of it yet, and I'd expect to see at least a few on a regular basis.
- hawkice 12y ago
  Instead of [deleted] it'll say [flagkilled].
- uptown 12y ago
  The string [flagkilled] is put before the title.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    Ah, so this is only for stories actually killed by flagging, rather than just for stories demoted by flagging?
    - squeaky-clean 12y ago
      I've only seen it for comments, but it appears just like a [deleted] comment, except the text says [flagkilled].
    - dang 12y ago
      That's correct. For both stories and comments.
minimaxir 12y ago
Last month, I posted an analysis of all 5.6 million Hacker News comments at the time: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ It should be noted that during the aforementioned six month periods, both the number of new comments made monthly and the average score for a given comment decreased, although this post claims a 30% increase to Hacker News traffic due to changes in the comment system, which is interesting assertion of causality. (in fairness, the decrease in number of new comments could be caused by the increased moderation of bad comments.) It would be helpful if this article in this submission clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) [EDIT: looks like this was added to the submission]
- krat0sprakhar 12y ago
  > It would be helpful if this article clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) So that's how you flag! Thank you! This definitely should be more noticeable.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Agreed. I didn't even know I could flag comments until I read this blog post.
- danielweber 12y ago
  How do you see the scores of comments? I only see the points of my own comments.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Comment scores are visible to the Algolia API after a period of time. Otherwise, the API returns a "null" for the points field. (example: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/2921983 https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/2921983) This is apparently unintended, as the official API has no points field. (example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?prin...)
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      Oh, interesting. I stopped indexing HN comments after the points data became unavailable (it was still available through the Octopart guys' api, until Algolia took over). It looks like comment scores start showing up around the 30 day mark.
  - erickhill 12y ago
    You can't. That feature was removed around 3 years ago, I think.
shitehawk 12y ago
Can anyone comment on the reasoning behind the lack of a mobile style sheet?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Hacker News is supposedly undergoing a redesign soon, which would assumingly include a responsive layout.
  - dang 12y ago
    Not a redesign, but new markup that preserves the existing design.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      dang I like the current design (it is no nonsense), but could one change be made to the location of the vote arrows. Could the down vote triangle be moved to after the users name (e.g. ^ dang v)? This would make it so much easier to avoid accidentally down voting on mobile devices.
- mmwtsn 12y ago
  Until the redesign goes live, there are a few viable alternatives on mobile. I have been using a mobile-friendly version of Hacker News called HackerWeb on my phone and tablet: http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ A handful of browser add-ons exist that will update the visual design and generally make the site more pleasurable to use. Here's one for Chrome: http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/ http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/
  - colinramsay 12y ago
    Yeah I thought that new HTML was supposed to be coming online a couple of weeks ago?
    - 12y ago
angersock 12y ago
A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change. Good to hear they decided to roll that back. PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark. It'd be nice to see an official policy statement changing that position, but I don't think it's likely. In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.
- krat0sprakhar 12y ago
  > In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad. I don't think this is true. Given that downvoted comments become faded, I have a strong reason to believe that the intent is to hide them because they are actually bad
  - danielweber 12y ago
    The irony of your comment being faded should not be lost.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Yes, I think that was the actual intent of the system. However, bad != disagreeing with the majority. If the up/down vote functionality is to be used to express agreement or disagreement, which is a change from the original philosophy, then the system should change accordingly. angersock's point is that, as it stands now, a faded-out comment may simply be expressing a good but unpopular opinion.
  - krapp 12y ago
    You're using circular reasoning - that the comments are faded because they're bad, and the evidence they're bad is that they're faded. But, people downvote comments for any number of reasons, and even doing so for mere disagreement is within the acceptable guidelines - and of course for everything, despite the lack of clear context, the effect remains the same.
raldi 12y ago
I applaud experimentation, especially when done with copious transparency and user engagement, as was the case here.
33W 12y ago
I would be interested in a combined content and comments link. I am often more interested in the HN commentary than the article itself, so I am always opening the comments as well. This would mirror a feature in the Reddit Enhancement Suite that I enjoy.
acheron 12y ago
Is there any guidance on what stories are appropriate to flag? Is it just spam, or is it looser than that? I sometimes flag blatant political stories, because I don't think they belong on HN, so I guess if I suddenly can't flag anymore then that was the wrong answer.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Lots of us flag politics, or anything else that (subjectively) doesn't fit the guidelines. It's definitely not just for spam.
readerrrr 12y ago
If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments. But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment? My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mblevin 12y ago
  Moving comments down completely can break the threading - e.g. you could have a highly upvoted parent comment with a single child comment that was heavily downvoted. You can't move the child any further down the tree. You CAN indicative that the comment has been downvoted - the fading accomplishes that objective.
  - readerrrr 12y ago
    That sounds like an incorrect fix. Since the comments are separated by trees, they should be positioned and compared to comments relative to that tree, not relative to the master tree. Being at the bottom of a sub-tree marks the comment automatically as the most downvoted in that tree. Applying fading to all the comments just because a downvoted comment has a parent that happens to be at the top, seems wrong.
    - xorcist 12y ago
      Downvoting and threaded view is hard to combine. What you describe is the trivial way. It has the downside that if a comment has few subcomments, downvoting them don't accomplish very much.
      - r00fus 12y ago
        Slashdot solved it by "re-parenting" - i.e., a great reply to a redundant/trollish comment will appear to start it's own thread. Another approach is simply to hide the offensive comment and weight the entire thread in relation to other threads when determining display order.
Torgo 12y ago
What constitutes flag abuse? I only do it for stories which I know will only produce flamewars.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I wish there were something between "do nothing" and "remove this story." Like a downvote button. But this is an experiment.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>I only do it for stories which I know will only produce flamewars. You shouldn't. For example, stories about big players (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook) almost always produce flamewars, but the discussions can also be interesting and informative. You should flag stuff only when it doesn't meet guidelines. For example, most news stories (e.g. "Man murders family, followed by car chase") are inappropriate for the site.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I used to do that, but I had my flagging privilege revoked for a long while. So don't do that, I guess. It's restored now. I don't think I've flagged many, if any, stories. I flag any comment I perceive as an attack on a person rather than the ideas of that person. I don't feel that's appropriate. And in particular it's not what I personally want HN to be. If a comment makes a point in what I feel isn't a good faith manner, I'll merely downvote it. If I just disagree but it's a fair point, I leave it alone.
grandalf 12y ago
In my opinion the only real annoyance with HN is when story titles are edited. Maybe it will take an updated policy to fix the core issue, which is that while linkbait headlines are annoying, some original works are titled very badly and the poster may actually add useful information by customizing the title (often by highlighting what is most interesting/relevant about the linked article).
- xnxn 12y ago
  I think this aspect of HN has improved immensely in the past several months; dang in particular has done much to increase the transparency around title editing. I find myself less likely to knee-jerk reject a title change when the rationale is right there in the comments.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I've found I can get away with minor changes to a title if they're purely informational. That's nice.
- 03108109108 12y ago
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- 03108109108 12y ago
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btreecat 12y ago
> The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so everyone can help there. So I guess I am not able to help.
- dang 12y ago
  An earlier draft of this post that Sam sent me had "nearly everyone can help there". I'll ask him to put it back. But it's not like this is much of a barrier. Even this one comment moved you significantly (as of right now at least).
  - delecti 12y ago
    Just curious, but are you saying that because of the relative position of the parent's comment in this thread, or is there a threshold for karma that unlocks seeing the karma on comments other than your own?
    - MrJagil 12y ago
      Just click on his username.
  - btreecat 12y ago
    Fortunately enough people "agreed" with me to bump my total karma just over the threshold. The problem is this comment was a total fluke really. I have _tried_ engaging in comments before with the results of only a vote or two usually. Had my previous comment not been up-voted so much, it likely would have taken me another 10 comments to reach the threshold for just flagging.
shaggyfrog 12y ago
I'm wondering if there's any official policy on linking to articles that are behind pay/register walls. I've flagged two such submissions, and only one got flagkilled.
- tzs 12y ago
  There are a few reasons such articles usually do not get flag killed. 1. Most of the paywall news sites allow free viewing of a few articles per month and so many here do not hit the paywall. 2. It is often very easy to get around the paywall if you are over the monthly limit. Sometimes it is as simple as searching for the article by title in Google and clicking Google's link. 3. If you cannot get around the paywall, it is often the case that you can find coverage of the same event at another site that is not paywalled, which will give you enough information to meaningfully enjoy and participate in the HN discussion. 4. Even if you cannot find free coverage of the thing under discussion, it is often the case that the HN discussion is entertaining and enlightening. HN discussion often goes off on tangents inspired by the article, and those tangents can be appreciated without having read the article. 5. Many people here don't see the paywalls because they subscribe to the paywalled sites. 6. Most here do not have such big egos or senses of entitlement that they are bothered by others reading and discussing something that they have not been able to read.
michaelochurch 12y ago
I still read HN. There's a good article or two per day. That said, the moderation needs work. (Or, more accurately, to be put out of work.) I've been under "rankban" for at least a year, if not longer. This means that my posts, even if they get a lot of upvotes, fall to or near the bottom. I don't really care, and while I could use sock puppets to get around that, I'm too old for that shit and I don't really care. Still, it's irritating. I've used HN Search (https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/) to verify comment karma and validate my suspicion. I'm also on "slowban", as Hacker News performs worse when I use it while logged in than when I do so in incognito, logged-out mode. It's dishonest bullshit. My main reason for continuing to comment is (a) to spite the moderators and (b) because there's a certain joy in getting +10 karma even when your post falls to the bottom.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  An alternate explanation would be that your comments are frequently marked as off topic. (dang has commented about marking his own comments off topic, so the support for that is in there, but I'm speculating about how it might be used.)
  - comex 12y ago
    Even if this is true, I doubt his comments are undesirable enough to passive-aggressively try to get him to stop using the site by silently slowing it down (if his claim to be on slowban is true). This kind of behavior seems like it should be reserved for trolls and other highly noxious personages.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Yeah, I didn't try to address that claim, I don't have any information about it.
    - pc86 12y ago
      I obviously can't speak to whether MOC is experiencing it, but I can say that with my first HN account, before I understood the context and spirit of HN, I made a very Reddit-esque comment that got me banned. The first part of that was the so-called slowban, as the site was all but unusable when I was logged in. This was years ago and I have no idea if the mods still use this tactic, but I imagine so in certain cases.
natch 12y ago
It seems like early comments on any article generally have a huge advantage in garnering votes. This appropriately rewards engagement, but also pushes down other worthy comments that come slightly later, often to effective near invisibility when replies to the top comment dominate the discussion. I wonder if there is any mechanism that could help counter this.
- maaaats 12y ago
  This has been discussed much on Stack Overflow earlier, by the name of "Fastest Gun in the West Problem". http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9731/186983 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9731/186983 However, I often see new (top level) comments on the top when entering a discussion here on HN, so it seems they at least get some exposure.
- hackuser 12y ago
  I expect that there is a strong correlation between how soon a comment is posted and its points. Two thoughts from a relative noob (sorry if these ideas already have been discussed or tried): * On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received votes. > This appropriately rewards engagement * It rewards engagement by people who have the time to frequently check HN, read linked stories, and comment throughout the day. My guess is that the smarter someone is, the less availability they have for such things. I would create a system that rewards engagement by busy people.
  - solistice 12y ago
    > On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received vote So essentially the same kind of system that is used for the link page? I honestly don't see why link aggregators use one system for links (based on time posted and points) and another system for comments (based solely on points). A very engaging link and a very engaging comment both share the same qualities, whether it is informativeness or adding something interesting to the discussion.
Someone1234 12y ago
Any chance we'll get some better text formatting options? Here's what is currently offered: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc Basically italics and code blocks only. No lists or no bolding.
- film42 12y ago
  It would be cool to see markdown support, but I totally understand that any addition to the formatting spec is risky, because any new change means older posts could be awkwardly rendered. On that historical HN note, it would be great if someone made an app that dug up really awesome older stories from the HN archives. I'd use that a ton!
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    They could do something like a BOM. Any comment without the wchar in position [0] is rendered historically. Anything with it is rendered using markdown (or another renderer). It adds no new columns, and better still if you pick a symbol which is nuked by TRIM() e.g. \x0B [U+000B] (vertical tab) then it might be ignored by existing infrastructure/trimmed.
rspeer 12y ago
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user. Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges removed, HN should at least consider creating a way to undo an action!
- yoha 12y ago
  I am in a similar situation. I do remember having mis-clicked on a "flag" link once.
  - drinchev 12y ago
    +1. I event didn't know that I can flag comments until now. I don't have flag link since I don't know when.
  - Donzo 12y ago
    I did this too. I unflagged them in the past, but it's happened repeatedly. It's because the UI on mobile is terrible.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- spicyj 12y ago
  > I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. Make sure you're clicking "link" through to the comment's page -- the flag links don't appear when comments are shown in a thread.
- BoppreH 12y ago
  Are you sure you are looking at the right place? To flag a comment you must click on "link", and only then the "flag" option appears. TFA mentions the threshold for flagging is only 30 karma. This has been the source of much confusion and I'm not 100% sure on the reason why it was implemented.
peterwwillis 12y ago
I'd love to see posts on the rationale between different design decisions, particularly with regards to things that change group dynamics. For instance, putting karma next to someone's name may produce leader-following social behavior, meaning your high-karma users would reinforce general behavior by encouraging other users to behave the same. But that would increase the already prevalent concern of high-karma users overly influencing discussion and getting upvoted based on karma alone. It would be interesting to see all these examples stacked up and then a post about why they went one way or another.
dsugarman 12y ago
> First, I want to thank the community for all the work people have done over the past six months to downvote, flag, and comment on content that doesn’t fit the site guidelines Sam & co, great job on experimenting and improving quality, it shows. I find this statement to be really confusing considering there is no guidelines[1] for downvoting and, in my experience, it is highly used to put opinions you don't personally agree with out of reach for the majority of users to read. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
sciurus 12y ago
"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately." When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusing flags, I would have happily self-corrected.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  I once had my flagging privileges disappear. I e-mailed the moderators, and they restored them. It wasn't clear either to me or the moderator what had resulted in the loss of privilege. On the one hand, that made it easy to decide to reinstate the privilege; on the other hand that made it hard to learn what I'd done wrong.
- dang 12y ago
  > comment flagging privileges disappeared Comment flagging privileges don't disappear (edit: alone). Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939.
  - privong 12y ago
    Would you mind clarifying? The blog post (quoted by parent) seems to explicity say that flagging privs can be revoked, which directly contradicts what you are saying in the comments. Or was the quote from the blog post only meant to refer to flagging of articles?
    - minimaxir 12y ago
      Comment flagging cannot be revoked, but story flagging can.
    - dang 12y ago
      My apologies—I wrote that in haste and I see now that it was unclear. What I meant was that you can't lose comment flagging privileges while story flagging privileges remain intact; the software just doesn't do that. Either all the flag links would disappear, or none would. So there must be another explanation for what sciurus described (as I understood it). Does that make sense?
Eduard 12y ago
What about the announced update to the rendering engine (http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api)?
- dang 12y ago
  It's coming.
huhtenberg 12y ago
Can you mark comments with the score of 1 in some way? I suspect that I'm not the only one who downvotes the comments he doesn't like or disagrees with, but who'd very rarely want to push a comment into gray. I mean, it's one thing to vote a comment down so that it won't float at the top and another is to punch its author in a face with a negative score.
- ars 12y ago
  So stop doing that. You are not supposed to downvote comments you don't like or disagree with. You are only supposed to downvote comments that are useless.
- dang 12y ago
  That's a good idea. Like so many of these, it isn't obvious how to do it in a way that doesn't complicate HN's minimal UI. But it's worth noting that you'd get this for free if we implemented vote undo, which is something we're open to.
kelvin0 12y ago
I wonder how many moderators are needed to be able to keep up with all the comments and traffic here? It must be a tedious job ...
vectorpush 12y ago
How does HN's moderation staff feel about users who are dead, completely oblivious to it, but who continue to post, sometimes for years after the fact without any kind of warning that they are wasting their time. Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the time, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly inappropriate in the comment history, but the user is still doomed to waste a considerable amount of time attempting to contribute to this board. In the context of internet discussion boards, it seems a little harsh. Off the top of my head, I feel like something akin to an automatic probationary resurrection period would be an interesting idea. Perhaps it occurs one year after hellbanishment, giving the community a chance to organically reevaluate the user's quality of contributions, and giving a second chance to those who have matured in a years time (or who was simply hellbanned in error).
- throwit99 12y ago
  I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective. It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more. After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. At the start, you sort of care about "karma". But you end up realising it's a measure of two things. 1. How much time you waste commenting on the internet, and 2. How much you can agree with the groupthink echo-chamber. But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. If I get hellbanned from the "rust is the future!!!" subhackernews, big whoop. It'd also help with filtering out all the non-interesting (self driving cars) stories. But then perhaps it'd basically be reddit at that stage which would defeat the point...
  - dang 12y ago
    Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people because they "critiqued a YC backed company". Edit: Some of the replies have made good points, and I realize that I overreacted. Sorry about that. Please shoot us an email at hn@ycombinator.com if you feel your account was banned unfairly. We're always happy to look into this—there's no question that we make mistakes; the most I can claim is that we're eager to, and do, correct them when they're brought to our attention.
rsync 12y ago
Is this a reasonable place to plead with people to stop the practice of meta-commentary on downvotes ? I am sick and tired of seeing the scoring system injected into the comment thread: "let the downvotes begin" "EDIT: you can downvote all you want, but ..." "EDIT: not sure why I'm being downvoted, but ..." ... and so on. Just comment and respond, don't add all manner of meta-commentary on voting and the score system into the discussion. Thanks.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  That's in the guidelines/FAQ.
- facepalm 12y ago
  Well it insults peoples feelings if they are being downvoted. It seems unrealistic to me to expect that they just accept the humiliation, even if it would be the rational thing to do. (I'm guilty of meta-commenting, too).
- dang 12y ago
  I agree with you, and so do the HN guidelines (as minimaxir pointed out). But it's clear that pleading with people not to do it isn't enough. We have sometimes toyed with implementing a lightweight guidelines reminder to indicate (privately, to the commenter) when a comment is breaking one of the guidelines. I'd still like to experiment with this someday. Ideally, it would be a community thing and not a moderator thing. The spirit would be, let's all remind each other of the guidelines when we need to. The things that HN cares about, like civility and signal/noise ratio, don't come naturally to an internet forum. We all have to work at it (definitely including me). Features like that are hard to get right, though, and until there's a good idea of how to do it that fits naturally into the existing site, it will remain prospective. Anyone with ideas here is welcome to send them to us at hn@ycombinator.com.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
chrisblackwell 12y ago
I would love to see them lower the threshold for down-voting. I've only got 200+ karma, and it's hard for me to get more. I can't be on here all day commenting, and being the first to submit articles. If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.
- kissickas 12y ago
  I also miss downvoting on HN, although Reddit needs my help there more anyway. However, Sam did say: >I'm sometimes asked how historically marginalized users can help shape the HN community when the karma threshold for down voting inappropriate comments is high. It's a fair question, and we are experimenting with lowering the downvoting threshold.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Well I have posting a lot lends itself to more karma than not, as in eventually I write something intelligent and interesting enough for people to up vote. The majority of my comments sit pretty at whatever the default is with an occasional soapbox that I post knowing it will get nuked. As far as stories, sometimes you can post too early and another will follow with a similar story and it runs up, submit what falls under the guidelines that you truly want to see discussed and you might hit karma gold. Myself, my wish list for HN is a feature I can flag stories for my later review; a save feature like reddit
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    "Myself, my wish list for HN is a feature I can flag stories for my later review; a save feature like reddit" Are you aware that upvoting a story saves it? You can access 'saved stories' via your profile. On one hand, you might argue that overloading the 'upvote' function isn't quite what you want, but the counter argument is that if a story seems interesting enough for you to want to read lead, the upvote's probably deserved.
- softdev12 12y ago
  The post says "The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so nearly everyone can help there.". I'm not sure if this was recently lowered from something higher. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the actual percentage of HN users that have over 30 karma. Does nearly everyone imply 99.9 percent?
jrs235 12y ago
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. At first I was appalled at hearing this until I realized I misunderstood the change. I was mistaking down voting for flagging. Flagging and down voting are two different things. Also, most everyone can [now] flag comments but you have to take one additional step (extra friction, perhaps for the better and to also prevent accidental flagging) which is you first must click on 'link' next the the comment and then 'flag'.
Yhippa 12y ago
Sam, thanks for the update. I feel that the quality of news has improved greatly as of late and the comments are getting better. Does anybody know what the downvote threshold is? Or any other thresholds for that matter?
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Offtopic here, but i noticed a huge relay since recently on HN... My initial loading time is 13 seconds (didn't realize it was that huge) since a couple of days. Note: didn't realize the lag was that high, i load some other tabs during the waiting... Note 2: I'm from Belgium, so perhaps it helps to debug the issue. Github account didn't seem to contain any items to report bugs/issues
tikhonj 12y ago
Flagging seems like the solution to toxic comments, and should be more encouraged. At the same time, this means it overlaps with downvoting—but only one use of downvoting. Really, the meaning of downvoting on HN is somewhat confused and muddled: is it a "flag lite"? Is it a way of disagreeing? Is it a way to push worse content to the bottom? Is it just the opposite of an upvote? Any one of these would be reasonable, but having all at the same time is not great. But that's exactly what we have now, both in the design of the feature and in how it gets used in practice. Personally, I think downvoting should move away from being an alternate form of flagging (with flagging, perhaps, taking a slightly more prominent role for dealing with actual abuse) and more towards just being the opposite of an upvote. This still makes it a bit of a hybrid (both for moving bad content down and disagreeing), but one that makes a lot more sense because it works just like upvotes do. For one, this is what the interface already implies. The downvote button looks just like the upvote button upside down. Seeing the two as exact opposites is entirely natural, and that's how it plays out in terms of karma too. But in terms of social conventions and, importantly, greying out comments, this doesn't quite hold. I also think that some symmetric way to counterbalance upvotes is actually useful in and of itself: downvotes can offset comments that gain a lot of upvotes before getting a strong rebuttal or comments stuck at the top of a discussion because of other quirks in the system. But people now seem pretty hesitant to use them this way. Which makes sense: if downvotes are, in part, mini-flags, they are too strong just to indicate that you think something has been upvoted too much or is not a particularly good comment (without being bad or abusive). So what would I do? Well, from the site's perspective, the main tweak is greying out comments after more than one downvote. Still have the votes change the order, but only have a really visible effect after a few have accumulated. More importantly, from a social perspective, it would be good to reach consensus on what a downvote actually entails, namely that it's just the opposite of an upvote, neither more nor less. Disentangling flags and downvotes like this will improve the utility of both features by making them more focused. Downvotes can be a symmetric force in shaping discussion while flags could be pushed a bit more as means of pruning actively harmful comments.
- doorhammer 12y ago
  The question I'd have about a downvote being opposite of an upvote is what is an upvote supposed to be for? I mean that as an honest question. Is it because it's something I like? Is it because I think it adds value to the conversation (usually why I upvote)? I've never seen guidlines for voting either way. The flag guidelines also seem pretty hazy (spam or offtopic [1]). Of course, that could be totally intentional, and I'm not implying it's a bad way to do things. They might not want to nail down the upvote/downvote idea so much and just let them represent a general will of the readers instead of getting into semantic debates over guidelines. Just a few things I'm curious about.
squigs25 12y ago
Flagging posts and downvoting are important pieces to improving the content here on hacker news. Interestingly, I think this one of the few forums where "trolls" appear to be relatively absent. One problem I have noticed is innapropriate downvoting. For example, if a voter downvotes a comment simply because he/she disagrees with the opinion of a commenter. How do we encourage a diversity of opinion on a site of like-minded people? And similarly, how do we prevent "downvote conformity" (I apologize for my invented phraseology, but I'm creating a name for the concept that our community upvotes posts that are generally agreeable and downvotes posts that may be less mainstream, thus imposing a conformity of opinion?)
DanBC 12y ago
I hope that flagging is used to consider when a user is shadow-banned and that down-votes just remove points. > third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change. I recently lost over 70 points across two posts. The first post was rightly down voted. (I would have preferred it to have been killed to stop losing votes) but the second post IMO was suffering from pile-on downvotes. Killing the first post would have prevented some of those follow-on downvotes. Without the context of the first postthe second post would have received some mix of votes. Killing unpopular opinions might be too harsh, but people need to start applyimg corrective upvotes if they feel that strongly about minority opinions.
- craigching 12y ago
  I always thought that downvoting was to be used for comments that were off-topic, not when you disagreed with someone, but I've learned otherwise I guess. I really wish I could read dissenting opinions or when someone says something wrong, instead of downvoting, I'd prefer someone explain why it's wrong. Downvoting because you disagree with someone always seems off-putting to me.
shocks 12y ago
What is the status of making HN more mobile friendly?
- dang 12y ago
  In progress. Sorry that I don't have more specifics, but it's coming.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
Voting is a dangerous thing. In German newspapers, an extreme right wing minority has taken over most comment forums. In some of these, even belonging to reputable newspapers, it has become extremely difficult to voice dissenting opinion (for example defending human rights for foreigners and homosexuals), mostly because "activists" have begun marking such opinions as spam or inappropriate.
alan_cx 12y ago
Problem I have is that there is no way of knowing why posts are down-voted. Quality? Politics? Just wrong? No idea. Sometime I see posts which are factually correct, but clearly unpopular and voted down. And to be utterly fair, I'm not even sure why I've down-voted or flagged in the past. Cant even remember if I've flagged. Now Im actually thinking about it, I think I'll only up-vote in the future, and I think that would be if I think I've learned something from a top notch post. Anything else feels like some sort of censorship, vanity or whatever.
- Loughla 12y ago
  This is actually why I (sort of) prefer the slashdot voting system. It's not just flat voting, it's voting with a purpose and explanation. At least that way if someone downvotes for not agreeing with a statement, they have to think about that reason and admit it to themselves, even if they don't admit it to the website.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
simonsarris 12y ago
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. You need to tell us what "flag inappropriately" means immediately. How do I know if I've been flagging stories inappropriately this entire time?!
- maxerickson 12y ago
  The flag button would disappear. If you look at flagging links as (mostly) a chore, losing that ability isn't really severe.
detroitcoder 12y ago
When will I be able to collapse comments on HN threads?
Bahamut 12y ago
I very much dislike how the flagging system works currently (for posts) - the stories that bubble to the top seem to become more uninteresting, and some of the more interesting ones, & sometimes certainly relevant, get flagged pre-emptively, which effectively only serves to squelch discussion at the cost a perceived sense of avoiding conflict for the sake of avoiding conflict. The point of view parroted out as justification for flagging stories though appear to suffer from one thing: an avoidance of taking responsibility for the results of the actions in full, and only accepting responsibility for the perceived gatekeeping of "conflict" & not for the flipside of accepting responsibility of intentionally barring any discussion on [insert topic]. The current flagging system for posts is not the solution, and it really decreases the interesting content present on this site.
xiaoma 12y ago
>"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately." I generally flag articles that are overly political, articles that look too much like advertising and anything behind a paywall. I haven't lost flagging abilities, but I do have some concern that moderators might not agree with me, particularly about paywalls.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hueving 12y ago
Reading this made me sick as I realized that optimizing the echo chamber to remove dissenting opinions is the apparent goal. "removing comments we don't want" is horrifying. Why don't we all just sit in a corner and pat ourselves on the back about how intelligent and enlightened we are now that we don't have to deal with unpopular opinions?
SCHiM 12y ago
I, for one, am very glad that I found this website. I migrated here from slashdot and arstechnica, and the community is much less toxic here. I also find that the level of discussion is higher and that the comments are often more insightful. I very much hope that it can improve even further.
sophialee 12y ago
Thanks for guiding.
bootload 12y ago
"... I’d also like to thank dang and sctb for all the work they’ve done as moderators and with software to increase story and comment quality. ..." This is a good point and should be acknowledged. I was personally contacted on how to improve HN. I've yet to get back to you @dang, replies are more fully formed.
lucb1e 12y ago
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. That seems like a lot of manual work, but maybe it needs to be. Perhaps it could be part automated by revoking flagging privileges when others upvoted the post? If it really are post nobody wants on the site, surely very few people (if anyone) would upvote it. So if it gets both flagged and upvoted, it are probably flags from users that disagree and you can pretty consistently revoke their permissions. Just an idea, I don't have the data to test this. Thanks a lot for all the work you are doing and have done so far on the site. I agree that the quality has increased!
facepalm 12y ago
A lot of effort to get rid of people, not so much effort to attract them. Maybe it's not needed because the site is so popular. But it seems to contradict the other messages where they try to encourage everybody to apply to YC, especially the people who feel like they are not suited to it. It's a bit funny if you consider these algorithms might be part of the selection process for YC (consciously or unconsciously) - have they really nailed the detection of trolls? Maybe eventually the algorithms will align so well with the spirit of YC that they can eliminate the interview process :-) I for one feel unwanted (it's not my first account - some got banned, one I somehow retired after a couple of years). I long for another news source, and also for open discussion. In general discussion does not seem to be welcome, as there are mechanisms to prevent deep threads. That's maybe OK, they want to be a news site, not a discussion site. But it leaves a void to be filled.
closetnerd 12y ago
So they're going to do to Hacker News what they did to Reddit.
etiam 12y ago
> best source of news and discussion about technology and startups 'News that hackers would be interested in reading' still applies, right? That's a bit clunky to put in a press release, I will admit, but I would be sad to see the range of HN reduced to merely startups and technology.
ende 12y ago
There are many classes of topic. Many posts are considered 'on topic' for HN, some are considered 'off topic' and flagged away, and then there is a lot of grey territory which seems to be tolerated but can't exactly be labeled as 'hacker news'. Politics is the most obvious example. Should downvoting work the same way in political threads as in technology threads? It really isn't serving the same function. Perhaps political or otherwise 'semi-topic' submissions can be flagged as such and thereby disable voting within them. People can visit them if they want to, but they do so knowing there is a different ettiquette.
Houshalter 12y ago
I haven't noticed that many "toxic comments" and it doesn't seem like a huge problem. Automating removal of flagged content seems like bad practice. The majority of users treat it like a "super downvote button" and a way to censor controversial things.
nextw33k 12y ago
Rather than lower the threshold, which is just lowering the bar, how about adding a time parameter to the points? (Older points are worth more, but not visibly so) Someone that has been using the site for a few years but only commented in a positive way is surely more valid a moderator than a new account that has submitted 10 articles in the last month. The time parameter adds continuity to the quality of flagging.
lettercarrier 12y ago
Comments are what gets me here, for discovery. Love when topics and links are the subject of comments. I think my CPS degree received when having to use IBM 129 and 3 runs per day afford a great HN following. I really don't get the down up karma thing. Just glad smart people with lots of time on their hands post interesting stuff
lexcorvus 12y ago
I'm cautiously optimistic about this, but the reference to "inappropriate comments" gives me pause. I'm reminded of this analysis [1]: We have such labels [for heresy] today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention. Especially when paired with coded language like "historically marginalized users" (I'm pretty sure Sam isn't talking about Republicans here [2]), targeting "inappropriate comments" suggests that Hacker News it at risk of becoming a progressive echo-chamber. (Of course, there are those [3] who fret that HN is insufficiently progressive, but the same people probably think Harvard and the New York Times aren't progressive enough, either.) I can understand flagging uncivil comments, but "inappropriate" comments? I'm not even sure what that means. Please proceed with caution. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html [2]: If you don't think tech is hostile to Republicans, you've probably never been a Republican in tech. Indeed, who's more underrepresented in tech: women, or Romney voters? (Note: I didn't vote for Romney, and I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Republican party.) [2]: See, e.g., https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says.

331 points by nicklovescode 12y ago

> First, we lowered the threshold for flags to kill inappropriate comments. Excellent. > Second, we've started indicating in the UI which comments/stories have been killed by user flags. What does this look like in the UI? I haven't seen any examples of it yet, and I'd expect to see at least a few on a regular basis.

hawkice 12y ago
Instead of [deleted] it'll say [flagkilled].
uptown 12y ago
The string [flagkilled] is put before the title.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  Ah, so this is only for stories actually killed by flagging, rather than just for stories demoted by flagging?
  - squeaky-clean 12y ago
    I've only seen it for comments, but it appears just like a [deleted] comment, except the text says [flagkilled].
  - dang 12y ago
    That's correct. For both stories and comments.

minimaxir 12y ago

Last month, I posted an analysis of all 5.6 million Hacker News comments at the time: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ It should be noted that during the aforementioned six month periods, both the number of new comments made monthly and the average score for a given comment decreased, although this post claims a 30% increase to Hacker News traffic due to changes in the comment system, which is interesting assertion of causality. (in fairness, the decrease in number of new comments could be caused by the increased moderation of bad comments.) It would be helpful if this article in this submission clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) [EDIT: looks like this was added to the submission]

krat0sprakhar 12y ago
> It would be helpful if this article clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) So that's how you flag! Thank you! This definitely should be more noticeable.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Agreed. I didn't even know I could flag comments until I read this blog post.
danielweber 12y ago
How do you see the scores of comments? I only see the points of my own comments.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Comment scores are visible to the Algolia API after a period of time. Otherwise, the API returns a "null" for the points field. (example: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/2921983 https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/2921983) This is apparently unintended, as the official API has no points field. (example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?prin...)
  - thaumaturgy 12y ago
    Oh, interesting. I stopped indexing HN comments after the points data became unavailable (it was still available through the Octopart guys' api, until Algolia took over). It looks like comment scores start showing up around the 30 day mark.
- erickhill 12y ago
  You can't. That feature was removed around 3 years ago, I think.

shitehawk 12y ago

Can anyone comment on the reasoning behind the lack of a mobile style sheet?

minimaxir 12y ago
Hacker News is supposedly undergoing a redesign soon, which would assumingly include a responsive layout.
- dang 12y ago
  Not a redesign, but new markup that preserves the existing design.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    dang I like the current design (it is no nonsense), but could one change be made to the location of the vote arrows. Could the down vote triangle be moved to after the users name (e.g. ^ dang v)? This would make it so much easier to avoid accidentally down voting on mobile devices.
mmwtsn 12y ago
Until the redesign goes live, there are a few viable alternatives on mobile. I have been using a mobile-friendly version of Hacker News called HackerWeb on my phone and tablet: http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ A handful of browser add-ons exist that will update the visual design and generally make the site more pleasurable to use. Here's one for Chrome: http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/ http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/
- colinramsay 12y ago
  Yeah I thought that new HTML was supposed to be coming online a couple of weeks ago?
  - 12y ago

angersock 12y ago

A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change. Good to hear they decided to roll that back. PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark. It'd be nice to see an official policy statement changing that position, but I don't think it's likely. In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.

krat0sprakhar 12y ago
> In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad. I don't think this is true. Given that downvoted comments become faded, I have a strong reason to believe that the intent is to hide them because they are actually bad
- danielweber 12y ago
  The irony of your comment being faded should not be lost.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Yes, I think that was the actual intent of the system. However, bad != disagreeing with the majority. If the up/down vote functionality is to be used to express agreement or disagreement, which is a change from the original philosophy, then the system should change accordingly. angersock's point is that, as it stands now, a faded-out comment may simply be expressing a good but unpopular opinion.
- krapp 12y ago
  You're using circular reasoning - that the comments are faded because they're bad, and the evidence they're bad is that they're faded. But, people downvote comments for any number of reasons, and even doing so for mere disagreement is within the acceptable guidelines - and of course for everything, despite the lack of clear context, the effect remains the same.

raldi 12y ago

I applaud experimentation, especially when done with copious transparency and user engagement, as was the case here.

33W 12y ago

I would be interested in a combined content and comments link. I am often more interested in the HN commentary than the article itself, so I am always opening the comments as well. This would mirror a feature in the Reddit Enhancement Suite that I enjoy.

acheron 12y ago

Is there any guidance on what stories are appropriate to flag? Is it just spam, or is it looser than that? I sometimes flag blatant political stories, because I don't think they belong on HN, so I guess if I suddenly can't flag anymore then that was the wrong answer.

tptacek 12y ago
Lots of us flag politics, or anything else that (subjectively) doesn't fit the guidelines. It's definitely not just for spam.

readerrrr 12y ago

If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments. But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment? My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mblevin 12y ago
Moving comments down completely can break the threading - e.g. you could have a highly upvoted parent comment with a single child comment that was heavily downvoted. You can't move the child any further down the tree. You CAN indicative that the comment has been downvoted - the fading accomplishes that objective.
- readerrrr 12y ago
  That sounds like an incorrect fix. Since the comments are separated by trees, they should be positioned and compared to comments relative to that tree, not relative to the master tree. Being at the bottom of a sub-tree marks the comment automatically as the most downvoted in that tree. Applying fading to all the comments just because a downvoted comment has a parent that happens to be at the top, seems wrong.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    Downvoting and threaded view is hard to combine. What you describe is the trivial way. It has the downside that if a comment has few subcomments, downvoting them don't accomplish very much.
    - r00fus 12y ago
      Slashdot solved it by "re-parenting" - i.e., a great reply to a redundant/trollish comment will appear to start it's own thread. Another approach is simply to hide the offensive comment and weight the entire thread in relation to other threads when determining display order.

Torgo 12y ago

What constitutes flag abuse? I only do it for stories which I know will only produce flamewars.

danielweber 12y ago
I wish there were something between "do nothing" and "remove this story." Like a downvote button. But this is an experiment.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>I only do it for stories which I know will only produce flamewars. You shouldn't. For example, stories about big players (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook) almost always produce flamewars, but the discussions can also be interesting and informative. You should flag stuff only when it doesn't meet guidelines. For example, most news stories (e.g. "Man murders family, followed by car chase") are inappropriate for the site.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
I used to do that, but I had my flagging privilege revoked for a long while. So don't do that, I guess. It's restored now. I don't think I've flagged many, if any, stories. I flag any comment I perceive as an attack on a person rather than the ideas of that person. I don't feel that's appropriate. And in particular it's not what I personally want HN to be. If a comment makes a point in what I feel isn't a good faith manner, I'll merely downvote it. If I just disagree but it's a fair point, I leave it alone.

grandalf 12y ago

In my opinion the only real annoyance with HN is when story titles are edited. Maybe it will take an updated policy to fix the core issue, which is that while linkbait headlines are annoying, some original works are titled very badly and the poster may actually add useful information by customizing the title (often by highlighting what is most interesting/relevant about the linked article).

xnxn 12y ago
I think this aspect of HN has improved immensely in the past several months; dang in particular has done much to increase the transparency around title editing. I find myself less likely to knee-jerk reject a title change when the rationale is right there in the comments.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
I've found I can get away with minor changes to a title if they're purely informational. That's nice.
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btreecat 12y ago

> The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so everyone can help there. So I guess I am not able to help.

dang 12y ago
An earlier draft of this post that Sam sent me had "nearly everyone can help there". I'll ask him to put it back. But it's not like this is much of a barrier. Even this one comment moved you significantly (as of right now at least).
- delecti 12y ago
  Just curious, but are you saying that because of the relative position of the parent's comment in this thread, or is there a threshold for karma that unlocks seeing the karma on comments other than your own?
  - MrJagil 12y ago
    Just click on his username.
- btreecat 12y ago
  Fortunately enough people "agreed" with me to bump my total karma just over the threshold. The problem is this comment was a total fluke really. I have _tried_ engaging in comments before with the results of only a vote or two usually. Had my previous comment not been up-voted so much, it likely would have taken me another 10 comments to reach the threshold for just flagging.

shaggyfrog 12y ago

I'm wondering if there's any official policy on linking to articles that are behind pay/register walls. I've flagged two such submissions, and only one got flagkilled.

tzs 12y ago
There are a few reasons such articles usually do not get flag killed. 1. Most of the paywall news sites allow free viewing of a few articles per month and so many here do not hit the paywall. 2. It is often very easy to get around the paywall if you are over the monthly limit. Sometimes it is as simple as searching for the article by title in Google and clicking Google's link. 3. If you cannot get around the paywall, it is often the case that you can find coverage of the same event at another site that is not paywalled, which will give you enough information to meaningfully enjoy and participate in the HN discussion. 4. Even if you cannot find free coverage of the thing under discussion, it is often the case that the HN discussion is entertaining and enlightening. HN discussion often goes off on tangents inspired by the article, and those tangents can be appreciated without having read the article. 5. Many people here don't see the paywalls because they subscribe to the paywalled sites. 6. Most here do not have such big egos or senses of entitlement that they are bothered by others reading and discussing something that they have not been able to read.

michaelochurch 12y ago

I still read HN. There's a good article or two per day. That said, the moderation needs work. (Or, more accurately, to be put out of work.) I've been under "rankban" for at least a year, if not longer. This means that my posts, even if they get a lot of upvotes, fall to or near the bottom. I don't really care, and while I could use sock puppets to get around that, I'm too old for that shit and I don't really care. Still, it's irritating. I've used HN Search (https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/) to verify comment karma and validate my suspicion. I'm also on "slowban", as Hacker News performs worse when I use it while logged in than when I do so in incognito, logged-out mode. It's dishonest bullshit. My main reason for continuing to comment is (a) to spite the moderators and (b) because there's a certain joy in getting +10 karma even when your post falls to the bottom.

maxerickson 12y ago
An alternate explanation would be that your comments are frequently marked as off topic. (dang has commented about marking his own comments off topic, so the support for that is in there, but I'm speculating about how it might be used.)
- comex 12y ago
  Even if this is true, I doubt his comments are undesirable enough to passive-aggressively try to get him to stop using the site by silently slowing it down (if his claim to be on slowban is true). This kind of behavior seems like it should be reserved for trolls and other highly noxious personages.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Yeah, I didn't try to address that claim, I don't have any information about it.
  - pc86 12y ago
    I obviously can't speak to whether MOC is experiencing it, but I can say that with my first HN account, before I understood the context and spirit of HN, I made a very Reddit-esque comment that got me banned. The first part of that was the so-called slowban, as the site was all but unusable when I was logged in. This was years ago and I have no idea if the mods still use this tactic, but I imagine so in certain cases.

natch 12y ago

It seems like early comments on any article generally have a huge advantage in garnering votes. This appropriately rewards engagement, but also pushes down other worthy comments that come slightly later, often to effective near invisibility when replies to the top comment dominate the discussion. I wonder if there is any mechanism that could help counter this.

maaaats 12y ago
This has been discussed much on Stack Overflow earlier, by the name of "Fastest Gun in the West Problem". http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9731/186983 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/9731/186983 However, I often see new (top level) comments on the top when entering a discussion here on HN, so it seems they at least get some exposure.
hackuser 12y ago
I expect that there is a strong correlation between how soon a comment is posted and its points. Two thoughts from a relative noob (sorry if these ideas already have been discussed or tried): * On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received votes. > This appropriately rewards engagement * It rewards engagement by people who have the time to frequently check HN, read linked stories, and comment throughout the day. My guess is that the smarter someone is, the less availability they have for such things. I would create a system that rewards engagement by busy people.
- solistice 12y ago
  > On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received vote So essentially the same kind of system that is used for the link page? I honestly don't see why link aggregators use one system for links (based on time posted and points) and another system for comments (based solely on points). A very engaging link and a very engaging comment both share the same qualities, whether it is informativeness or adding something interesting to the discussion.

Someone1234 12y ago

Any chance we'll get some better text formatting options? Here's what is currently offered: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc Basically italics and code blocks only. No lists or no bolding.

film42 12y ago
It would be cool to see markdown support, but I totally understand that any addition to the formatting spec is risky, because any new change means older posts could be awkwardly rendered. On that historical HN note, it would be great if someone made an app that dug up really awesome older stories from the HN archives. I'd use that a ton!
- Someone1234 12y ago
  They could do something like a BOM. Any comment without the wchar in position [0] is rendered historically. Anything with it is rendered using markdown (or another renderer). It adds no new columns, and better still if you pick a symbol which is nuked by TRIM() e.g. \x0B [U+000B] (vertical tab) then it might be ignored by existing infrastructure/trimmed.

rspeer 12y ago

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user. Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges removed, HN should at least consider creating a way to undo an action!

yoha 12y ago
I am in a similar situation. I do remember having mis-clicked on a "flag" link once.
- drinchev 12y ago
  +1. I event didn't know that I can flag comments until now. I don't have flag link since I don't know when.
- Donzo 12y ago
  I did this too. I unflagged them in the past, but it's happened repeatedly. It's because the UI on mobile is terrible.
deleted 12y ago
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spicyj 12y ago
> I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. Make sure you're clicking "link" through to the comment's page -- the flag links don't appear when comments are shown in a thread.
BoppreH 12y ago
Are you sure you are looking at the right place? To flag a comment you must click on "link", and only then the "flag" option appears. TFA mentions the threshold for flagging is only 30 karma. This has been the source of much confusion and I'm not 100% sure on the reason why it was implemented.

peterwwillis 12y ago

I'd love to see posts on the rationale between different design decisions, particularly with regards to things that change group dynamics. For instance, putting karma next to someone's name may produce leader-following social behavior, meaning your high-karma users would reinforce general behavior by encouraging other users to behave the same. But that would increase the already prevalent concern of high-karma users overly influencing discussion and getting upvoted based on karma alone. It would be interesting to see all these examples stacked up and then a post about why they went one way or another.

dsugarman 12y ago

> First, I want to thank the community for all the work people have done over the past six months to downvote, flag, and comment on content that doesn’t fit the site guidelines Sam & co, great job on experimenting and improving quality, it shows. I find this statement to be really confusing considering there is no guidelines[1] for downvoting and, in my experience, it is highly used to put opinions you don't personally agree with out of reach for the majority of users to read. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sciurus 12y ago

"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately." When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusing flags, I would have happily self-corrected.

lotharbot 12y ago
I once had my flagging privileges disappear. I e-mailed the moderators, and they restored them. It wasn't clear either to me or the moderator what had resulted in the loss of privilege. On the one hand, that made it easy to decide to reinstate the privilege; on the other hand that made it hard to learn what I'd done wrong.
dang 12y ago
> comment flagging privileges disappeared Comment flagging privileges don't disappear (edit: alone). Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939.
- privong 12y ago
  Would you mind clarifying? The blog post (quoted by parent) seems to explicity say that flagging privs can be revoked, which directly contradicts what you are saying in the comments. Or was the quote from the blog post only meant to refer to flagging of articles?
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Comment flagging cannot be revoked, but story flagging can.
  - dang 12y ago
    My apologies—I wrote that in haste and I see now that it was unclear. What I meant was that you can't lose comment flagging privileges while story flagging privileges remain intact; the software just doesn't do that. Either all the flag links would disappear, or none would. So there must be another explanation for what sciurus described (as I understood it). Does that make sense?

Eduard 12y ago

What about the announced update to the rendering engine (http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api)?

dang 12y ago
It's coming.

huhtenberg 12y ago

Can you mark comments with the score of 1 in some way? I suspect that I'm not the only one who downvotes the comments he doesn't like or disagrees with, but who'd very rarely want to push a comment into gray. I mean, it's one thing to vote a comment down so that it won't float at the top and another is to punch its author in a face with a negative score.

ars 12y ago
So stop doing that. You are not supposed to downvote comments you don't like or disagree with. You are only supposed to downvote comments that are useless.
dang 12y ago
That's a good idea. Like so many of these, it isn't obvious how to do it in a way that doesn't complicate HN's minimal UI. But it's worth noting that you'd get this for free if we implemented vote undo, which is something we're open to.

kelvin0 12y ago

I wonder how many moderators are needed to be able to keep up with all the comments and traffic here? It must be a tedious job ...

vectorpush 12y ago

How does HN's moderation staff feel about users who are dead, completely oblivious to it, but who continue to post, sometimes for years after the fact without any kind of warning that they are wasting their time. Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the time, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly inappropriate in the comment history, but the user is still doomed to waste a considerable amount of time attempting to contribute to this board. In the context of internet discussion boards, it seems a little harsh. Off the top of my head, I feel like something akin to an automatic probationary resurrection period would be an interesting idea. Perhaps it occurs one year after hellbanishment, giving the community a chance to organically reevaluate the user's quality of contributions, and giving a second chance to those who have matured in a years time (or who was simply hellbanned in error).

throwit99 12y ago
I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective. It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more. After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. At the start, you sort of care about "karma". But you end up realising it's a measure of two things. 1. How much time you waste commenting on the internet, and 2. How much you can agree with the groupthink echo-chamber. But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. If I get hellbanned from the "rust is the future!!!" subhackernews, big whoop. It'd also help with filtering out all the non-interesting (self driving cars) stories. But then perhaps it'd basically be reddit at that stage which would defeat the point...
- dang 12y ago
  Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people because they "critiqued a YC backed company". Edit: Some of the replies have made good points, and I realize that I overreacted. Sorry about that. Please shoot us an email at hn@ycombinator.com if you feel your account was banned unfairly. We're always happy to look into this—there's no question that we make mistakes; the most I can claim is that we're eager to, and do, correct them when they're brought to our attention.

rsync 12y ago

Is this a reasonable place to plead with people to stop the practice of meta-commentary on downvotes ? I am sick and tired of seeing the scoring system injected into the comment thread: "let the downvotes begin" "EDIT: you can downvote all you want, but ..." "EDIT: not sure why I'm being downvoted, but ..." ... and so on. Just comment and respond, don't add all manner of meta-commentary on voting and the score system into the discussion. Thanks.

minimaxir 12y ago
That's in the guidelines/FAQ.
facepalm 12y ago
Well it insults peoples feelings if they are being downvoted. It seems unrealistic to me to expect that they just accept the humiliation, even if it would be the rational thing to do. (I'm guilty of meta-commenting, too).
dang 12y ago
I agree with you, and so do the HN guidelines (as minimaxir pointed out). But it's clear that pleading with people not to do it isn't enough. We have sometimes toyed with implementing a lightweight guidelines reminder to indicate (privately, to the commenter) when a comment is breaking one of the guidelines. I'd still like to experiment with this someday. Ideally, it would be a community thing and not a moderator thing. The spirit would be, let's all remind each other of the guidelines when we need to. The things that HN cares about, like civility and signal/noise ratio, don't come naturally to an internet forum. We all have to work at it (definitely including me). Features like that are hard to get right, though, and until there's a good idea of how to do it that fits naturally into the existing site, it will remain prospective. Anyone with ideas here is welcome to send them to us at hn@ycombinator.com.

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chrisblackwell 12y ago

I would love to see them lower the threshold for down-voting. I've only got 200+ karma, and it's hard for me to get more. I can't be on here all day commenting, and being the first to submit articles. If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.

kissickas 12y ago
I also miss downvoting on HN, although Reddit needs my help there more anyway. However, Sam did say: >I'm sometimes asked how historically marginalized users can help shape the HN community when the karma threshold for down voting inappropriate comments is high. It's a fair question, and we are experimenting with lowering the downvoting threshold.
Shivetya 12y ago
Well I have posting a lot lends itself to more karma than not, as in eventually I write something intelligent and interesting enough for people to up vote. The majority of my comments sit pretty at whatever the default is with an occasional soapbox that I post knowing it will get nuked. As far as stories, sometimes you can post too early and another will follow with a similar story and it runs up, submit what falls under the guidelines that you truly want to see discussed and you might hit karma gold. Myself, my wish list for HN is a feature I can flag stories for my later review; a save feature like reddit
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  "Myself, my wish list for HN is a feature I can flag stories for my later review; a save feature like reddit" Are you aware that upvoting a story saves it? You can access 'saved stories' via your profile. On one hand, you might argue that overloading the 'upvote' function isn't quite what you want, but the counter argument is that if a story seems interesting enough for you to want to read lead, the upvote's probably deserved.
softdev12 12y ago
The post says "The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so nearly everyone can help there.". I'm not sure if this was recently lowered from something higher. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the actual percentage of HN users that have over 30 karma. Does nearly everyone imply 99.9 percent?

jrs235 12y ago

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. At first I was appalled at hearing this until I realized I misunderstood the change. I was mistaking down voting for flagging. Flagging and down voting are two different things. Also, most everyone can [now] flag comments but you have to take one additional step (extra friction, perhaps for the better and to also prevent accidental flagging) which is you first must click on 'link' next the the comment and then 'flag'.

Yhippa 12y ago

Sam, thanks for the update. I feel that the quality of news has improved greatly as of late and the comments are getting better. Does anybody know what the downvote threshold is? Or any other thresholds for that matter?

NicoJuicy 12y ago

Offtopic here, but i noticed a huge relay since recently on HN... My initial loading time is 13 seconds (didn't realize it was that huge) since a couple of days. Note: didn't realize the lag was that high, i load some other tabs during the waiting... Note 2: I'm from Belgium, so perhaps it helps to debug the issue. Github account didn't seem to contain any items to report bugs/issues

tikhonj 12y ago

Flagging seems like the solution to toxic comments, and should be more encouraged. At the same time, this means it overlaps with downvoting—but only one use of downvoting. Really, the meaning of downvoting on HN is somewhat confused and muddled: is it a "flag lite"? Is it a way of disagreeing? Is it a way to push worse content to the bottom? Is it just the opposite of an upvote? Any one of these would be reasonable, but having all at the same time is not great. But that's exactly what we have now, both in the design of the feature and in how it gets used in practice. Personally, I think downvoting should move away from being an alternate form of flagging (with flagging, perhaps, taking a slightly more prominent role for dealing with actual abuse) and more towards just being the opposite of an upvote. This still makes it a bit of a hybrid (both for moving bad content down and disagreeing), but one that makes a lot more sense because it works just like upvotes do. For one, this is what the interface already implies. The downvote button looks just like the upvote button upside down. Seeing the two as exact opposites is entirely natural, and that's how it plays out in terms of karma too. But in terms of social conventions and, importantly, greying out comments, this doesn't quite hold. I also think that some symmetric way to counterbalance upvotes is actually useful in and of itself: downvotes can offset comments that gain a lot of upvotes before getting a strong rebuttal or comments stuck at the top of a discussion because of other quirks in the system. But people now seem pretty hesitant to use them this way. Which makes sense: if downvotes are, in part, mini-flags, they are too strong just to indicate that you think something has been upvoted too much or is not a particularly good comment (without being bad or abusive). So what would I do? Well, from the site's perspective, the main tweak is greying out comments after more than one downvote. Still have the votes change the order, but only have a really visible effect after a few have accumulated. More importantly, from a social perspective, it would be good to reach consensus on what a downvote actually entails, namely that it's just the opposite of an upvote, neither more nor less. Disentangling flags and downvotes like this will improve the utility of both features by making them more focused. Downvotes can be a symmetric force in shaping discussion while flags could be pushed a bit more as means of pruning actively harmful comments.

doorhammer 12y ago
The question I'd have about a downvote being opposite of an upvote is what is an upvote supposed to be for? I mean that as an honest question. Is it because it's something I like? Is it because I think it adds value to the conversation (usually why I upvote)? I've never seen guidlines for voting either way. The flag guidelines also seem pretty hazy (spam or offtopic [1]). Of course, that could be totally intentional, and I'm not implying it's a bad way to do things. They might not want to nail down the upvote/downvote idea so much and just let them represent a general will of the readers instead of getting into semantic debates over guidelines. Just a few things I'm curious about.

squigs25 12y ago

Flagging posts and downvoting are important pieces to improving the content here on hacker news. Interestingly, I think this one of the few forums where "trolls" appear to be relatively absent. One problem I have noticed is innapropriate downvoting. For example, if a voter downvotes a comment simply because he/she disagrees with the opinion of a commenter. How do we encourage a diversity of opinion on a site of like-minded people? And similarly, how do we prevent "downvote conformity" (I apologize for my invented phraseology, but I'm creating a name for the concept that our community upvotes posts that are generally agreeable and downvotes posts that may be less mainstream, thus imposing a conformity of opinion?)

DanBC 12y ago

I hope that flagging is used to consider when a user is shadow-banned and that down-votes just remove points. > third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change. I recently lost over 70 points across two posts. The first post was rightly down voted. (I would have preferred it to have been killed to stop losing votes) but the second post IMO was suffering from pile-on downvotes. Killing the first post would have prevented some of those follow-on downvotes. Without the context of the first postthe second post would have received some mix of votes. Killing unpopular opinions might be too harsh, but people need to start applyimg corrective upvotes if they feel that strongly about minority opinions.

craigching 12y ago
I always thought that downvoting was to be used for comments that were off-topic, not when you disagreed with someone, but I've learned otherwise I guess. I really wish I could read dissenting opinions or when someone says something wrong, instead of downvoting, I'd prefer someone explain why it's wrong. Downvoting because you disagree with someone always seems off-putting to me.

shocks 12y ago

What is the status of making HN more mobile friendly?

dang 12y ago
In progress. Sorry that I don't have more specifics, but it's coming.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

Voting is a dangerous thing. In German newspapers, an extreme right wing minority has taken over most comment forums. In some of these, even belonging to reputable newspapers, it has become extremely difficult to voice dissenting opinion (for example defending human rights for foreigners and homosexuals), mostly because "activists" have begun marking such opinions as spam or inappropriate.

alan_cx 12y ago

Problem I have is that there is no way of knowing why posts are down-voted. Quality? Politics? Just wrong? No idea. Sometime I see posts which are factually correct, but clearly unpopular and voted down. And to be utterly fair, I'm not even sure why I've down-voted or flagged in the past. Cant even remember if I've flagged. Now Im actually thinking about it, I think I'll only up-vote in the future, and I think that would be if I think I've learned something from a top notch post. Anything else feels like some sort of censorship, vanity or whatever.

Loughla 12y ago
This is actually why I (sort of) prefer the slashdot voting system. It's not just flat voting, it's voting with a purpose and explanation. At least that way if someone downvotes for not agreeing with a statement, they have to think about that reason and admit it to themselves, even if they don't admit it to the website.
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simonsarris 12y ago

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. You need to tell us what "flag inappropriately" means immediately. How do I know if I've been flagging stories inappropriately this entire time?!

maxerickson 12y ago
The flag button would disappear. If you look at flagging links as (mostly) a chore, losing that ability isn't really severe.

detroitcoder 12y ago

When will I be able to collapse comments on HN threads?

Bahamut 12y ago

I very much dislike how the flagging system works currently (for posts) - the stories that bubble to the top seem to become more uninteresting, and some of the more interesting ones, & sometimes certainly relevant, get flagged pre-emptively, which effectively only serves to squelch discussion at the cost a perceived sense of avoiding conflict for the sake of avoiding conflict. The point of view parroted out as justification for flagging stories though appear to suffer from one thing: an avoidance of taking responsibility for the results of the actions in full, and only accepting responsibility for the perceived gatekeeping of "conflict" & not for the flipside of accepting responsibility of intentionally barring any discussion on [insert topic]. The current flagging system for posts is not the solution, and it really decreases the interesting content present on this site.

xiaoma 12y ago

>"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately." I generally flag articles that are overly political, articles that look too much like advertising and anything behind a paywall. I haven't lost flagging abilities, but I do have some concern that moderators might not agree with me, particularly about paywalls.

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hueving 12y ago

Reading this made me sick as I realized that optimizing the echo chamber to remove dissenting opinions is the apparent goal. "removing comments we don't want" is horrifying. Why don't we all just sit in a corner and pat ourselves on the back about how intelligent and enlightened we are now that we don't have to deal with unpopular opinions?

SCHiM 12y ago

I, for one, am very glad that I found this website. I migrated here from slashdot and arstechnica, and the community is much less toxic here. I also find that the level of discussion is higher and that the comments are often more insightful. I very much hope that it can improve even further.

sophialee 12y ago

Thanks for guiding.

bootload 12y ago

"... I’d also like to thank dang and sctb for all the work they’ve done as moderators and with software to increase story and comment quality. ..." This is a good point and should be acknowledged. I was personally contacted on how to improve HN. I've yet to get back to you @dang, replies are more fully formed.

lucb1e 12y ago

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. That seems like a lot of manual work, but maybe it needs to be. Perhaps it could be part automated by revoking flagging privileges when others upvoted the post? If it really are post nobody wants on the site, surely very few people (if anyone) would upvote it. So if it gets both flagged and upvoted, it are probably flags from users that disagree and you can pretty consistently revoke their permissions. Just an idea, I don't have the data to test this. Thanks a lot for all the work you are doing and have done so far on the site. I agree that the quality has increased!

facepalm 12y ago

A lot of effort to get rid of people, not so much effort to attract them. Maybe it's not needed because the site is so popular. But it seems to contradict the other messages where they try to encourage everybody to apply to YC, especially the people who feel like they are not suited to it. It's a bit funny if you consider these algorithms might be part of the selection process for YC (consciously or unconsciously) - have they really nailed the detection of trolls? Maybe eventually the algorithms will align so well with the spirit of YC that they can eliminate the interview process :-) I for one feel unwanted (it's not my first account - some got banned, one I somehow retired after a couple of years). I long for another news source, and also for open discussion. In general discussion does not seem to be welcome, as there are mechanisms to prevent deep threads. That's maybe OK, they want to be a news site, not a discussion site. But it leaves a void to be filled.

closetnerd 12y ago

So they're going to do to Hacker News what they did to Reddit.

etiam 12y ago

> best source of news and discussion about technology and startups 'News that hackers would be interested in reading' still applies, right? That's a bit clunky to put in a press release, I will admit, but I would be sad to see the range of HN reduced to merely startups and technology.

ende 12y ago

There are many classes of topic. Many posts are considered 'on topic' for HN, some are considered 'off topic' and flagged away, and then there is a lot of grey territory which seems to be tolerated but can't exactly be labeled as 'hacker news'. Politics is the most obvious example. Should downvoting work the same way in political threads as in technology threads? It really isn't serving the same function. Perhaps political or otherwise 'semi-topic' submissions can be flagged as such and thereby disable voting within them. People can visit them if they want to, but they do so knowing there is a different ettiquette.

Houshalter 12y ago

I haven't noticed that many "toxic comments" and it doesn't seem like a huge problem. Automating removal of flagged content seems like bad practice. The majority of users treat it like a "super downvote button" and a way to censor controversial things.

nextw33k 12y ago

Rather than lower the threshold, which is just lowering the bar, how about adding a time parameter to the points? (Older points are worth more, but not visibly so) Someone that has been using the site for a few years but only commented in a positive way is surely more valid a moderator than a new account that has submitted 10 articles in the last month. The time parameter adds continuity to the quality of flagging.

lettercarrier 12y ago

Comments are what gets me here, for discovery. Love when topics and links are the subject of comments. I think my CPS degree received when having to use IBM 129 and 3 runs per day afford a great HN following. I really don't get the down up karma thing. Just glad smart people with lots of time on their hands post interesting stuff

lexcorvus 12y ago

I'm cautiously optimistic about this, but the reference to "inappropriate comments" gives me pause. I'm reminded of this analysis [1]: We have such labels [for heresy] today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention. Especially when paired with coded language like "historically marginalized users" (I'm pretty sure Sam isn't talking about Republicans here [2]), targeting "inappropriate comments" suggests that Hacker News it at risk of becoming a progressive echo-chamber. (Of course, there are those [3] who fret that HN is insufficiently progressive, but the same people probably think Harvard and the New York Times aren't progressive enough, either.) I can understand flagging uncivil comments, but "inappropriate" comments? I'm not even sure what that means. Please proceed with caution. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html [2]: If you don't think tech is hostile to Republicans, you've probably never been a Republican in tech. Indeed, who's more underrepresented in tech: women, or Romney voters? (Note: I didn't vote for Romney, and I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Republican party.) [2]: See, e.g., https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says.