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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 injecte
by 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 agoThat's in the guidelines/FAQ.
- facepalm 12y agoWell 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 agoI 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.