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When I've had people explicitly say "thanks", that's meant more to me than upvotes. There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to b
by philh 11y ago
When I've had people explicitly say "thanks", that's meant more to me than upvotes.
There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to be the default way to express approval, but it does seem valuable to have both available.
(Downvoting thank-you posts is one way to keep them available without losing their value, but I'm not sure it's the best way.)
- philh 11y agoThrowing an idea out there - I haven't received many thank-you comments, but my favourite along those lines came through my anonymous feedback form, http://sayat.me/philh http://sayat.me/philh. If there was a community norm of people having those, then people could easily make thank-you comments that didn't clutter the page. (I wouldn't usually want someone using email for that, because then I'd feel obliged to respond.) (This is kind of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I'd like them to be a norm for other reasons too. Unfortunately they can also be used for bullying, so I don't know how realistic that is.)
- krapp 11y agoMaybe Hacker News could have public and private comments. Private comments would essentially be dead comments that could only be visible and active for the person being replied to.
- thaumaturgy 11y agoTaking the time to write a slightly more thoughtful "thank you" comment usually does the job just fine. "Thank you." vs. "Thank you for taking the time to write this, this topic has been on my mind recently and you really helped me figure this out." The latter doesn't usually get downvoted, and sometimes even gets promoted a bit.