51–60 of 72 posts
Absolutly no politics, current mainstream news, or anything that comes near them. No OWS crap that keeps getting submitted. There's a lot of pieces from the Atlantic, Vanity, and other places that are being submitted and upvoted that are essentially political in nature but seem to be viewed in a good light simply because of their publisher. Cut out all that and the biggest problems will go away. Promote civil discour…
OWS as in Occupy Wall Street?
Hacker News seems to be evolving and becoming many things to many users. Why not leverage that instead of trying to restrict it? Regardless of whether things are "on topic" or not, the site has two things going for it that other communities often strive in vain to build: traffic and a definable culture. My suggestion: a column down the left with a topic marker: startup advice, network technology, programming tips, ha…
On the other hand, I think it would be useful to have strict limits on how far the culture stretches. We should try to preserve the geeky, business-y, thoughtful culture, rather than going the route of reddit where everyone's allowed to do what they want.
I'd like to see more people on the "New" page. I'm not sure how much attention it gets compared to the front page, but it seems like very few people are taking the time to wade through all of the submissions and upvoting the gems. Essentially, controversial topics are much more likely to garner the necessary upvotes to make it to the front page, and thus receive a lot of attention, while technical ones often fade int…
I agree about "Be the change you want to see".
Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics (even politics within a thirty mile radius of a computer!), because they predictably descend into value-free flame wars. That destroys the sense of community even on good threads: after seeing "you're a fucking idiot" on some article about how the TSA is cracking down on Wall Street music piracy, people often think "Did you read the fucking post?" is…
In that vein, I think the guidelines ( http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) are too wishy-washy: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some…
I've seen these things discussed, and pg has given his opinion on some of them in comment threads, but we should decide and put the answer in the site guidelines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
why not get rid of downvoting entirely? Dissenting opinion (from someone who generally believes in positive reinforcement as the best policy): I tend to be a very controversial figure, wherever I go. I have dropped out of a lot of communities in part due to the degree to which I get attacked. Some of my comments here get upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. It can be entertaining to watch it. It usually doesn't re…
Kinda similar here. I dislike "me too" responses, and tend to be the devil's advocate because that's the point of debating vs "commenting". The funniest is when my comments get downvoted, yet acquire tons of responses [1] [2]. It's kind of interesting to see how the votes fluctuate until they reach their final (usually low) score. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116043 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
I have a serious medical condition that is supposed to be killing me, and I do still have bad days at times, but I'm getting well when doctor's (and everyone else) says that can't be done (getting well is why I have slimmed down so much). To me, that is an ordinary fact and I talk about it casually at times online, the way I would to the two sons who live with me and know all the details. For other people, that's a headfuck and most folks divide up between being highly impressed or spitting in my face and accusing me of both making up crap and being a danger to others to talk about it (which makes me want to go "Okay, which is it? You can't have it both ways.").
In short, I guess I'm the anti-group-think wherever I go. AKA lightening rod for controversy.
I sometimes make a comment that I don't feel is controversial/wrong at all, only to see it downvoted. Not only is it discouraging (and a great way to ruin my day), but it's also low in signal--I don't know whether someone just had a bad day and wanted to spread their hate, or whether I misperceived the controversy of my comments. I always want to ask the downvoters to let me know what I said wrong--I just hate the anonymous drive-by shooting, if that analogy makes sense.
Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics (even politics within a thirty mile radius of a computer!), because they predictably descend into value-free flame wars. That destroys the sense of community even on good threads: after seeing "you're a fucking idiot" on some article about how the TSA is cracking down on Wall Street music piracy, people often think "Did you read the fucking post?" is…
Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here. I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here, to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook friends of diverse political opinions wh…
Consider, for example, the terrible problem of The Virtual Currency That Shall Not Be Named, which until recently was like a plague here on HN. It's hard to argue that it was off topic for hackers: It was a system built by a hacker and employing fun cryptographic hacks. But it was also a sort of terrible wedge by which absolute torrents of drivel arrived on the site.
IMHO the way to handle politics is to empower certain individuals to delete political threads. Then the definition of politics will be subjective. That's fine. There is no other way. And an advantage of the subjective boundary is that it will be naturally fuzzy, which is good. An absolute ban on submissions about The Currency That Shall Not Be Named would be too extreme. What we need is an occasional foray into that world, followed by corrective action if the experiment starts going wrong.
In the meantime I flag things that I think go over the edge, as tptacek does.
The downvotes are horribly biased and uninformative. I think an interesting experiment to try is to force downvoters to also give a comment, so the parent knows why he/she is being downvoted, so as to discourage that behavior in the future. This is a great way for newcomers to stop making rookie mistakes, and to reduce the number of "Why was my post downvoted?" updates/comments that add little value, but is a questio…
I think one of the main problems with HN is the way comments are displayed on the page. Essentially, the way things are set up, every thread becomes ossified after while. It becomes this stagnant, rigid, structure that doesn't change much when new comments are added. This is the opposite of what you want, if you want a vibrant, active discussion on an interesting topic that lasts for longer than a few hours.
Effectively, HN needs some of the features that forums and bulletin boards have had for ages. There is a reason forums work so well for discussions.