151–160 of 383 posts
I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major effect on the signal/noise ratio.
I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course, but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images. Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin ) really helped. The…
A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one karma point. Down-voting should be for disruption, not ignorance. Ignorant comments are fine. Get them out there so they can be aired and corrected. Laymen get to know what they think. Experts get to know what laymen think. Occasionally there's a good idea. Talk is cheap and we should do more of it. The alternative is people being far more ign…
A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one karma point. Down-voting should be for disruption, not ignorance. Ignorant comments are fine. Get them out there so they can be aired and corrected. Laymen get to know what they think. Experts get to know what laymen think. Occasionally there's a good idea. Talk is cheap and we should do more of it. The alternative is people being far more ign…
That is such a good idea it has actually been integral to HN for, oh, I don't know, a pretty long time... From the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html):
''' How is a user's karma calculated?
Roughly, the number of upvotes on their stories and comments minus the number of downvotes. The numbers don't match up exactly, because some votes aren't counted to prevent abuse. '''
Reading this article and thinking back on the users on HN that I do enjoy reading comments from I think that a neat feature may be the ability for a logged in user to "favorite/mark" specific authors. Those authors only get some particular character in front of their name (or a different color) so that they stand out more. I do agree with this post about seeing certain names and knowing that the signal ratio will be…
Removing the vote count was a step back. You end up with highly positioned comments that are factually wrong and no way to weigh the corrections made in replies. If you saw that a comment had 20 votes, but a reply had 500, you'd have something to go by. If nothing else, they could show the relative score of a reply to its parent.
This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back. Please also provide a new view that lists all top 20% of highest commented and highest voted news stories per day (disregarding any downvotes/flags !!). I really hate to miss stories that received a lot of traffic but got buried on page 200+ just because a vocal minority decided to hide it. Please let me vote on old comments. "Voting is closed on tha…
Your wish has been granted, you have a "karma: 4406" line
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad likes to dismiss Wikipedia, and he used to be an admin. They may just know how the sausage is made. His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors". His favorite example is that of an article about an ancient persian poet, which says that there's only 2 of his poems known, and only 1 remains. Next to that line, there's a picture of the other poem. Eh, who knows.
I didn't argue that Wikipedia always was correct (no source is that, I'd guess), just that it smelled really bad to dismiss it with just hand waving . It do have sources and have been whetted (for reasonably popular subjects.)
Minor nitpick, vetting is someone checking something and approving it, whereas whetting is grinding away metal to sharpen a blade.
Reading this article and thinking back on the users on HN that I do enjoy reading comments from I think that a neat feature may be the ability for a logged in user to "favorite/mark" specific authors. Those authors only get some particular character in front of their name (or a different color) so that they stand out more. I do agree with this post about seeing certain names and knowing that the signal ratio will be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back. Please also provide a new view that lists all top 20% of highest commented and highest voted news stories per day (disregarding any downvotes/flags !!). I really hate to miss stories that received a lot of traffic but got buried on page 200+ just because a vocal minority decided to hide it. Please let me vote on old comments. "Voting is closed on tha…
> This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back. Your wish has been granted, you have a "karma: 4406" line
I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started. California can not even replicate 40 years old TGV, but somehow it will build space-like technology for fraction of price. And than there are politics. Entire world should accept millions of refugees. But SF is different, and should not even host 400 homeless who arrive every year.
But it should build lots of housing for tech workers for whom life just isn't worth living if they have to be anywhere else on the planet.