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Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

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Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#131

Post by jasonkester »

sabat wrote: post #106
jacquesm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more up-front than seeing your link go 'dead' could it be? After all it's not like anybody reads the guidelines linked above anyway before submitting a link, especially not if they're old hands (and most likely not even if they're not). Maybe a message could be added to the submission process that said: "You've used a URL shortener, bang , you're dead", but that's pretty obviously the reason why. After all,…

The URL shortener was just an example -- just one example. My point is not about bit.ly or anything like it. My point is: there are apparently a bunch of rules, and I don't have the sense that I understand them. Worse, I have the sense that asking about the rules is frowned upon. I find this a little chilling, and it seems to fly in the face of the quasi-libertarian spirit I generally find on HN.

That's by design. The worst thing you can do is tell spammers why you flagged their thing as spam.

Right now, there are spammers repeatedly submitting shortened URLs to their WOW Gold sites and not checking to see if they're killed. That actually stops a good fraction of it, because frankly, they're not very smart people.

If you told them exactly why their current tactic is not working, they'd immediately move on to the next one and the next one until they find one that works.

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#132

Post by ismarc »

lsc wrote: post #123
ismarc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it may be a bit spammy, with the frequency you updat your blog, I personally wouldn't see it as such. However, you're tying yourself to HN for discussion (typically a good discussion), but I see it as "setting precedent" for others. You remember the web rings? It reminds me of that. Perhaps a single platform for managing discussions of articles/posts/blogs similar to news list sites, but specifically for discus…

>In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts. hm. well, in that case, maybe I shouldn't do it? I mean, really, what I want is to outsource the 'community management' stuff. As far as I can tell, hacker news has (for now) has the best community of any similar s…

Maybe it's all the recent discussions around the eternal September recently, but this has kind of stuck in my mind, and Reddit with the subreddits actually seems kind of ideal for what you're looking for. Set up your own subreddit and just submit every blog entry to it. You then have a catalog, an easy way for others to discover new posts, and a discussion forum all built in.

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#133

Post by lsc »

ismarc wrote: post #132
lsc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts. hm. well, in that case, maybe I shouldn't do it? I mean, really, what I want is to outsource the 'community management' stuff. As far as I can tell, hacker news has (for now) has the best community of any similar s…

Maybe it's all the recent discussions around the eternal September recently, but this has kind of stuck in my mind, and Reddit with the subreddits actually seems kind of ideal for what you're looking for. Set up your own subreddit and just submit every blog entry to it. You then have a catalog, an easy way for others to discover new posts, and a discussion forum all built in.

hm. neat... and it wouldn't spam up the rest of reddit? hm. I don't spend much time on reddit, so I don't really know of the culture, well, much, but that might be the way to go, I mean, if that sort of thing is acceptable within the cultural norms of reddit.

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#134

Post by avar »

duairc wrote: post #62
pg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people are more apt to downvote than in the past. But there are a lot more voters. Plus I recently removed the -4 threshold on comment scores and instead merely never display a number lower than -4. So downvoted comments now cost more karma. (This was in response to people who would say asshole things, knowing they couldn't cost them more than 4 points.)

I don't know, I definitely think people a people a much more inclined to downvote for the wrong reasons. I've made a lot of posts in the last day, one of which was by far the longest post in a 200+ comment thread, none of which I think were in any way rude or anything like that, and despite that it's cost me around -10 karma overall (mostly because of one post in particular, which I don't think was that bad. A strong…

If you're talking about [1] then I'm one of the people who down-voted it yesterday, for the reasons that steveklabnik [2] cites.

It's just an assertion with nothing backing it up, so it's not contributing anything to the discussion. It's an assertion that I happen to agree with in large part for my own reasons. But as long as you're not making a case for it it's just noise that deserves to be down-voted, while comments that back up their assertions and stimulate thoughtful argument deserve an up-vote.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643726 2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647505

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#135

Post by blasdel »

ptomato wrote: post #8
sp332 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't always work though. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632572 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579 were posted one day apart, with identical URLs.

Actually the link checker only checks vs. links that are currently loaded into memory.

That would probably work terrifically if there was an eviction algorithm other than crashing at least once per day. (If you try to comment and get "Unknown or expired link", it's because news.arc crashed between the page load and the POST)

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#136

Post by lsc »

mquander wrote: post #121
lsc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hm. What do you think of the other suggestion, a "submit this to hn/talk about it on hn" link that asked a user to do the submission for me? does that make it any more or less spammish, in your opinion?

I think that a "submit this to HN" link is less spammish, because if someone clicks it, the implication is that your blog post was actually genuinely interesting to someone. The issue I have with doing it yourself is that you're not competent to judge whether your own post is any good or not. Someone else is.

Yes, but my mother reads my blog.

My point is that if I put a 'submit to hn' link on my blog, no matter how low-quality my blog entry is, /someone/ is going to click the link, especially if that is the only way to comment.

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#137

Post by sabat »

jasonkester wrote: post #131
sabat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The URL shortener was just an example -- just one example. My point is not about bit.ly or anything like it. My point is: there are apparently a bunch of rules, and I don't have the sense that I understand them. Worse, I have the sense that asking about the rules is frowned upon. I find this a little chilling, and it seems to fly in the face of the quasi-libertarian spirit I generally find on HN.

That's by design. The worst thing you can do is tell spammers why you flagged their thing as spam. Right now, there are spammers repeatedly submitting shortened URLs to their WOW Gold sites and not checking to see if they're killed. That actually stops a good fraction of it, because frankly, they're not very smart people. If you told them exactly why their current tactic is not working, they'd immediately move on to…

My point has nothing to do with spammers or URL shorteners -- that was just an example. See above if you care to know my actual point.

But this is probably related. I think the anti-spam measures are probably going too far. I'm not a spammer. No site I've ever attempted to submit has been been a spam site, an ad site, or anything else self-serving. Yet my most recent attempts to submit have been stomped on, accusing me of "wasting my time" by attempting to spam HN.

Here's the most recent article I tried to post -- you judge whether I'm submitting spam sites: http://www.w3matter.com/journal/2010/8/29/startups-old-peopl...

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#138

Post by mquander »

lsc wrote: post #136
mquander wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a "submit this to HN" link is less spammish, because if someone clicks it, the implication is that your blog post was actually genuinely interesting to someone. The issue I have with doing it yourself is that you're not competent to judge whether your own post is any good or not. Someone else is.

Yes, but my mother reads my blog. My point is that if I put a 'submit to hn' link on my blog, no matter how low-quality my blog entry is, /someone/ is going to click the link, especially if that is the only way to comment.

Frankly, I agree, but I feel like my objections to this are so far out of the mainstream (in a world where every webpage is slathered in "Twitter/Digg/Reddit/Facebook this" links) that I am not even going to try to champion them.

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#139

Post by lobo-tuerto »

lobo-tuerto wrote: post #115
swombat wrote: post #7

Yes, yes, HN is going to the dogs, it's not as good as it used to be, it's all because of the new users, and so on and so on. It's been like that since I joined two and a half years ago.

It reminds me of the famous "Wear sunscreen" video :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=MX&v=0CVB8YSOLK4

Ugh, got decontextualized.

I meant the video reminded me about the recurring ranting (or praising) cycle that takes place when looking life in hindsight. :)

"... when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble ..."

Re: Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

#140

Post by xiongchiamiov »

binspace wrote: post #59
georgecmu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst trend I see is comments getting downvoted based on opinions expressed within, not on how poorly they are expressed. No matter how thoughtful a comment, if it goes against the groupthink, you can expect it to hurt your karma.

I like /.'s tagging of comments. It's good feedback on why something was up or down modded. It also forces a downvoter to justify why something is getting downvoted.

Now if they only allowed us to downvote stories, instead of relying upon tags such as "slashvertisement", "dupe", and whatever we tag those ridiculously-overhyped headlines...
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