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A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

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Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#21

Post by minikites »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #14
minikites wrote: post #3

>Likewise, topics around diversity and inclusion in tech have gained lots of visibility over the past few years. However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Time to see see if mentioning this very clear behavior gets this link flagged/killed. Privileged people usually don't like having their privilege challenged.

It's less about privilege being challenged, more about "inclusion" being used to justify just about anything and often going too far. Here's a comment in an official nodejs repository that got edited by a contributor to correct a pronoun on somebody else's post: https://github.com/nodejs/package-maintenance/issues/77#issu... (click the "edited" dropdown) That you yourself come right out the gate guns blazing about "p…

I don't understand what you mean, why is correcting a pronoun "going too far"? Do you not think respecting people's gender is worthy of the tiny amount of effort it takes?

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#26

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Here's some features I wish we had:

- Overhauled voting system. Comment votes are effectively "like/dislike" buttons, and some people use them to help promote/discourage comments central to the discussion. If you get downvoted or upvoted you do not know why, and that helps no one. Slashdot implemented a useful feature for this over 20 years ago.

- Tags on submissions, which would enable very simple filtering by topics.

- New hidden sections to let us dig into dead or controversial stories (maybe /dead and /deadnew?). If you watch /newest, you'll sometimes notice information that is interesting or meaningful, but it's auto-killed. There's no way to only show dead info except to page back through /newest. It would also be neat if we could actually vote on these, even if they remain dead. I don't even need comments to work on them, I'd just like to occasionally look at content that either a bot or overzealous human deems 'inappropriate'.

On the last one, here's an example: I just found this dead article in /newest (https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The...) talking about the world's largest battery being built in Texas. It was submitted by protomyth, number 55 on the HN leaderboard. Of their past 30 submissions, 5 are dead, 1 has >100 votes, and 1 has >200 votes.

You can't easily find articles like this, because you have to keep paging back and paging back to find 30 or more dead articles. And you can't see the highest voted dead articles, so ones that might be interesting but were killed for some reason are also hard to find.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#27

Post by lxmcneill »

minikites wrote: post #21
hombre_fatal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about privilege being challenged, more about "inclusion" being used to justify just about anything and often going too far. Here's a comment in an official nodejs repository that got edited by a contributor to correct a pronoun on somebody else's post: https://github.com/nodejs/package-maintenance/issues/77#issu... (click the "edited" dropdown) That you yourself come right out the gate guns blazing about "p…

I don't understand what you mean, why is correcting a pronoun "going too far"? Do you not think respecting people's gender is worthy of the tiny amount of effort it takes?

I think this has less to do with respect and more to do with detracting from the original discussion e.g. source code integrity having nothing to do with human genitalia.

Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

#28

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

hannasanarion wrote: post #24

I was hoping to learn about why sometimes comments can't be replied to, especially if they're deep in a thread. Can somebody fill me in?

Try clicking the time stamp link of the comment, you should be able to reply from there.

I don’t know if there’s a limit to thread depth?

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