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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

#42
post #30

One feature I’d like to see is the split between upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It’s a measure of controversiality which I would find more interesting than the net score.

Yes. I’d much rather read comments with a high number of votes and net zero score than the two other extremes.

Well you don't get to see other people's comment scores anyway. What I meant is for your own comments, seeing a score of +1 doesn't carry the same information than +15/-14.

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

#43
post #30

One feature I’d like to see is the split between upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It’s a measure of controversiality which I would find more interesting than the net score.

But I think that would lead to people preferring vote manipulation. If I agree with a title but I see it close to 50% upvotes/downvoted, I’m more prone to upvote it. Whereas I’m reality I might not upvote it anyways.

Not submissions which you can't downvote anyway. I meant comments, for which you can only see the score of your own anyway.

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

#46

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page. Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.

Very often this is readers following some link, seeing other links from that page and submitting them.

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

#47

>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.

One of the best ways to get downvoted is to predict in advance why you'll be downvoted! In this case you appear to be setting up a narrative to claim downvoters are evidence of a particular ideological point, when instead they might be downvoting you because you're being a jerk.

You seem to have misread his comment. He predicted downvotes on the original submission, not his own comment.

He was wrong, but only because you have to click the link and read the full list to see the excerpt he quoted, when most people only read titles and comments.

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

#48
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. I think it's just aversion to culture war. I know I get more than enough of my fill on Twitter.

Your ability to ignore "the culture war" is the very definition of privilege.

"Privilege" in Intersectionality seems to have all of the same semantics as "original sin" in traditional religions. However, it's most particularly similar to certain toxic fundamentalist religious formulations of inherited guilt, in that the concept is explicitly tied to race and ethnicity. (The "Children of Ham" in the Handmaid's Tale.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8

(EDIT: An anthropologist friend of mine told me about this story of a Jewish mystic and preacher who was also a travelling trader. As he was returning to a particular town, the residents recognized him and started throwing rocks at him. To this, he says, "Ah, good!" His companion asks why in the world would you say this is good? His answer: "Because it means they were listening!")

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

#50
post #22

A new account posting a very old and famous post... almost looks like karma farming...

I've never seen it before, and I've been reading HN for years. A new user might naturally be interested in undocumented features and stumble upon. I can't help but notice that it's still missing `noprocrast` and related settings.

noprocrast is documented in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
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