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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

#51

It's interesting that you need at least 501 karma to be able to downvote comments and posts, but only 31 to flag submissions. Kind of surprising considering that they say a flag is essentially a "super" downvote.

Out of curiosity, how do comments get flagged?

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

#52
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.

StackOverflow does this well. They allow you to click the sum total of votes to see the breakdown of upvotes versus downvotes.

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

#53
post #51

It's interesting that you need at least 501 karma to be able to downvote comments and posts, but only 31 to flag submissions. Kind of surprising considering that they say a flag is essentially a "super" downvote.

Out of curiosity, how do comments get flagged?

Users with enough karma (I think it's 30?) flag them. You need to click on the actual link to the comment, which is where you can flag (or vouch!) for comments that you think break the guidelines (or were wrongly flagged).

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

#54
post #51

It's interesting that you need at least 501 karma to be able to downvote comments and posts, but only 31 to flag submissions. Kind of surprising considering that they say a flag is essentially a "super" downvote.

Out of curiosity, how do comments get flagged?

You click the timestamp of the comment, which takes you to a page with more menu options. One of those is [flag]. I don't know how many flags it takes to convert a comment from normal to [flagged], or to dead.

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

#56
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.

I maintain a list of resources here https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity I'd actually added this list a year ago, but forgot about it, then just added it again, and had to remove it again as I realized it was dupe :)

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

#57

>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.

Oops, you missed out the best bit from your quote: "(Unfortunately)" ;) - I was going to post a comment about how precious this is, but looks like you got here first on this subject, so I'm going to add a reply instead.

The fact that people here will generally flag this shit to death is good. This is a sign of maturity. The community has realised that discussions here on these topics are reliably unproductive, and will therefore kill them on sight.

"But what if this means killing the productive discussions here on this topic?" - well, it's a calculated risk...

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

#59
The ranking algorithm also isn't some simple votes/time metric. The flame war detector for posts is an example that is mentioned, but there are also some undocumented complexities on the comment side too.

An obvious one is brand new comments get a huge boost in the rankings compared to older comments. It is pretty common to see a few minute old comment at the top of a lot of comment threads. It also seems user reputation is a factor in this. A user with a good average karma score (a metric that used to be displayed publicly but is now hidden) seems to have their comments stay near the top longer than other users.

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

#60

>If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings Why on earth is there a karma requirement for this, let alone such a high one?

If you hit the threshold, enabling the flag for you, then you are downvoted below the threshold, do you lose access to the feature as well?
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