Flame-war detector remind me of the following short story by Scott Alexander
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
101–110 of 196 posts
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#102I 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?
One issue I've noticed which I'm surprised still exists is, on really large threads with 1000+ comments, collapsing threads becomes noticeably slow (multiple seconds long).
I was looking at the source code, and it seemed like collapsing recursively collapses all comments below it too?
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#103>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.
I meant the overall post/link (where I quoted from), not my own comment.
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#104Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#105You left out orange usernames
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#106One 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.
While we are on the subject of downvotes, I'd love to have it require a comment (reason) to downvote. Not knowing why something gets downvoted is super frustrating. The comment doesn't have to be visible in the default listing; it perhaps can be a side option/listing or pop-up.
It's not going to happen; it's part of the ethos of the site to downvote in lieu of writing insubstantial criticisms, a policy Paul Graham actually wrote out once long ago.
It's the right policy, I think. The last thing we need are dozens more one-line "why this sucks" comments on each thread.
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#107Pretty cool report. Personally all I want is to be able to change my username, even if it means emailing and waiting a few days.
Agreed, this would be nice to add. However, it would have been easier if everyone's primary identifier was a number, and a name was just an associated field. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that it was set up this way. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Anybody known if emailing the mods will let this happen?
Maybe add a displayname "on top" that gets displayed in discussions, while still showing the username in the profile so people don't impersonate each other, add a button to "flag displayname" on the profile so that can be reset if abused or even the privilege to set it revoked -- done?
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#108>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?
It's not meant to be taken seriously.
Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#109Re: A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
#110Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 ) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.
Web changed from Google to DuckDuckGo.
But which features are missing?