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Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

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Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#291

Post by onecommentman »

Applejinx wrote: post #160
paganel wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not just discussions about politics, I still find HN to be one of the most politics-free places on the Internet, which is nice. Granted, I avoid almost everything that talks about US computer programmers vs the rest of the world computer programmers, discussions which tend to have not that nice xenophobic nuance to them, but the rest of the discussions are pretty civil. Also (and of course), I also avoid almost eve…

I find HN to be a very specific political demographic of great interest, so when I read it, it's with the specific intent of exposing myself to the point of view of this very specific political demographic. That's not the same thing as a specific POV or catechism: the demographic actively seeks novel answers and ideas in certain ways so long as larger assumptions remain unchallenged, and even then the right framing c…

If you replace “political” with “intellectual” or “social” or “philosophical” I’d agree with you. If you start challenging larger assumptions, you might get a few new insights, but the danger is ending up in the swamp of post-modernism that would make Napoleon’s march to Moscow look like a productive use of time and resources in comparison.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#292

Post by onecommentman »

aaron-santos wrote: post #259
xivzgrev wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave you an upvote. I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks. Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally…

> I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks. Interesting perspective. One of the easiest ways to gain karma from comments is writing a "The article gets it completely wrong. Here's why..." type comment[1]. HN highly rewards this kind of comment. Discussion after discussion is riddled with them. It might help to exemplify taking risks in the space of possible co…

HN should highly reward this kind of comment, because it aids the reader in determining what to spend their limited time in reading. If it is done well. Editor, not censor. Not “I don’t like this political view”, but “The assertions aren’t supported by facts” or “These facts should also be considered”. Anyone who spent any time judging Baldrige Quality Award submissions would know the drill.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#293

Post by dang »

krapp wrote: post #282
dang wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see links to the highly meritorious politically-charged discussions that were flagged.

Adding the purely subjective qualifier "highly meritorious" makes it seem as if you intend to make me waste my time searching for links only to categorically dismiss them all out of hand. That's a common form of trolling that should be beneath you. Most stories or comment threads here wouldn't meet the bar for "highly meritorious" so there's no reason political stories should as well. Anyway, you should know of some…

Ok, I've gone through that list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24504297 was not a good discussion (many of the comments in it were flagkilled, so anyone who wants to see how bad it was would need to turn 'showdead' on in their profile). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24667006 was ok, but small; had the post stayed on the front page it would almost certainly have turned into a flamewar. We turned off the flags on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23677740, so that's an example of a discussion not being suppressed. Your other links just point to meta threads.

These links seem to me to point to a system that is working reasonably well, the main problem with which is that people say a lot of untrue things about it. That's inevitable—people say a lot of untrue things in general. I don't think it's possible to do better than 'reasonably well', for many reasons, including: there's too much randomness, we don't see everything, and a lot of these situations are lose-lose.

If you're suggesting that we should just have political free-for-alls on HN, that is quite impossible—HN would not survive it. If you're not suggesting that, it's unclear to me what your complaint is. Too much Assange? Everyone thinks that HN has too much of $something.

How we moderate politics on HN is well-established, and clearly explained at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone have a better idea, I'd love to hear it, but please make sure that you've familiarized yourself with past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why it won't work.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#294

Post by tom_mellior »

cinntaile wrote: post #17
tom_mellior wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.

From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them for rude posts or other posts that aren't helpful to a discussion.

"Disagree" describes a wide range of things though. It can be "you claim facts that are demonstrably false", "you claim facts that I cannot demonstrate are false, but I have strong doubts and you do not provide sources", "you cite correct facts but your interpretation of them is demonstrably wrong", "you cite correct facts but I interpret them differently", etc. And those are just factual disagreements, without getting into "you're making a strawman argument", etc. Thinks probably shouldn't be this fine-grained, but I hope you get the idea that there is reasonable room for more helpful feedback than "I disagree".

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#295

Post by 0-_-0 »

RubenvanE wrote: post #266
Nemi wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had this problem too on one page. I clicked on another article and it worked. Looks like it is a little buggy (founder take note!)

Yes, I am aware of the issue (see my recent comment on one of the parent comments). I am afraid that it is an issue with the way some browsers render the CSS sticky position. If you have any CSS knowledge, I would greatly appreciate your input! For my information, which browser do you use?

I tried both Google Chrome and Firefox (also, Brave)

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#296

Post by koheripbal »

cromka wrote: post #225
koheripbal wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think the future is actually in smaller action-based forums. Like, if you want to achieve something, you would join a group based on that goal, and it would not be structured around posts/news, it would instead be structured in a way that would break down the goal into finer and finer chunks, that people could collaborate on and actually submit/assign/judge tasks to perform. All this karma circlejerking…

Totally agree. We could even give it a name, like Usenet or sth?

> sth

What is sth?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#297

Post by Pick-A-Hill2019 »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #207
Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma points are both a blessing and a curse. They are good as a form of gate-keeping but bad because I too have found myself deciding not to post a comment in case it got down-voted to oblivion. In fact I debated whether or not to post this comment for those same reasons. I try to take down voted comments on the chin (and one of mine at -4 was absolutely warranted) but at other times it can be dis-heartening to see…

I kind of think about it like the karma attained buys you the ability to occasionally say something that wrests the narrative back from the crowdmind a bit .. at least until it disappears due to the downvote pileon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's Hoping ;->

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#298

Post by lwhi »

mncharity wrote: post #223
ChefboyOG wrote: post #175

The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community. I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out…

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers ? "Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"…

I want an environment that mirrors the serendipitous nature of real physical life conversation.

What you're proposing seems very similar to blocking people who you feel shouldn't be allowed to contribute.

"...forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society ..."

I'm obviously exaggerating my point, but this snippet of a definition feels appropriate.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#300

Post by smusamashah »

RubenvanE wrote: post #153
smusamashah wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks great. I can't seem to minimize the comments and seeing an exception in console. I am on chrome desktop.

That's weird! I've used it mainly on Chrome so far and I've not yet encountered this problem. Does it keep happening or was it once?

I keep getting this on most news items for example on https://hackerdaily.io/24741077/comments i get this error

  DOMException: Failed to execute 'appendChild' on 'Node': This node type does not support this method.
    at Object.appendChild (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:41326)
    at m (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:54249)
    at v (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:53880)
    at _ (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:54335)
    at P (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:57721)
    at P (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:57656)
    at f.__patch__ (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:58133)
    at f.t._update (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:35072)
    at f.r (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:65536)
    at _n.get (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:27248)
Folding works in this one though https://hackerdaily.io/24740266/comments
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