I'd like a better "hide" mechanism - swipe. I'd like to swipe away comments and submissions that I am done with but have them revive if enough points or comments come in after. Eventually the front page would only show new posts or those jumping in popularity (or be empty as I dismissed everything); no infinite scroll.
Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#32Less transphobia and general lack of social consciousness. I'm often on the edge of not reading HN as it is for those reasons, but unfortunately there isn't anything else like its better sides.
HNs isn’t Twitter, and one of its strengths is being intellectually open and discursive.
What you see as ‘the obviously true thing everyone should accept, positively affirm, and shun dissenters of’ may not be that. At the very least, none of us should expect HNs to be tailored to our particular set of ideological values, no matter how deeply held - imo.
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#33I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how stagnant discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring.
One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#34The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on. The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse. There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality true / false funny / serious insightful / wrong kind / hurtful agree / disagree (useful for votes) I haven't got a clue how a good…
this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#35The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on. The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse. There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality true / false funny / serious insightful / wrong kind / hurtful agree / disagree (useful for votes) I haven't got a clue how a good…
In terms of agree/disagree, I'd want to add that unrationalized downvotes is not very useful to readers.
Someone anonymously disagrees with a statement - but why?
Upvotes, on the other hand, makes sense inherently. Someone agrees to the statement, which is rationalized by itself.
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#36I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how stagnant discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring. One of the things that I've come to appreciate about…
You've really hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. HN has become awfully boring, but much more so in the last year or two. I used to keep up with tech here and I've learned a lot about architecture from links and articles posted here, but the conversation seems to have become narrower.
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#37I would stop using HN if it turned into Reddit - from a comments perspective. I already see it happening on some threads so it's probably a matter of time.
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#38The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on. The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse. There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality true / false funny / serious insightful / wrong kind / hurtful agree / disagree (useful for votes) I haven't got a clue how a good…
this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex
Slashdot doesn't seem to keep them separate, so they really don't work that way at all. Information is still tossed to /dev/nul
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#39The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting. People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg…
I agree, and I think I have a potential solution, although it would require additional moderation efforts.
Every downvote must must be accompanied by a comment. That comment is bound to the downvote, and whether that downvote is counted is contingent on the quality of the accompanying comment.
The accompanying comment must give supporting reasons for the downvote. If the comment is something along the lines of: "I disagree", "NO U R DUMB", "asdfasfdasfd", or is blank, then that comment's downvote can be flagged for review, and ultimately discounted.
A good accompanying downvote-comment should do something like: (1) point out logical errors or fallacies in the parent comment (2) point out logical or methodical errors in the parent comment's sources. [1]
I'm sure we'll get some mental gymnasts who try to twist things, but with this system, the added friction with downvoting should reduce the number of "I disagree" downvotes by a meaningful amount.
[1] edit: even this can be a problem though, because these kinds of logical or methodical refutations can be insightful to some people, which they won't see if the downvoted comments fade into the abyss
Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think downvote could be more valuable if it required a comment explaining why it as downvoted. I sometimes find I read comments that have been downvoted, and I'm wondering why, potentially the downvoter had a good reason I wasn't understanding.
I used to think this too. /. had this back in the day (I guess still does?). Lobste.rs has this too. The problem is people just substitute "downvote without a reason" with "downvote as 'trolling'" for any opinion they disagree with.
I'd figure this is pretty easy to get around if you are potentially being downvoted for not providing good feedback as to why you are downvoting.