51–60 of 106 posts
I think the issue is that the potshot bait is starting to overwhelm the first few pages like a lazy bacteria. And we just ran out of antibiotics. I know I've been reading HN a lot less over the last several months. It might not be reflective of any real reality, but an idea can turn real if enough people start to believe it.
I mean that I am making myself feel worse for reading HN... That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN. Take a day off and invest that energy back where it belongs. We'll be here when you get back. Promise. EDIT: Added tags (Lighten up you guys).
Rather than interpreting his essay as a sign of HN becoming too important in his life, I think it's more accurate to say that he values HN and feels that a blog post is a good way to contribute useful ideas back to the community.
The last poll pg ran asking if people wanted karma totals back demonstrated overwhelming support for them. That was months ago, so there must be some compelling reason they're not back, but I certainly think they would go a long way to making HN comments more readable. At least, they do for me, and I'm the only one I can speak for!
Yeah, it's hard to say what - if anything - to do about this. Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. But, then again, people always complain about "ninja downvoting" and say "if you're going to downvote me, at least tell me why." But the last time I left a reply to something I downvoted, my reply in turn got downvoted pretty quickly (although it…
> Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. // Personally I think HN has degraded vastly since we lost scores. I see far more downvotes for disagreement and apparently less interest in supporting good argument. It's really hard now to read HN and get much from it unless the topic is one you want to read every single comment on. I hope I'm not dragg…
Doesn't this post simply contribute to the problem, though? I mean, if Raganwald wants the community to be more focused on content, rather than pointless meta-discussion, shouldn't he or she post content ? I mean, all this post serves to do is give even more attention to the hipsters and trolls. My recommendation? If you see a comment that's clearly off-topic, vote it down if you're able or ignore it if you're not. E…
Only works for top-level threads though. A bad response to a highly-rated OP will continue to hang out near the top of the page. It's a genuine problem, what do you do with bad comments? The average bad commenter is a fifteen-year-old boy with strongly held yet poorly developed opinions. If you downvote them without replying, then you wind up with an angry commenter who thinks their opinions are being shut down by th…
We are all going to nod our heads to this post, but as 'raganwald knows, nothing is going to change as a result. The inoculations against tribalism and tribal drama are cultural. Whatever vaccine HN had against this, it's worn off. My take is, flag these topics off the site. Cut them off like a gangrenous limb. We want to keep the leg, but even more, we want our heart to keep beating. But then, a vocal subset of HN u…
I'd like to do this. I tried doing it a while ago on the new tab. I spent 20 minutes each day flagging off topic posts.
I didn't mind doing this as it was my way of making the community better.
Sadly the flag link seems to have gone away:(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, invisible comment scores add noise, because if I read something I agree strongly with I feel compelled to show my approval. In the old days clicking the up-arrow would show a suitable quantum of approval, but nowadays I sometimes feel compelled to add a comment which just says "I agree" and perhaps adds some minor extra point. While typing this comment it occurred to me that this comment falls into that very…
Going even further and showing the actual voters , in addition to the score (like kuro5hin does) can also sometimes remove the need to post. I especially miss it here at the end of an exchange, where I want to say something like "good point" or "well I still disagree but your argument is a good one". On k5, I'd just vote "3" on that comment, which they would then be able to see I upvoted. Here it feels like I need to…
Is there any reason I can't have something vote numbers and vote inflation whilst others have only flagging with no vote scores?
We are all going to nod our heads to this post, but as 'raganwald knows, nothing is going to change as a result. The inoculations against tribalism and tribal drama are cultural. Whatever vaccine HN had against this, it's worn off. My take is, flag these topics off the site. Cut them off like a gangrenous limb. We want to keep the leg, but even more, we want our heart to keep beating. But then, a vocal subset of HN u…
It's funny that you write this b/c I hadn't read any of those threads myself. I have a filter where I don't often read the comments on stories from major media that make it to HN. There's rarely anything much to discuss and you're absolutely right that I do not care what anyone on HN thinks of Steve Jobs. As a side note, I'm happy about the removal of point visibility on comments... but I wonder if perhaps increased…
Comment-dimming notwithstanding, that feedback has been removed. There's a class of reader whose desire for a kind of interactivity is no longer satisfied by the voting system; for them, pile-on voting has been replaced by pile-on posting (albeit often in the more thoughtful HN style). Which in turn begets more such posts, and thus a more polarized conversational shape.
Doesn't this post simply contribute to the problem, though? I mean, if Raganwald wants the community to be more focused on content, rather than pointless meta-discussion, shouldn't he or she post content ? I mean, all this post serves to do is give even more attention to the hipsters and trolls. My recommendation? If you see a comment that's clearly off-topic, vote it down if you're able or ignore it if you're not. E…
Only works for top-level threads though. A bad response to a highly-rated OP will continue to hang out near the top of the page. It's a genuine problem, what do you do with bad comments? The average bad commenter is a fifteen-year-old boy with strongly held yet poorly developed opinions. If you downvote them without replying, then you wind up with an angry commenter who thinks their opinions are being shut down by th…
Yeah, this is why I wish HN had collapsible comments (like Reddit, or even Slashdot). In that way, you could simply collapse irrelevant comments and ignore them. Having comments that can't be collapsed makes this much more difficult, as even a comment that's been downvoted into oblivion still takes up space and forces you to scroll more in order to get to the stuff that you are interested in.