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There is a lot of stuff in the HN Undocumented norms repo[0] that would be potentially good candidatesSpecifically which items? We can't include all of them—the list would be too long. Actually https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is too long already. The longer we make it, the less people will read, so the bar for additions needs to be high.
> Clear up some of the oft repeated norms around disagreement and downvotes
A mere rule can't clear that one up. What clicks those buttons is the reptile brain, and the reptile brain doesn't know about rules.
> Information about posting: reposting, file types (since only pdfs and videos are mentioned explicitly), pay walls. Add a note about year tags.
Reposting is in the FAQ. Re file types—which ones? pdfs and videos are the main cases, and it's important for guidelines not to be laundry lists.
Paywalls—that's an interesting case. I think it needs to remain a grey area. Not grey like https://www.color-hex.com/color/dedede, mind you—more like https://www.color-hex.com/color/676767. But not black and white like it would be if we officialized it.
> Add a note about year tags.
To me that one's on the wrong side of "what belongs in the guidelines". The current system, which leaves it to convention, moderator edits, and user comments, works fine. Every detail we add to the guidelines has a cost—it dilutes the attention people pay to the other ones.
> Info about why titles are sometimes changed automatically (since this is often confusing to people).
This is another discretion-is-the-better-part-of-valor case, like downvotes—it's too emotional to be subject to rules or explanations (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Rather than add a rule that everyone breaks, thus weakening the entire ruleset, I'd rather leave it to work itself out in the threads.
> An explicit call out that bots and entirely (or almost entirely) generated comments are banned, with allowances for comments with substantial human contribution quoting eg ChatGPT output.
This is the one I'm closest to agreeing with, but the way you phrase it does a good job of bringing out its problems. How much generated content is ok? is it ok to just quote? and so on. I'm also not sure that it doesn't already follow from the existing guidelines, particularly the one about curious conversation.