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Hacker News is depressing

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Re: Hacker News is depressing

#61

Post by krapp »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #37
vxNsr wrote: post #11

Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that pers…

At the very least, there needs to be a rudimentary troll block. I so tire of HN comment threads littered with discarded opinions from one-off accounts. Make accounts read-only for the first two-weeks and make sure they're actually being logged into and aren't being harvested.

That wouldn't necessarily work ... it wouldn't be difficult (at least for a hn user) to script account creation, and maybe even 'browsing around' by accessing random links. It would be even less difficult to farm it out to something like a captcha farm.

Really, one-off accounts seem to be the HN version of anonymous posting. Which suggests to me that it may be more beneficial, perhaps, to simply allow anonymous posting with some caveats (any user can choose to block all anonymous posts, anonymous posters couldn't be upvoted or downvoted, it automatically triggers some kind of alert to the mods to watch the post, and maybe it even costs you karma to use the feature.)

I also keep considering that some kind of API which allows users to choose to block other users might be an effective form of self-policing, but that would also kind of by definition stifle and fragment conversation.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#62

Post by Karunamon »

Wait, i'm confused. Author brings up Twitter (of all things..) as an example of a network where you can block people you don't want to deal with.

Okay, but then he then jumps from that to suggesting that HN implement a feature that doesn't let people on another site talk about whatever site they please?

That doesn't even make sense, or am I just missing something here?

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#63

Post by vxNsr »

127001brewer wrote: post #40
vxNsr wrote: post #11

Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that pers…

Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Communities like this are like water: it changes constantly sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. The only thing to be happy about is whether or not it's thriving . And, in my opinion, limiting the number of participants in this community would be a terrible mistake. Perhaps there's other ways to limit trolling, such as limiting the number of comments you can submit pe…

>Communities like this are like water: it changes constantly sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. The only thing to be happy about is whether or not it's thriving.

I agree but wouldn't it be nice if we could keep it changing for the better?

EDIT: Sorry if I wasn't clear, some really good ideas have been presented here, I only posted the first couple ideas that came to mind, expecting all the other really smart people here to come up with better ideas once I got the ball rolling - and they have!

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#64

Post by gwgarry »

simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

We have as much right to defend the behavior as you have to attack it. It's an arbitrary questions of norms and of tolerance to criticism. In modern society it seems that we're so isolated and insecure in ourselves that we can't handle criticism and meanness.

That everyone must be over socialized to be overly concerned about what everyone else thinks and not be concerned about the objectivity of what we're trying to achieve. In political questions this is overly dangerous.

A healthy level of tolerance of criticism is necessary for any sort of critical culture. Without it disasters like the nuclear disaster in Japan occur. Where everyone is trying to be so polite and get along that obvious problems go unsolved because criticism is not brought to bear on the right people at the right time.

Yes there are limits to what is acceptable and not overdoing it. But then there is also a need for tolerance of criticism to an extent and perhaps if there is enough confidence a rebuttal to criticism.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#65

Post by gwern »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #16
vxNsr wrote: post #11

Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that pers…

> Finally, I've begun to really like OSC's version of the internet as presented in Ender's Game, at least when it comes to having real discussions. The only things I remember about it is that a) there were effectively several 'internets', and you had to pay to access each one, and b) the Wiggin kids had to have accounts created for them by their parents, who could presumably vouch for them, and would be tied to a rea…

> and b) the Wiggin kids had to have accounts created for them by their parents, who could presumably vouch for them, and would be tied to a real identity. But later..they have totally self-funded anonymous accounts, which doesn't make sense in light of point b.

Blinded commitments. Could require verifiable yet anonymous endorsements from X existing users to 'level up' to an anonymous account; only the endorsers know who the account is for, yet all can verify that X users in good standing vouched for the anonymous account.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#66

Post by davewiner »

mountaineer wrote: post #43
simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

If I understand what you're asking re [1], I believe he's stating that the HN commentators are making comments about him and his past work unaware of his latest work (shipped 2 products recently and working with javascript).

That's correct.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#67

Post by npsimons »

simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

EDIT: In the spirit of being less negative, I'm deleting my original comment. I still contend that Mauro was in the wrong, and refused to acknowledge or fix his mistake, but will agree that Linus probably could have handled it better.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#68

Post by Nursie »

simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

>> If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.

And if you hit your spouse like boxers do in the ring then that would be abuse too. It's almost as if there are different rules for different situations.

(No, I'm not saying that kernel development is like boxing)

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#70

Post by FreeBird »

simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

That's nothing. Check these comments, anywhere else you would get summarily fired for emails like this.

http://www.muktware.com/5276/linus-torvalds-secure-boot-supp...

"Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead.

If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's your issue..."

What if that email was to a female kernel dev? What if a whizkid reads the kernel dev mailing list and goes asks their parents what deepthroating means?

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