811–820 of 854 posts
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As I understand it, that's kind of the point.
To kill conversations which are deemed useful by all participants and have no negative impact other than the negligible cost of hosting them?
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Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the di…
> downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN // Um, no. You downvote when a comment doesn't contribute. If you disagree then you can state it and if that contributes it can get upvoted too.
What's interesting is how the opposite gets repeated far more often, usually in an authoritative tone, as if the speaker had just consulted a rulebook.
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Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the di…
I think you're wrong and are just trying up make some claim about Reddit. I don't think it is as simple as "upvoting in agreement is legitimate therefore the converse is true." Down voting as the effect of removing the comment from discussion and is even used to indicate there is something unfair, mean, or what have you. I think what you're talking is more for a site that shows the scores of comments but does not obs…
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Correction: it would require all users with over 1000 karma to read the comments of every post to HN. It seems like you are making the assumption that every user reads every post
If a comment isn't seen by many users with over 1000 karma then it isn't seen by many users period, and thus doesn't have much influence anyway.
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A site I used to work for had a pre-moderation system for pictures posted on the site that worked like this, to the best of my memory: There was a moderation queue and various volunteers (here it could be the >1000 karma people, I guess) went through it and gave their vote. A picture had to reach all positive 3 to go live or positive six to go live if there were any negative votes. Moderators were awarded points base…
> Moderators were awarded points based on how many of their votes matched the consensus. That's cool because I can imagine for a picture site you want all pictures to gravitate around the consensus, a strong self-selecting group-think can be very desirable. But for HN ... well at least the people who end up sticking around will surely love it ...
There were a handful of people who had multiple points per vote who could swing it drastically away from the 'consensus' if it was wrong, and doing so also penalized the people who voted for it.
My may concern with this system: Sledgehammer meets tack. The comments on HN aren't perfect, but they're far from bad when compared to other sites of this nature. There has been a downwards trend most probably due to the increasing popularity of HN. A response is warranted. However, this system has the potential to silence a lot of high quality comments on any threads that aren't on the front-page for an extended per…
I agree with this entirely. As it currently stands, implementing this policy in such a abrupt way will hurt discussion and negatively impact the quality of the community. And although there are ways to improve the actual implementation of the system, I still think it is fundamentally flawed for a few reasons. First, any system in which a comment is assumed to be spam or trash until proven otherwise will produce less…
Since I don't comment often, this probably doesn't mean much, but this is the last comment I'll post on HN until the policy is reversed.
I didn't even know HN had a commenting problem until HN told me. As is often the case, the comments are pretty informative on this topic too.
Well, so long everyone. Logging out for now. Someone please let me know on Twitter if this gets reversed.
"Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle" To be clear, you mean you are going to stop maintaining the codebase of HN, not stop actively participating in the community, right?
It's impossible to predict the future perfectly, but I hope to leave completely. The only YC thing I'm going to do is office hours with the startups.
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> downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN // Um, no. You downvote when a comment doesn't contribute. If you disagree then you can state it and if that contributes it can get upvoted too.
I'm talking about what the HN policy has always been. This is a factual question, and it's not as you describe it. What's interesting is how the opposite gets repeated far more often, usually in an authoritative tone, as if the speaker had just consulted a rulebook.
Despite your relative long-standing I'll bow to your claim of factuality and request citation of that fact?
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Perhaps another feature is needed: mark redundant. So when you mark one of several similar comments as good, you can mark a others as redundant -- so that the owner can retract it. I suppose preferably you'd link it somehow, so that the author of a "redundant" comment would get a "deemed redundant due to: comment . Why list: maybe 1kkarma-user #1 found commend x to be best, #2 found y to be best, and both found your…
That sounds like a waste of time for the non-winning comment writer (especially if they could have seen the situation comin from the beginning like now). People put time and effort in their comments; I suspect they don't want to play quality lottery with it.
My idea of having a "mark reduntant" feature, is simply to aid an author in checking if he or she agrees that the (entire) comment is indeed redundant -- and to provide somewhat constructive feedback (no, your comment wasn't bad, you were just too slow, and in the interest of conciseness, it is considered redundant).
It does feel a bit strange keeping to defend the slashdot moderation system -- but it already has a "redundant" moderation -- and fwiw afaik it is the least bad community moderating system for discussions.
As I've alluded to elsewhere, I think there might be a bit of a disconnect between parts of the users (including ycombinator as curator) as to what hn is and/or should be. On the one hand there is some strong leanings towards not being a discussion forum at all, "just" a news-site -- on the other hand I think there's tacit agreement that the only thing that sets hn apart is it's community. I'm not sure how we can expect to have community without free, many-way, constructive communication.
And I'm not sure how pending comments would help strengthen the news part, or the discussion part of what hn is today.
Again, I'd very much like to see a problem statement, before a fix is proposed (or even worse, introduced).