An Update on Hacker News
blog.ycombinator.com
An Update on Hacker News
1–10 of 371 posts
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#2> First, we lowered the threshold for flags to kill inappropriate comments.
Excellent.
> Second, we've started indicating in the UI which comments/stories have been killed by user flags.
What does this look like in the UI? I haven't seen any examples of it yet, and I'd expect to see at least a few on a regular basis.
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#3Last month, I posted an analysis of all 5.6 million Hacker News comments at the time: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/
It should be noted that during the aforementioned six month periods, both the number of new comments made monthly and the average score for a given comment decreased, although this post claims a 30% increase to Hacker News traffic due to changes in the comment system, which is interesting assertion of causality. (in fairness, the decrease in number of new comments could be caused by the increased moderation of bad comments.)
It would be helpful if this article in this submission clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) [EDIT: looks like this was added to the submission]
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#4> First, we lowered the threshold for flags to kill inappropriate comments. Excellent. > Second, we've started indicating in the UI which comments/stories have been killed by user flags. What does this look like in the UI? I haven't seen any examples of it yet, and I'd expect to see at least a few on a regular basis.
Instead of [deleted] it'll say [flagkilled].
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#5> First, we lowered the threshold for flags to kill inappropriate comments. Excellent. > Second, we've started indicating in the UI which comments/stories have been killed by user flags. What does this look like in the UI? I haven't seen any examples of it yet, and I'd expect to see at least a few on a regular basis.
The string [flagkilled] is put before the title.
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#6Can anyone comment on the reasoning behind the lack of a mobile style sheet?
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#7Can anyone comment on the reasoning behind the lack of a mobile style sheet?
Hacker News is supposedly undergoing a redesign soon, which would assumingly include a responsive layout.
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#8A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change.
Good to hear they decided to roll that back.
PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark.
It'd be nice to see an official policy statement changing that position, but I don't think it's likely. In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#9Last month, I posted an analysis of all 5.6 million Hacker News comments at the time: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ It should be noted that during the aforementioned six month periods, both the number of new comments made monthly and the average score for a given comment decreased, although this post claims a 30% increase to Hacker News traffic due to changes in the comment system, which is…
> It would be helpful if this article clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first)
So that's how you flag! Thank you! This definitely should be more noticeable.
Re: An Update on Hacker News
#10A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change. Good to hear they decided to roll that back. PG opened a pandora's box when he said that d…
> In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.
I don't think this is true. Given that downvoted comments become faded, I have a strong reason to believe that the intent is to hide them because they are actually bad