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An Update on Hacker News

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Re: An Update on Hacker News

#331

Post by jacquesm »

dang wrote: post #201
selmnoo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dang, I think HN has improved for the better, especially since some effort has been made to make things more transparent. But it would be despicably dishonest for you guys to deny that routinely you guys do things here to protect YC companies (including manipulating voting points on comments/ submissions). One example (on the top of my mind) is the drchrono post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004 Even thou…

I'm glad that you agree that HN has been getting better. We obviously have a way to go to win you over, but challenge accepted, we're absolutely willing to try. It isn't hard to deny that general impression you're reporting, because it isn't true. But I don't see any way to refute such a sweeping claim convincingly. As far as I can tell it exists only on the level of rumor and is unanswerable. But I'm happy to reply…

This is an unsolvable problem. As good a job as you're doing, YC is the sponsor of HN and just because of that there will always be this perception. The only way to get rid of this issue would be to completely divorce YC and HN, something that may for a variety of reasons not be possible and for a whole pile of other reasons not be desirable.

You're doing an absolutely super job, probably far better than most or all of us here will ever realize simply because moderation when done properly is all but invisible so don't sweat it, this is a thing that is as far as I can see not solvable in the current set-up. Those lines were drawn long before you showed up and within those lines you're doing the best you can.

FWIW I too recall several instances of users that were banned imho unjustly as well as some threads where the pro-YC bias broke through but over the vast amount of content generated here those are very very few instances, not by far enough to claim systematic bias or to be used as evidence for some nefarious plot. More like genuine mistakes and things done in the heat of the moment. And on later reflection some of those were reverted.

(If you want I can probably dig them up for you but you're busy enough as it is.)

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#332

Post by cs702 »

tptacek wrote: post #255
glimcat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. * When that kind of response comes from the site's moderator, I really don't see the level of toxicity i…

I'll go ahead and call Dan a friend, display my "not a shill for YC" bona fides, vouch for Dan as not a toxic person, and go on to criticize him for being so concerned about the appearance of toxicity that he's backing down on an issue he should stand his ground over. If he says HN moderation won't hellban someone for criticizing a YC company, take it to the bank.

I feel compelled to add: the accusation seems baseless. Over the several years I've been participating in these forums I cannot remember a single instance of anyone getting hellbanned or otherwise penalized just for criticizing a YC company.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#333

Post by grayclhn »

peterwwillis wrote: post #278
grayclhn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It moves stupid comments down _faster_. If the comment's super stupid, that can be worthwhile.

What's the difference between a super stupid comment and a comment which gets no votes at all? I'll bet you the answer to that is "I really didn't like it", which mostly means emotional value. So the purpose of the downvote there is to basically have an emotional reaction button. Take away the downvote and you take away the emotion from the voting. Then all you have is upvoting, which is based purely on merit. It sou…

Some comments degrade the quality of the conversation. We might disagree about which ones, but surely we can agree about that, right? The obvious candidates are purely asshole comments, trolling comments, intentionally racist comments, etc., and there are less obvious ones too. (Almost any joke where the author feels a need to reply, "guess no one around here has a sense of humor" after being downvoted probably fits.)

The discussion is better if those comments are lower on the page and, ideally, discouraged from being made at all. Downvoting does both.

> Then all you have is upvoting, which is based purely on merit. It sounds like people don't like the idea of forum meritocracy, though.

I don't understand what this means or what a "meritocracy" is in this setting. (The moderators are in charge; the highest ranked users will never form a ruling class or be in power. Most forums are not "meritocracies", "socialist exeriments", "democracies", "plutocracies", "oligarchies", "monopolies", or anything that implies something other than a loosely managed commenting system.)

HN has many readers that know an absolute shitload about different subjects, and I'd like them to share interesting information and anecdotes about interesting articles. I don't want to read stupid jokes and memes on HN, because there are other places that are better for that. So I like that there are ways to explicitly encourage certain comments and explicitly discourage others.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#334

Post by Houshalter »

I haven't noticed that many "toxic comments" and it doesn't seem like a huge problem.

Automating removal of flagged content seems like bad practice. The majority of users treat it like a "super downvote button" and a way to censor controversial things.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#335

Post by dang »

DanBC wrote: post #132
dang wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As other users have pointed out, to flag a comment you have to click on 'link' to go to the comment's item page [1]. I don't know why PG designed it this way but have always assumed it was a speed bump to reduce impulsive flagging, since flags are more powerful than downvotes. We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is all too familiar over here. 1. https://hn.algolia.co…

Is there any way for me to tell if my flags are useful or stupid? I tend to pre-emptively flag stories which I know will draw out the worst bits of HN. That's probably a bad thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it caused my flags to be ignored.

> Is there any way for me to tell if my flags are useful

Anyone worried about this is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask, and we'll be happy to take a look for you. But I feel like the kind of people who would worry about this probably tend to be the kind whose flags are useful.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#336

Post by dang »

privong wrote: post #107
dang wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> comment flagging privileges disappeared Comment flagging privileges don't disappear (edit: alone). Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939 .

Would you mind clarifying? The blog post (quoted by parent) seems to explicity say that flagging privs can be revoked, which directly contradicts what you are saying in the comments. Or was the quote from the blog post only meant to refer to flagging of articles?

My apologies—I wrote that in haste and I see now that it was unclear. What I meant was that you can't lose comment flagging privileges while story flagging privileges remain intact; the software just doesn't do that. Either all the flag links would disappear, or none would. So there must be another explanation for what sciurus described (as I understood it). Does that make sense?

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#338

Post by dang »

rsync wrote: post #112

Is this a reasonable place to plead with people to stop the practice of meta-commentary on downvotes ? I am sick and tired of seeing the scoring system injected into the comment thread: "let the downvotes begin" "EDIT: you can downvote all you want, but ..." "EDIT: not sure why I'm being downvoted, but ..." ... and so on. Just comment and respond, don't add all manner of meta-commentary on voting and the score system…

I agree with you, and so do the HN guidelines (as minimaxir pointed out). But it's clear that pleading with people not to do it isn't enough. We have sometimes toyed with implementing a lightweight guidelines reminder to indicate (privately, to the commenter) when a comment is breaking one of the guidelines. I'd still like to experiment with this someday.

Ideally, it would be a community thing and not a moderator thing. The spirit would be, let's all remind each other of the guidelines when we need to. The things that HN cares about, like civility and signal/noise ratio, don't come naturally to an internet forum. We all have to work at it (definitely including me).

Features like that are hard to get right, though, and until there's a good idea of how to do it that fits naturally into the existing site, it will remain prospective. Anyone with ideas here is welcome to send them to us at hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#339

Post by dang »

huhtenberg wrote: post #80

Can you mark comments with the score of 1 in some way? I suspect that I'm not the only one who downvotes the comments he doesn't like or disagrees with, but who'd very rarely want to push a comment into gray. I mean, it's one thing to vote a comment down so that it won't float at the top and another is to punch its author in a face with a negative score.

That's a good idea. Like so many of these, it isn't obvious how to do it in a way that doesn't complicate HN's minimal UI. But it's worth noting that you'd get this for free if we implemented vote undo, which is something we're open to.
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