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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
381–390 of 673 posts
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#382How does a steel man reflect?
How does a steel man reflect about problems?
How does a steel man reflect about problem solving?
How does a steel man reflect about problem solving if it is broken?
How does a steel man reflect about problem solving if it is broken (and hurting to describe (something unsaid (difficult to (just block (list (listen))))?
Robo swears robo cares a (alpha proto) race is healthier.
Recreating racism with bitcism is mechanical.
Pattern recognition by accellerated racism is pattern mapping missing lots (of school sensor sec).
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#383Can we also have a rule against Gratuitous Positivity? Seriously, it's a slippery slope. "Nothing of substance" is a term that needs more clarification that what that post provides. It seems to suggest that if the criticism is too harsh, then it's no longer substantial. I think there's a better guideline than that. The best ideas not only can withstand criticism, they get better with criticism. If you examine what's…
> Can we also have a rule against Gratuitous Positivity?
We could, but I don't see any evidence that there is an amount of that going around that requires an addition to the guidelines.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#384I think the downvote functionality is holding back the utility of HN more than anything else. It is grossly overused and very rarely for guidelines violations like it was designed for. Most people use to show they disagree with a comment. It's an awful experience and is the main fuel in a negative feedback loop that travels with users from thread to thread.
pg a few years back commented: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 I don't know if he's made another comment on this issue since then. Shouldn't flagging a post/topic be generally used for a guideline viola…
> Shouldn't flagging a post/topic be generally used for a guideline violation?
Yes.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#385> To support this, Daniel and the HN team are working on another new idea I'm very excited about--code-named "Modnesty"--to turn more moderation power over to the community. We'll be sharing more on that in the coming months. That sounds really interesting. I'm curious what kind of additional moderation capabilities this potentially includes. In particular, personally I'm less interested in the moderation ability to…
Yes, that's what we're working on. It turned out to be tricky for technical reasons, but we're getting there.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#386Old Hacker News Guideline: Avoidant (Kill Pain.) New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Trauma (Kill Pain. Be Nice!) I (CC) @traumahack because I feel we are mistaking advanced emotional-intelligence with objectification eracing perfect forms. The bitcism of pretending we can order people to make empathy.money by requring we read documentation to spell our own feelings and thoughts. Amount of energy being distressed for di…
The racial biteracy and bitcism is so deep that we literally and figuratively change the color of the words we miss as law.
What are we object-relational mapping legal-rational-emotional consciousness by proscribing that error-missing.
(Reps memory ignorance as-if, as-shh-if, some sort of truth syrum?)
((War machinery organization is recreational for private supermoderation corporations clustering and cultivating public commentary centralization for forward-looking statements about major social-emotional networking of speech.))
Without web archival/memory/recovery/rescue/leak services many users would lack a single vital sign of life, from sites that erase first, and then call their unconscious actions entactogenesis.
illogy ve. logy
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#387I think the downvote functionality is holding back the utility of HN more than anything else. It is grossly overused and very rarely for guidelines violations like it was designed for. Most people use to show they disagree with a comment. It's an awful experience and is the main fuel in a negative feedback loop that travels with users from thread to thread.
I agree with you. I don't participate enough to be able to have a downvote option but I've seen how a different viewpoint (mainly one that doesn't align with HN demographics) will often get downvoted and, even though this site seems much better than others in that regard, it will still discourage anyone from posting anything they might consider controversial.
Of course, any comment about downvotes is also, understandably, frowned upon and discouraged so there doesn't seem to be much recourse.
We could avoid political or ideological topics altogether but that's very hard considering any conversation can lead to them.
To get back on track, I see it as an extremely hard problem to solve since downvoting due to disagreement is a very big temptation and, once you start, you might not even notice you're doing it anymore.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls. Everybody knows internet commenting is crude, rude and awful more often than not. In my opinion HN is a glorious example of an online community done right and I'm not sure we should change the site. But who knows, maybe it will even be better if it gets a little make-over.
The site in general is good, but the user moderation system is utterly awful. A 'disagree' mod double-functions as a censor, and there's no need because there's also a separate flagging system. My profile page has a bit of a rant about the shortcomings of the mod system here with more detail. The autodetection algorithms probably need tweaking as well - from time to time I see users with polite comment histories myst…
Not only does it censor, it gives some people undue power. A few days ago, I commented on a now flagkilled post. Within a couple of hours, some 15-20 other people had commented on it, and each and every post, except mine, was grayed out from downvotes. I had gotten a downvote too, but I had enough votes to counterbalance the briagading. I read the other comments, but did not notice anything nasty or disrespectful in there.
This abuse of power is ruining the system for those who have new accounts or only post occasionally.
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
That actually came from the original C2 Wiki, although it's been refactored (across sites apparently...it's now on MeatBall) significantly since I first came across it c. 2003: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AssumeGoodFaith I suspect it's a much older idea than that, probably dating back to the Enlightenment. It's closely related to the Principle of Charity, which was coined in 1958 but again, refers to a much older principl…
> That actually came from the original C2 Wiki That's fascinating! Has anyone traced it to its precise origin there? I'd love to see that.
I think the Principle of Charity is pretty spot on for 1958. I suspect John Rawls said something assuming good faith, too, given the quotes I've found [1]:
In his book A Theory of Justice, Rawls stated that citizens are obliged to act in good faith, and to assume good faith on the part of others until clear proof emerges to the contrary. They must recognize, in effect, that the system cannot meet everybody's claims at once and accept that at times they will be on the losing side.
And a good recent blog post [2]:
Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for example, that the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where? So I looked for their way out, not mine.
[1] http://www.rbc.com/aboutus/letter/may_jun1995.html
[2] https://parentheticalpilgrim.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/good-f...
Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
#390It's "the programmers way" to try to come up with some sort of moderation/policing system to solve this. Please do not come up with a moderation system. There should simply be a confirmation step after hitting submit, reminding the poster that they are valued for their positive contribution and giving the poster the chance to rethink their post and cancel if its too negative. Additionally when posting, require people…
Thanks for this, it's a good idea getting people to rate how negative their comments are... it would certainly be an interesting exercise, although it may just show that those who leave negative comments don't think they are being negative, whereas the people that can be bothered rating the negativity of others are probably more sensitive to negativity.