Live data from Hacker News

Open secrets about Hacker News

bengtan.com

131–140 of 210 posts

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#131
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.

I was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich my day. There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.

There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to be a member in your club.

And no risks in being too open about who gets to be a member of your club?

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#132
post #81
post #46

One thing I’ve never understood is I can only upvote, but some comments are greyed out as if they’ve been downvoted. How does this work?

Why would you downvote something? 'You weren't invited, just move along', exists. Happy to say, I only ever upvote.

Silly replies (like you might get on many Reddit subs) get downvotes. But so do comments that contain factually wrong information. Particularly if the author uses the falsehoods to attempt to convince.

These posts typically have a top reply comment correcting the parent.

The downs help people reduce or avoid being influenced by even glancing at information that is no good.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#133
post #33

A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented > Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots). Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is th…

> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include... Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.

I just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#134
post #96
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you downvote something? 'You weren't invited, just move along', exists. Happy to say, I only ever upvote.

Why would you downvote something? Sometimes people are mean about React and they must be punished.

And sometimes people say things that are unsubstantial, deliberately obtuse, and don't really contribute to a useful discussion.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#135
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several hours, possibly a day.

You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4 and still got told to settle down lol.

Mine were spaced over an entire day. They just happened to be consecutively downvoted.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#136

> he is the best moderator in the world Yes he is. Dang, you are amazing. Thank you for tending this beautiful garden in the middle of a sad and boggy Internet.

dang seems to be fairly cool headed, despite the deflagration often directed at him, for being, a bouncer, babysitter, teacher, help manual, advocate etc.

i hope it all stays at work most of the time.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#137

I'm really curious about voting ring detection. Oftentimes I've seen posts from the same company hitting the front page over and over again, and none of them was particularly interesting, nor was the company any of HN's "love children" such as Stripe. I can't recall any specific example, but when looking a bit closer it was usually some small- to medium-sized startup with maybe 10-100 people, which would technically…

"I'm really curious about voting ring detection."

I am curious about this as well.

When I read "voting ring" I think of accounts trading votes - a group of accounts votes for each others' stories.

But your description (possibly accurate) is that asking people to vote for a story is a "voting ring".

Once in a while my company makes an announcement of some kind and emails that announcement to some portion of our customer base. Sometimes that announcement includes a link to an HN story that I create with an invitation for discussion. We never make any mention of voting or scoring.

This makes good sense because we don't have a forum and everyone prefers the HN user interface anyway.

Is this a voting ring ?

If this is not a voting ring, per se, is it likely this still trips the voting ring detection ?

Is this poor HN etiquette ?

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not clear about flagging, I don't want to get myself tagged because I flag-ed someone 3rd submission of his weekend Rust project, or those COVID conspiracies/magic cures, I could offend some free-speech extremist if I have the opinion that the HN is not the correct place for that.

Yeah flagging is the most extreme, for things that really don’t have anything to do here. It’s rare that a flag-able story ends up on the front page, to be fair, but a COVID magical cure or a propaganda piece for the usual quacks would fit all the criteria to be flagged to oblivion. I don’t flag random projects, just ignore them (I know some people here like them, it’s not my thing but it is harmless). I downvote obn…

there are times when a very good post contains discussion that quickly goes "lord of the flies" with controversy polarity and off topicality.

this is a case where i would flag the post rather than spend hours flagging comments, that would result in jail time if said IRL.

Post reply on HN