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An Update on Hacker News

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Re: An Update on Hacker News

#141

Post by eksith »

dang wrote: post #135
throwit99 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective. It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more. After being…

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. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people be…

What are your thoughts on this episode? https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#142

Post by kissickas »

chrisblackwell wrote: post #129

I would love to see them lower the threshold for down-voting. I've only got 200+ karma, and it's hard for me to get more. I can't be on here all day commenting, and being the first to submit articles. If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.

I also miss downvoting on HN, although Reddit needs my help there more anyway. However, Sam did say:

>I'm sometimes asked how historically marginalized users can help shape the HN community when the karma threshold for down voting inappropriate comments is high. It's a fair question, and we are experimenting with lowering the downvoting threshold.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#143

Post by Shivetya »

chrisblackwell wrote: post #129

I would love to see them lower the threshold for down-voting. I've only got 200+ karma, and it's hard for me to get more. I can't be on here all day commenting, and being the first to submit articles. If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.

Well I have posting a lot lends itself to more karma than not, as in eventually I write something intelligent and interesting enough for people to up vote. The majority of my comments sit pretty at whatever the default is with an occasional soapbox that I post knowing it will get nuked.

As far as stories, sometimes you can post too early and another will follow with a similar story and it runs up, submit what falls under the guidelines that you truly want to see discussed and you might hit karma gold.

Myself, my wish list for HN is a feature I can flag stories for my later review; a save feature like reddit

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#144

Post by throwit99 »

dang wrote: post #135
throwit99 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective. It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more. After being…

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. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people be…

Maybe you don't personally, maybe you don't as a group anymore.

As I suggested in my original post though, I have more useful things to do than look back at comments I posted years ago and compile evidence. I've moved on.

I'm sure it happens a lot more often than you realise, because in general when people get hellbanned, they come to the same realisations as me.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#145

Post by dec0dedab0de »

vectorpush wrote: post #111

How does HN's moderation staff feel about users who are dead, completely oblivious to it, but who continue to post, sometimes for years after the fact without any kind of warning that they are wasting their time. Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the t…

I generally upvote anyone who is hellbanned if they are making a comment that seems like it is in good faith.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#146

Post by softdev12 »

chrisblackwell wrote: post #129

I would love to see them lower the threshold for down-voting. I've only got 200+ karma, and it's hard for me to get more. I can't be on here all day commenting, and being the first to submit articles. If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.

The post says "The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so nearly everyone can help there.". I'm not sure if this was recently lowered from something higher. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the actual percentage of HN users that have over 30 karma. Does nearly everyone imply 99.9 percent?

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#147

Post by dang »

throwit99 wrote: post #144
dang wrote: post #135

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. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people be…

Maybe you don't personally, maybe you don't as a group anymore. As I suggested in my original post though, I have more useful things to do than look back at comments I posted years ago and compile evidence. I've moved on. I'm sure it happens a lot more often than you realise, because in general when people get hellbanned, they come to the same realisations as me.

> anymore

Not only did we never ban people for criticizing YC companies, the very first thing PG told me when I started moderating HN, and the thing that he emphasized most strongly after that, was never to do things that could be construed (or misconstrued) as censorship of anti-YC stories.

(I've edited out some irritation that leaked through in my original version of this comment.)

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#148

Post by krapp »

axlprose wrote: post #108
readerrrr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an incorrect fix. Since the comments are separated by trees, they should be positioned and compared to comments relative to that tree, not relative to the master tree. Being at the bottom of a sub-tree marks the comment automatically as the most downvoted in that tree. Applying fading to all the comments just because a downvoted comment has a parent that happens to be at the top, seems wrong.

Agreed. If they're this adamant about keeping the fading functionality tied to downvoting, they should just do away with downvoting all together, because fading just seems to worsen the discussion. I've lost count of how many times I've seen perfectly good insightful comments around here that get ignored because some people decided to downvote them for some arbitrary reason. In fact, it's so bad, that I'd say I've ba…

Comments that most deserve to be downvoted (trolling, incivility, lies, etc) are inevitably going to garner a lot of downvotes anyway. It's only the ones which oscillate between one or two downvotes and upvotes in what may be controversial threads which most fall prey to what I consider to be the more petty examples of downvoting. The first couple of downvotes are the least meaningful, I think.

So perhaps a margin of, say, five or six downvotes should be necessary before any visual effect takes place. Not only would this no longer bias readers against a comment before having read it, but it would guarantee that the faded comments more accurately reflect the standards of the community as a whole.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#149

Post by squigs25 »

Flagging posts and downvoting are important pieces to improving the content here on hacker news. Interestingly, I think this one of the few forums where "trolls" appear to be relatively absent.

One problem I have noticed is innapropriate downvoting. For example, if a voter downvotes a comment simply because he/she disagrees with the opinion of a commenter. How do we encourage a diversity of opinion on a site of like-minded people?

And similarly, how do we prevent "downvote conformity" (I apologize for my invented phraseology, but I'm creating a name for the concept that our community upvotes posts that are generally agreeable and downvotes posts that may be less mainstream, thus imposing a conformity of opinion?)

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#150

Post by ars »

readerrrr wrote: post #14

If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments. But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment? My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't a…

> If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments.

No, that is NOT correct.

Downvoting is a for useless comment. Flagging is for spam and abusive comments.

If you disagree with the comment, but the comment was well made and on topic you should UPVOTE it, not downvote it.

This is one of the main differences for HN vs Reddit, and it's one of the main reasons this site is so much better.

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