181–190 of 321 posts
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You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.
So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)
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what does hellbanned look like on HN? Can't login? Can't post? Can post, but noone can see it?
Anything you post can't be seen by others unless they've turned on dead posts in their configuration, in which case anything you post has [dead] prefixed on it. Though it happens less than in other forums, wagon circling is definitely a persistent problem on HN. I believe it's only further exacerbated by the fact that downvoted comments are displayed in a difficult to read color, meaning that downvotes can effectivel…
I normally find that, unless an essay is about mathematics, if it is based on a binary argument then it's just false because it's too simplistic to be based in reality. In this case saying there's only "trolls" and "super awesome people!" is childish. There's a much more interesting spectrum of human behavior online that doesn't fit into these convenient categories. To then say there's only two types of "trolls" is a…
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You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.
So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.
So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, things used to be rougher, but they also used to actually get something done on occasion. Can you see the current congress accomplishing that?
The current Congress can't get anything done because one of the political parties has decided that it isn't in their interest to get anything done, to keep the other party from getting credit for it. I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.
Hmm.
The House passed a budget this year. The Senate hasn't for almost three years.
The House passed an extension to govt financing/ operations. The Senate hasn't.
The House passed an extension to the payroll tax cut. The Senate refuses to even vote on it.
I wonder which party controls which branch of the legislature.
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But when a community has set a precedent and an expectation for trust and respectful discussion, it is poisoning and degrading that community to come in and disrupt it intentionally for your own amusement. If you dump toxic waste into a pool, you've poisoned the pool, accusing the fish of just not liking it doesn't work.
He appears to be arguing that it's bad even when the community doesn't have that precedent/expectation, though (my examples were of communities where various varieties of "trolling" are expected/normal, like SA's FYAD, and 4chan's /b/). Plus, ecosystems are complex; Slashdot's is a bit of a mix. You can't napalm the "intruders" and accuse everyone burnt by napalm of just not liking it!
I think one particular line got me thinking: Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world. Paul Graham has to make a caveat because it's too easy for someone to say, "WELL, sir, you have clearly missed that some graffiti is amazing. Banksy!" But there's a very important filter th…
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"Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be." tl;dr: maintaining an online community is anything but simple. I'm not sure exactly what you mean. One possibility is that you're referring to the hackers that build communities online who try to establish some sort of guidelines for behavior. If this is what you meant then I think I disagree. I've tried a very similar experime…
Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be. I was referring to the hackers who use the forum, not the ones who run it. Sorry for the confusion. It really is much easier and more beneficial for everyone to just be nice . Why work harder to achieve less? A few strategies that have made it easier for me to "be nice": 1. Avoid long back and forth threads. Say what you have to…
If everyone followed all those rules I think this one would be detrimental. Seeing you smarter-than-me people go back and forth about stuff I'm right on the verge of understanding is pretty cool.