191–200 of 322 posts
When I first came to HN from reddit, I posted some jokey nonsense comment. A moderator gently scolded me. I really disliked it. Now, I see the wisdom of keeping the jokes to a minimum and focusing in thoughtful discussion. So thank you, mods.
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> HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.
Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.
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They're in the footer on every page. Not enough?
I've been reading this site for almost 10 years and never noticed them until you just pointed it out. I don't think many people look at the footer. :) (They're also not in the footer of the comment page and a link in the otherwise empty header could be useful for new users.)
I really appreciate @dang for such an attentive hard work. He definitely deserves kudos. But here's the rub. You will not see this post. I have been secretely ghosted out so all my comments goes to bottom no matter how thoughful or informative it may be. There is no way for me to de-ghosted. He or other mod probably did this to me for some reason I don't even know or remember. The moderation at HN is like life senten…
Also, usually asking the moderators though email works as a way to get your questions answered.
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When I feel a bit to much about a subject I open notepad and write the comment there and then just close the window if it feels inappropriate. This way there is no risk that I accidentally post it but it still feels like I got to say what I wanted to say. And then I can write something more levelheaded.
There's also the 'delay' setting that you can set in your HN user profile, which gives you 1-10 minutes to edit your comment before it becomes visible to others. This has saved my bacon on many occasions.
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Upvotes are not just for karma, they also show that you say relevant/important things and that people agree with you.
IMO, the most important work that upvotes and downvotes do is to move comments up and down the page. In that context, HN consensus on downvoting jokes makes more sense. I like a good joke, but they belong on the bottom of the page after the "serious" conversation. It's unfortunate that it's overloaded with karma, but complicating the upvote/downvote system has other drawbacks.
" N-gate, a satirical Web site with the slogan “We can’t both be right” (a NAND gate is a kind of logic gate that only outputs “false” if all of its inputs read “true”), offers a weekly summary of Hacker News discussions, dubbed “webshit weekly.” The N-gate entry about a Hacker News discussion of a Times article on the crashes of two Boeing 737 airliners, in Indonesia and Ethiopia, is typical. “Discussing a pair of c…
Guess what N-gate talks about…
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I wonder how many doctors browse HN... Sometimes I find some great posts by MDs here and it's really interesting.
I have for many years (since nearly the beginning).
Thanks dang! You've helped keep HN readable, corrected countless title and link errors, and prevented heated discussions from devolving into fights. I also am super thankful for your help getting my "Show HN" post to the front page. We all appreciate you.
TIL it's "Dan G" and not the Chinese surname "Dang" that I'd always assumed.
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Do you mean a private list of your own tags that the UI would then display to you? Interesting idea.
It's a great idea that will probably damage the community. I do something like this privately, or did until earlier this year, when I stopped because it (a) was making it hard for me to read people's comments rather than surveil threads for specific tags and (b) really drove me to invest time in tagging people, which is unproductive since I know so little about the people commenting here and really have no business b…