Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lamer-news! Now that would be a funny website.
http://lamernews.com/
Yeah, I figured.
Trolls (2008)
311–320 of 321 posts
Re: Trolls (2008)
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said, there's a bunch of links (like job postings and YC company PR posts) that get privileged front page status with their own decay algorithms You are mistaken. Only job postings have their own decay algorithm, and those are visually distinguished from stories by e.g. not having points or comments. All stories have the same decay rate.
Has this always been the case? He seems to have a point with scribd, but then it could also be that there were just a lot less people voting over all back then.
Yes. There has always been a single ranking algorithm for stories.
Re: Trolls (2008)
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
"1. Avoid long back and forth threads. Say what you have to say and get back to work." 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.
About 5-10% of back and forth threads are useful to read. As you point out, these are usually civil debates about the merits of particular approaches. I think the point is: as soon as it gets personal, get back to work.
The best predictor of a long exchange being good is the number of intermediate questions asked and answered in it.
Re: Trolls (2008)
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what "the human factor" is. Or maybe I should say, I don't think there is a single "human factor". Humans in a first world, upper middle class neighborhood coffeeshop behave very differently than humans in 1994 Rwanda, or the humans in the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's not that the humans themselves are different (or started out different), it's that the environment in one place encourages a different…
So, as a corollary, ideally you'd design the environment so that humans adapt to it in a particular way, thus getting rid of the 'human factor', whatever it is.
Well, getting rid of the sides of that human factor that we collectively wish to suppress. You can do it algorithmically with things like karma systems, but it's really nothing new, it's just a higher-tech way of doing what Hammurabi (and others before him) did.
Re: Trolls (2008)
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about the difficulty of making a replacement account. It's about the loss of profile / reputation / recognition. The longer a user has been contributing, the more painful losing all of that becomes.
I guess I never saw it that way. Personally, I don't really care for reputation / reputation. Case in point, I've been on HN for almost 2 years, and I only recognize a handful of names: patio11, edw(somenumber), tptacek and pg. Usually, I read comments without even looking at the name, unless the comment is so profound that I have to know who said it This is why those 4 stick in my mind - they have said incredibly in…
I'm sure they'll be really bummed if they had to give up their name and start from scratch. It's not an issue of numeric karma. It's brand value.
Re: Trolls (2008)
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
ALL CAPS alls warrants a ban. That said, hell bans are fucking despicable. They might be the proper way to deal with spambots, but for contributing members they are as far as I am concerned incredibly unethical.
I agree. I used reddit daily for several years until a weirdo passive-agressive moderator? replied to one of my comments with profanity and then sabotaged my account in some way. Wasted a lot of time and haven't been back there for years, a shame. At least I learn more here, and there are fewer pictures of kittens.
Re: Trolls (2008)
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is zero chance yelling at or about me on HN is going to get you hellbanned. There's a bigger chance I'll get hellbanned. This is one of the dumber meta-threads HN has had. Not so much your comment in particular as the whole thing.
You won't be shitbanned, tptacek. Someone with 100 karma who makes a contrary post for a YC company will.
A couple years ago a prominent user with ~9000 karma was hellbanned for getting picked on by Zed Shaw, and pg went as far as adding new code to news.arc afterward so he wouldn't show up on the "leaders" list anymore (he was unbanned a month ago).
You'd be surprised, it doesn't take much to get pg trigger-happy. He's threatened me with banning a few times myself!
Re: Trolls (2008)
#318"But we still only have about 8,000 uniques a day." Wow, now it's more like 120,000. If I was already worried about the problem then (which I must have been if I took the time to write about it), I'm surprised the site is even usable now.
interesting...
Re: Trolls (2008)
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
There has been some threads where any comment that was not a praise of Steve Jobs and Apple was downvoted. Sometimes I feel fragmentation on HN, was is upvoted in a thread is downvoted in another.
I have watched posts of my own go upvoted then downvoted then up voted then down voted more or less randomly. FWIW I do NOT think people should downvote based on disagreement. I think downvotes should be sparsely used and I personally upvote even people I disagree with.
Well, maybe, but now I am using thread upvote mostly to promote themes I like to see on HN, and comment downvotes to push down thanks, me-too, or otherwise empty answers.
Re: Trolls (2008)
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that kind of hard to believe. I don't hack or even work in the computer industry any more, have got into arguments with almost every long-term member at some point or other, and hold distinctly minority positions on a variety of topics (most often about governance). And heaven knows that I can be as snarky or pompous as anyone else when I've had a bad day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the admins seem pretty hands…
anigbrowl, I enjoy your comments, both on your good days and your bad days. On rare occasions it seems like you may have misread something since your reply comes from a surprising angle, but English is not the first language of everyone, and everyone misreads things on occasion. The good news is when I see something surprising as if things were misread, it means I should reread them to make sure that I didn't misread…
Why thank you.