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Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

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Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the OP was suggesting, I'm just trying to provide my feedback in a more pleasant way. On the other hand, your feedback seems to be rather harsh and all negative. Unless you were trying to be ironic. In which case I say brilliant!

ORLY? You: * implied the possibly they might not be a human (perhaps a bot?) * used exceedingly formal language in an informal setting, fully knowing this appears like you are talking down to someone * noted they made a typo - the "valueless" part mentioned * say it is with "deep regret" that you noted that typo - I doubt you had any regret whatsoever In short, your comment does highlight the issues fairly well.

You lost me for a minute there with parts of your comment until I realized you were thinking this was a different comment from months ago. But you got it for the most part. I was not suggesting they were not human. I was trying not to offend them if, in fact, they turned out not to be human (I was thinking alien... not bot... bots don't get offended). While formal language can be thought of as lofty these days when no one really speaks like that, it is also how people used to speak. It always cracks me up when I see movies set in that day and the people say the most absurd, inane things yet seem to do it so eloquently and with a smile. They make it seem so pleasant. I was going for old-timey pleasant... not current day lofty. True, pointing out a typo is largely useless, but it was necessary due to my previous point about lofty/pleasant language. True, I had no regret. Really, I was just trying to illustrate that rolling a turd in chocolate and nuts does not make it an Almond Roca.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#462
post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

I think it would be worth taking a look at the Slashdot voting system, which IMO does the best job I've seen of getting the best signal out of the noise of mass voting.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#463
post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

Private comments and automatically fold/collapse long/low-point threads and negative-comment scoring comments.

Optionally mark your comments as private for grammar/spelling/technical errors, way off topic comments and personal requests.

I think graying out works for comments scoring 0 or maybe -1, but beyond that, might as well fold/collapse them.

I also think something like xkcd's Robot9000[0] would be useful to prevent some clutter like "me too!", "awesome!", "Thanks"

[0]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#464
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms. It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without c…

"... community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm." I disagree and find such a community engineering approach dangerous for the health of the very community it's trying to "save". I think there are two big problems with it: (i) It gives too much power to the gatekeeper(s), be it software or human,…

> Although I hate snarky, nonconstructive comments as much as everybody else

Sure, I sorta agree, but ... there's snark, and then, well, there's snark.

Sometimes snarky, non-constructive comments can be really funny and/or satisfying. I don't want them to dominate the conversation, and a lot of snark is just sort of stupid, but ...

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, another forum running SMF. But solid software, really? I give them one thing: it works . Can't recall encountering any real big bad bugs either, so yeah in that sense, quite solid. But given that you contributed to it I assume that you've seen the code? I've had to make some modifications/hackery here and there myself and the amounts of time I've cursed at it for being a tangled and obscure mess... combine th…

I've not contributed for a good number of years. I just didn't have the time. I assumed it was still running smooth. Maybe it has fallen off in recent years. Sad. But they had a pretty good MOD system I thought for the time. But I agree that the code was not organized all too well.

We used it since at least 2007 (not exactly sure, we switched from PhpBB around the time exploits were discovered every other week or so). It's still quite smooth and works fine, I just don't like looking at the code, nothing changed in that respect :)
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