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Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

hackersmacker.org

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Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

#1

Post by conesus »

Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).

Main website: https://hackersmacker.org

Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...

The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.

I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!

Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
hackersmacker.org

Re: Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

#4

Post by ineedasername »

I’d encourage a change of labels away from “friend/foe”. It may seem minor but the subtle loaded nature of those paired terms encourages an adversarial stance rather than one of productive discourse. It’s not catchy so there’s probably better than this but, just as an example— “engage/ignore” could better signal to the user a neutral “do I want to bother with this person?”

Re: Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

#5

Post by jacquesm »

ineedasername wrote: post #4

I’d encourage a change of labels away from “friend/foe”. It may seem minor but the subtle loaded nature of those paired terms encourages an adversarial stance rather than one of productive discourse. It’s not catchy so there’s probably better than this but, just as an example— “engage/ignore” could better signal to the user a neutral “do I want to bother with this person?”

That's just Slashdot's influence. They did the same thing at some point.

Re: Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

#6

Post by scrumper »

I wonder what the second order effects of this on the HN karma system will be. It'll create a graph of karmic supernodes perhaps. Say I green-blob someone with a big reputation here, say jacquesm; no doubt lots of other people will do the same. The friends-of-friends icon is going to appear widely but it'll all be a single edge away from Jacques' node. Is that much of a signal? I dunno. That's 30 seconds of thought about it. It's a fun idea though so I'll try it.

Version two: hide foes? Come to think of it, maybe the 'foe' aspect is the fun part...

EDIT: it's like I summoned him.

Re: Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

#7

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

I would suggest categorizing the quality of comments by its content and not its creator. Oh, nevermind, that’s a silly thought.

Challenge my core belief? Well… I could rationally evaluate that, or, I could just use a tool to block it from my vision! Bubble thickener.

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