I've always been amazed that a proprietary engine with unclear rules and unavailable source code is the dominant source of news for the hacker community. Although it is designed better than reddit, unpopular opinions are still punished, which can stifle discussion and results in users self-moderating themselves and preventing themselves, even subconsciously, from expressing certain opinions from fear of downvoting.
Many of those undocumented behaviours are described with speculation - why don't we have a clear image of the capabilities and inner workings of Hacker News available anywhere? Security by obscurity?
There are lots of open source discussion systems, and lots of transparent ones. For whatever reason, the closed and opinionated Hacker News reached the popularity that it did. I don't mind it.
Something about the mystery and the relatively tight moderation has kept HN from becoming too off topic and silly. Do you think Hacker News has somehow avoided Eternal September?
I'm sure that helped, especially in the beginning, but at this point I think the number of people that value it for the community and discussion far exceeds those that use it to keep abridged of YC developments.
Still, being seen here has value in part because of who sees you, itself in part because of the VC and startup culture behind the site. Keeping abreast of YC developments doesn't even matter - some people want to hang around the water cooler where very important people might happen to walk by.
I suspect that if this were just a tech and programming forum, it would be about as popular as a niche imageboard like lainchan.
HN was already pretty popular while YC was only distributing $1M/year, back in 2010. But posting was encouraged to YC participants (IIRC), which probably did help it quite a bit.
I see plenty of disagreement in the threads I visit. The things I tend to see downvoted are things that contain blatant falsities and bigoted comments. I'm OK with people self-censoring those.
I'm willing to grant that I might be missing things I would otherwise agree with.
It’s only visible in the individual comment view (like the flag link) iirc, and it’s only available for dead (not just flagged) comments. For example, I have a vouch link available for this comment:
Checked it out. No vouch link. Thanks for mentioning it though.
EDIT: The post was dead at the time I checked, but it's possible it still shows as dead after it has been deleted, which I assume removes the vouch option.
It's possible I'm mistaken then. My apologies. I did not intend for my suggestion to be perceived as a punitive measure had been taken ("which leads me to believe it's been turned off for my user").
I'd rather call it in-house than proprietary. Maintaining or even publishing a project in the open is a lot of work, and it's not like there aren't a lot of open-source forums available, so I can imagine the maintainers deciding it's really not worth it.
In fact, the comment system of LWN is in-house as well, and I doubt anyone would accuse them of proprietary sympathies. They're getting there, but it's just nor a priority, or even that important in the open source world.
Back when we had scores shown most people would seem to vote towards their ideal score for that post -- that was the consensus in voting discussions I was party to (IIRC). I'd vote down highly voted comments that I agreed with because the comment wasn't that good; also upvote any comment that was negative that seemed to have value.
But then I learnt pg said basically 'downvote if you disagree', which IMO makes the site much worse. Also then votes were hidden and so I spend most votes on things I disagree with because they made a good point and I believe others should at least be able to see the text of the comment.
I also dislike hidden censorship, hidden rules, and hidden moderators/moderation (eg covert post promotion for Ycombinator companies).
> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
> [...] Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
"pg" is still making statements, e.g., in this thread, as "pvg".
What was the motivation for hiding scores? Was it to prevent exactly what you describe? (i.e. downvoting based on view that a comment received "too many" upvotes)
What happened to polls; HN used to have them. Wouldnt they accomplish the desired behaviour? (i.e. measurement of disagreement)
It's scary to think I've been here long enough to know things others don't.. Or maybe "those that would know won't tell." Either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
One thing I think it should have mentioned is that although comment scores are not shown to anyone but the user, it is easy enough to infer them, at least approximately. Obviously, negative scores are shown by desaturation. And positive scores are shown by sort order.
I hate the desaturation, I should add a user.css entry for it or something. Effectively silencing non-mainstream views seems so contrary to hacker culture to me.
Contrarian views aren't usually down voted here, low quality posts are. Troll posts that may have some semblance of an actual point should be rephrased to actually be part of a discussion.
I disagree - the are at least 2 top level comments on this story now that are greyed out. I consider them to be well-made, definitely not flames or spam, clearly written but contrary to the apparent majority view.
Even uncontroversial statements of fact get down-voted.
Take this:
>"Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything beyond warm fuzzies." //
assuming the commenter didn't lie then it is a fact, they started their thought. Now the down-voters may know vouching revives comments, but that's no reason to downvote, that's reason to respond with a source.
Even if they are mistaken, it's harsh to downvote a view that can't be easily corrected because of hidden information.
Yea, I just finished a comment about this very topic before I read yours. People here will downvote anything. There’s a big voting audience, and chances are there will be at least some people who disagree with you on any topic. Best to just roll with it.
This isn't true on any political topic. I've seen people who are far better authors than myself have posts downvoted to dead because they disagreed with the prevailing opinion in a thread.
I don't believe it is quite so simple. Remark ordering also appears to incorporate
* freshness (new remarks get a moment at the top)
* reputation (remarks from high-karma accounts linger higher, longer)
and I may possibly have also observed:
* a penalty box: hidden downweighting, or reduction in effective karma, imposed by moderators upon troublesome users that weren't egregious enough to ban/shadowban.
It actually brings them back, they do not lie to you about them not being [dead] anymore. I've vouched for a number of shadowbanned users when they have a comment that ought to be visible and then other people reply to it. You can verify (should you run across this again) by logging out or using incognito mode to view the page after you vouch.
I've noticed that sometimes [dead] comments don't seem to be revived by - presumably - just me clicking vouch. Perhaps vouches and flags and other criteria are balanced against each other or something like that.
The value of vouching, like everything else on HN, is secretly manipulated behind the scenes depending on how much you agree with the hivemind. If you vouch for things that then get flagged again (because the hivemind doesn't want to read them,) your vouches will carry less and less weight.
It definitely does work. I suspect that vouching (like voting itself) has an influence weighted by the reputation of the user in question. Reputation being some secret sauce correlated with, but not identical to karma.
My latest campaign has been to find a way to add the tiniest bit of accountability for downvotes. I believe at a minimum the total number of downvotes given should be shown publicly on user profiles.
As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.
Why do any votes need 'accountability'? Their purpose is to identify comments worth reading. Almost everything people write about voting itself is not worth reading and the less of it, the better.
My intention is to ensure contributing to publicly censoring/censuring costs something (intentionally tiny, but greater than zero/nothing) each time, beyond the one-time minimum karma requirement. "Downvote to disagree" seems unlikely to scale indefinitely, particularly as mobile means less willingness to contribute beyond clicking up/down (specifically now that there are apps catching on that remove all "fat-fingered web UI" friction!).
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
I know it's perfectly fine, I'm trying to follow this (very common) line of thought and adherents never seem to explain it in a way I can understand.
For one thing you're not really 'censoring' anything but even if we say, for the sake of argument, that you are why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote? The mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation is also quite compelling. What's the counter to that other than stuff that mostly seems to boil down to some version of 'getting downvotes kind of feels bad' (of which calling downvotes 'censoring' seems like a particularly overwrought variant).
Thanks for taking the time to bring up these counterpoints!
>why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote
If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add "censuring" as a better word.
>mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation
Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is behind-the-scenes for now.
[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing -- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.
Worth reading is very subjective. I think you are looking at popular opinions. The current system works that way as opposed to some randomized insertion in between. One often problem with popular opinion is that readers might jump on that trail and build a deep thread, which probably reduce the incentive to read any further by either skipping the middle to the end, ir simply ignore the rest.
Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).
The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.
I always thought that a user's votes should be normalised by something sensible, like total number of votes or time spent online (with sensible scaling). That way opinionated clickers don't have outsize influence.
Downvotes could remove from users karma. It acts as a constraint. Basically, the more popular your posts the more moderation you can do, but you still lose moderation capabilities over time if you use it excessively.
No need to make it visible why a user's karma is dropping, it just is. Could be they're getting downvoted, or they're using their voting action and reducing it themselves.
The only other option that works well is a meta-moderation feature like /. has, but that's impractical for this site, the way it does things.
I doubt that really happens, other than for that very brief moment and tiny minority of users who are right around the threshold. The karma losses are capped, it's hard to lose meaningful amounts of karma without actively trying to.
Sorry, I reread my post. What I meant was that if I downvote someone, the mechanism could deduct from my karma (or a fraction of my karma) as well as theirs.
So we're both at 1000 karma, I downvote you. You go to 999, I go to 999.5. Repeat. If I'm only downvoting, I'm forfeiting my karma to that moderation action. Optionally the same for flagging and other things.
This becomes a constraint because a user who just got to 500 karma and downvotes would lose the privilege immediately. A user at 10k karma can downvote pretty much everything. You could also have it cost more to downvote more in a period of time. Like 0 karma to downvote once an hour. 0.5 karma for two or three times an hour. 1 karma for four times an hour. Some scale (linear or faster).
This would prevent or mitigate people going through and downvoting all of a particular commenters posts in a thread just because it's controversial or they wrote one controversial thing. It creates a cost for moderation.
Oh I see what you mean. You can see a system like that in action on Stack Overflow. I don't think it really does very much at all there either, under what seem like much more favourable conditions: harder to accumulate karma, lots and lots of permission thresholds, a community involved in far more moderation than here and piles of caps on all sorts of user actions.
On HN, this would also favour commenting participation over curating participation. It's not obvious this is a win over the way things work now.
On StackOverflow reputation is subtracted when downvoting answers but not questions [1], which is a neat approach. On your own profile, you can see the proportion of upvotes to downvotes (as well as other activity), but others cannot (maybe moderators?). So, there is at least some personal impact to having a user be accountable for a downvote. There is also generally a culture of "if you downvote, you should explain why", which sometimes seems to be here on HN as well. I remember Disqus removed the downvote count some time back, and Facebook doesn't have a "Dislike" button, so there are different approaches to it. I wonder what some other approaches some communities have taken, and what would be effective? Or even, what is the desired impact?
I'm developing Talkyard which has its own voting system: there's the Like vote, and the Disagree vote.
But the Disagree vote isn't a downvote — it doesn't affect karma or sort order. It justs shows how many people disagree about something. That can be good to know, so one can avoid harmful advice. Or just because one is curious about others' opinions.
There is a downvote too, actually, but only available for staff and core members. It works a bit like the downvote here at HN (e.g. removes "karma" and moves the comment downwards, dims it a bit).
If either intended or not intended, talking about the downvoting system seems unnecessarily taboo(gets downvoted). Which is a shame because there is an interesting effect that it has on the community which would be worth looking into.
One of the biggest questions I have: are downvotes an accurate way to moderate low-quality comments? I'm not sure how that can be proved by data but it would be interesting to see someone prove it.
I find myself thinking of the Slashdot system (also used by Soylentnews, a Slashdot "spinoff"), where people get to "flag" a certain number of comments on an article they themselves have not participated in. And said flags can never lift the post above +5 or send it below -1, but the most common flag given to a comment is represented next to the score.
It will be interesting to see how we look back on the moderators' decision to stifle political discussion on HN. In my opinion it is a horrible abdication of responsibility among technologists to simply hide any content that pertains to politics.
But it is fitting that the political monoculture of the valley would give rise to an HN moderation regime that includes aggressive censorship.
I love HN and have learned a great deal from the articles and comments, but censoring political discussion is a form of sides-taking and HN mods are unabashedly responsible for it. It's a truly shameful dark cloud in what is otherwise a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem of ideas.
I love the statement of fact here, as if your opinion alone determines what "went well" means.
The outcome that people threw giant hissy fits about not being able to Trump-bash or insist that Silicon Valley is the most sexist institution ever created for a week does not mean that the experiment didn't go well.
In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite. It illustrated how deeply embedded a certain sociopolitical view is on this site despite everyone constantly patting themselves on the back over how smart, tolerant, and accepting they are. I think the experiment went quite well at illustrating what HN has become.
I've seen what you describe as "hissy fits" (and well-reasoned, substantive comments for that matter) come from all points of the political and ideological spectrum. The most deeply embedded sociopolitical view I'm aware of is the natural human bias that "it's the $otherSide that's responsible for misbehavior".
HN is politically divided, much as the surrounding societies are. But each side feels like the other side dominates this site, often with intense conviction. It's striking.
Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip, and mainstream discussion dilutes the intellectual quality and purpose of the community and only hastens the Eternal September effect.
If anything, the moderators have probably been too lenient about letting political content through. It's starting to become the HN equivalent of a junk buffet. Far too little of it passes the bar of "satisfying intellectual curiosity," and far too much appeals only to tribalism and emotion.
> Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip...
This may be true of some political discussion, but one could equivalently say that most technological discussion is about big screen televisions and mobile phone service plans.
Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
>Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
It should, but it often doesn't. For some reason, politics short circuits people's brains. And one way to encourage people to dig deeper is to keep shooting into the trenches, being more aggressive about downvoting political content than apolitical, technical content.
I think this is a very cynical view. To some extent the demagogues and "ruling class" among us try to oversimplify things and create emotionally potent talking points.
But ultimately as citizens we must figure out reality for ourselves without the emotionally potent, over-simplified explanations offered by partisans.
We must be patient that some of us may not have realized (yet) how to think in a rational way about politics, not just abandon it completely.
"people who were strong at math were able to effectively solve an analytical problem. However, when political content was added to the same analytical problem – comparing crime data in cities that banned handguns against cities that did not – math skills no longer predicted how well people solved the problem. Instead, liberals were good at solving the problem when it proved that gun control reduced crime, and conservatives were good at solving the problem when it proved the opposite"
Not an endorsement of this paper, just something I've seen going around on social media. When I followed the citation for the statement quoted above, it didn't seem quite as cut and dry, that summary is eliding quite a few details of the the experiment I think, but I just skimmed.
I agree; it is an abdication of our responsibilities to our communities (Internet, countries, world) to say the current political situation, including the lack of intelligent and productive interaction, is not our problem and to abandon the field. Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work, and then which could be duplicated elsewhere (and arguably many people here are directly responsible for the currently poor performance of online communities in this regard). Rather than give up, people at HN are accustomed to taking on problems that others assume are intractable, and are comfortable and flexible enough for experimentation. Imagine the effect success would have on the world - is there any app that would have a bigger impact?
At the same time, the unfounded assertions and exaggerations ("horrible", "aggressive censorship", "unabashedly", etc.) in the parent are, IMHO, the kind of communication that causes political discussion to fail.
> Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work ... is there any app that would have a bigger impact?
Exactly.
> the unfounded assertions
Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.
Because of the aspect of HN that is professional networking, most people are afraid to call out the mods on this, but someone needs to.
> Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.
I've had contact with them, and I haven't observed any self-righteousness or interest in censorship.
If political discussions that evoke partisan loyalties end up being classified as “flame wars” due to the definition in the article, then if those involved in the so-called flame wars are censured (throttled etc) then effectively the topic has been discouraged simply because the votes averaged lower than the number of comments. Over time users learn to ignore such topics.
The big goof up is in the idea that all discussions with widespread disagreement are harmful. It’s an absurd view of manners akin to saying that discussion about the ethics of slavery is simply rude to participate in regardless of one’s views and regardless of whether any of the comments are actually rude or disrespectful (or are even, themselves, partisan. The votes may be where partisanship gets introduced).
Slavery is a bad example because it seems morally obvious and thus the enlightened side seems obvious. But many issues today lack moral clarity which is why intelligent discussion of them is deeply important.
Politics can be messy but in many ways political topics represent the conflict between values as some values gain or lose prominence.
As a received impression, it may accurately reflect an emergent property of HN, and many other popularity-based ranking sites.
It's possible to either vote up, or flag, articles. Political articles which hit a major divide may see much of both actions. I've seen and been disaappointed by articles I thought should get more play that were flagged off the front page.
That's not a direct reflection of HN admin actions, but is undeniably tied to site mechanics, and so is something of an admin metaaction.
I've inclued several of these in my Favourites list
The default styling results in it having too narrow a view so it requires a lot of side scrolling on mobile devices. It gets really annoying for block quoted text past 80-90 characters.
I'm on android Firefox at the moment and I can confirm that it becomes problematic after about thirty characters. That's what I meant by my previous post.
Unofficial HN community guide: Short comments meant to be viewed as sarcasm end up being interpreted incorrectly often when used in a serious forum. A short clarifying rider sentence explaining your real opinion often helps. That may ruin the joke, but if your comment was just to make a joke, it probably wasn't strong enough reason to comment anyway (for additional info on jokes, see the section entitled How to make a joke and not get downvoted).
Addendum: Poe's law is alive and well.
(The above is of course my take, and other people will follow their own best practices)
But not it made me wonder, how a positive enforcing behavior is only allowing down vote until you reach a threshold. It makes you engage and understand the community better before making your judgment.
It is also a way to manipulate HN to allow those with similar views to prosper and reinforce those same ideas. Those who don't agree have less power...
It takes a while in the beginning, then you learn what works and what doesn't, which thankfully aligns fairly well with the community values as I see them. Here's a distillation of how I see them:
* Comment when you have something to contribute. The contribution can be small, even just adding your own experience. A "me too" comment will likely get downvoted. A "Me too. I often experience/feel this when..." will likely be left neutral or upvoted, depending on topic and content.
* Assume the other party in a discussion or argument is acting in good faith. Try to look for alternate interpretations for offensive or upsetting comments, and ask, if at all ambiguous. Even if it's clear the opinion is at odds with your own, don't condemn someone outright, ask why (and try to do so in a way that doesn't sound like you're setting them up).
* Tangents are okay. Responding to a particular comment but addressing the conversation is okay. Try to make it obvious when you are not addressing the person you replied to specifically. Context matters, especially for those that see the reply, and it's easy for them to assume it's supposed to be meant as a rebuttal to them when they've been seeing lots of rebuttals.
I believe the top comment in an high voted thread can get 100+ points but winning the thread is extremely difficult. In almost 6y I only was able to make it 3 or 4 times. The quality is really high and it's amazing how there is always somebody in a better position to comment it.
I find that true technical commentary is often less appreciated than superficial technical statements.
Using only myself as an example:
* I write a comment about databases and data science that comprises hard-won insights borne out of years of experience and mistakes -> {0, 1, 2} upvotes.
* I write a throwaway comment about IBM PC-DOS -> many more upvotes (>10).
I'm not complaining. I think HN merely conforms to the broader pattern of the world.
It does have one downside: very often, soundbite comments that are naive or wrong get upvoted a lot. [0]
For all the complaints about the hivemind, I see a broader range of opinions here than anywhere else. Perhaps the reason for complaints is that the visibly broad range of opinions creates an expectation that any reasonable opinion will be tolerated, when in fact some reasonable opinions will be suppressed by the community. In such a generally open context, this suppression seems particularly unjust.
In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.
On the other hand, in general I don’t care about the occasional wave of downvotes. They’re fake internet points—-no reason to tie your HN karma to any measure of self worth. Literally anything can and will get down-votes here. Hell, just yesterday I wrote a long-ish story about some ethical issues I encountered as an engineer. No arguments or judgment passing or controversial stands—just a “here’s a little snippet of my career” and it got a couple downvotes. No need to sweat them. The advice to not complain in-thread about downvotes and not attack/question your downvoters is good advice. It’s pointless because everything, including uncontroversial comments, high quality comments, correct, incorrect—-they all get a few downs.
> In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.
Sound advice. It's easy to collect some downvotes by posting about anything people feel passionate about -- there's always going to be somebody who downvotes out of dislike for your opinion. Also, I believe criticizing certain national governments attracts an outsized share of downvotes / flags.
That or any google proguct. They seem to have the forum locked down tight. Look at the posts that rise after a while in any AMP, Gmail, or Talk thread. Its a clear shift when workers come online. I often wonder how many people are employed to influence and steer technical discussion on sites like this.
Certain topics are predictsbly for/against on HN. Nuclear power is one such topic where for example arguments against Thorium reactors gets HN voters up in arms and prompt downvotes.
> No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried.
These exist, but I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that. Sometimes arguments you've seen, or made yourself, that were open ended and/or asking for discussion get downvoted, but sometimes it's just a week later and they don't. I think a lot of it has to do with the context people see it in, their own state of mind, and whether someone happened to take up reasoned discussion on the topic before downvotes started accumulating.
Put another way, I think there's a lot of people that see someone looking to talk about a topic and immediately assume they are looking for an opening to express their outside views rather than explore the topic (which is not fair to assume, IMO). Seeing people discuss that topic rationally stalls or negates that knee-jerk reaction.
In other words, it's a crap shoot (but there are strategies for broaching these subjects that work better than others).
Yes, preservation of the “house style” is an explicit goal of HN’s design and moderation. Preventing newcomers from “democratically” hijacking the forum and turning it into something else is something it’s explicitly built to thwart.
it's interesting to note that that's exactly the kind of position you might have if your opinions are just not that great.
the whole system is rigged and it's just not appreciating your awesomeness. maybe you're seeing a pattern that's not there? might it be your opinions that are flawed? or maybe your communication skills or style are left wanting? i don't know but those things are certainly possibilities too.
you didn't actually make an argument about what you think the "similar views" are, how the mechanism works, who's involved, or anything worthy of consideration and discussion.
might that be representative of the problem right there?
It's called groupthink. And I've heard many people outside the SV scene complain precisely about SV groupthink issues.
They can be good ideas, bad ideas, horrendous ideas... Regardless, if SV thinks its good, then it passes muster here.
I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct. They just challenge the precepts that are held holy in the 'Valley.
Do you folks have any anonymized demographics data? I’d love to see it over time in particular, since I’m guessing early on it was much more SV. When I travel and am in a vastly different time zone (like say to Europe or Asia), I notice the active participants on HN are fairly different. Is 10% by viewership, accounts, activity, all of the above?
I was just looking at this. 5% of "users" (it depends how you define a user who isn't logged in) last month were in SV. A third were in the US, a third in Europe, 8% in Canada/Australia/NZ, 6% in India, 3% in China.
That is the distribution of everyone who hit the site last month at all, regardless of how much they used it. If we weight the numbers by the number of days they used HN, then US has 44%, Europe 33%, Can/Aus/NZ 8%, India 3%, China 2%. And Silicon Valley is 8%. That's surprisingly low, given how many people assume that HN == SV.
Sure, it does act as a stabilizer, but IMO it affects discussion style much more than opinions expressed. Which is, to me, is a good thing.
Rudeness and pointless ramblings get downvoted quickly, which is likely a model learned quickly by newcomers. Arguing an unpopular view is unlikely to get beaten hard -- I do not recall ever getting more than -3 or so on a comment (but maybe I am just a conformist).
In my opinion, it creates an echo chamber where in order to be a "full member" of the community you have to already espouse views the community supports. It is a big reason why I don't participate much.
I certainly think it's possible to clear 500 karma by playing to the echo chamber, but I don't remember having had much difficulty doing getting 500 and most of my comments have either been technical or about niche policy-ish stuff like urban planning or energy. I think my personal views on particularly echo-chamber-y things are probably at least somewhat different from any normative HN values that may exist, and that hasn't really been a barrier.
I espouse a lot of views that the community does not support. I am also the first woman to make the leaderboard (under a different handle -- my retired handle has 25k karma).
I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.
How do you know you were the first woman to do so? This is a psuedo anonymous internet forum where people aren't required to state their gender or even their real names.
I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.
> I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on,
If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.
> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But go ahead, be mad about it.
Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.
To sum it up, the ignorance of the harsh realities of life, especially (but not exclusively!) for the lower class. HN is a circlejerk (oh my bad, "echo chamber") of idealists, whether they are utopian or dystopian, pretty far removed from reality.
It's the same all over social media "circles", which is why I just gave up on it all, it's more like show off media. If you participate, share your actual thoughts without trying to fit in.. Or just take full on advantage of the circus. Cue the downvotes.
I don't participate much because unlike, say, reddit, HN seems much more focused on delivering people to other destinations. That might just be my perception, but I think reddit has much more sophisticated community features, where as comments have always felt like an add-on for HN
That's so different from my experience. I often read the comments on HN before the linked article. I generally find reddit comments, even in subs dedicated to topics I care about, to be garbage. In contrast, I learn a lot from reading HN's comments.
Why do you think "views the community supports" is the only thing that people upvote? I upvote entire threads where people are disagreeing because the whole conversation has value. I also upvote comments that add something new to the conversation. I think you have a naïve sense of participation.
I reached that threshold mostly via submissions, I don't comment that much (but also downvote very rarely). Surely, also submissions may add to the echo chamber, especially if they hit a nerve.
One reason for me to stay here is the diversity (and civility) of the comments, I don't think it's too bad. Another favourite read of mine is Arstechnica, but the comments there don't reach the quality of the comments on HN, imho.
Then again, if you feel that you need to be able to downvote people in order to "participate", maybe it's good that you don't have a downvote button yet ;-)
HA! That made me think of what might be an interesting feature on a forum, if the parent gets downvoted, all the children do as well. Might prevent feeding trolls or expanding off-topic conversations.
Often I feel it's not worth replying to obviously wrong stuff because it'll just get downvoted so low that nobody's likely to see my eloquent and carefully-worded rebuttal anyway.
I've been slowly creeping towards downvoting for the better part of 2 years as I comment very infrequently. I imagine it'll be anticlimactic once I get there, but it's relatively exciting to be so close—it's the last frontier of Hacker News-ing.
We'll probably get rid of that list or at least change it to show different kinds of leaders. I've been saying that for years, but like an alligator, we lunge eventually.
It seemed to take forever, and I was counting the numbers when I was at like 490, but now the downvote buttons are there, I find it's very rare that I get a chance to wield them in anger.
This is a great write up, and answered a question I had about comments which are automatically collapsed. I understand the frustration around the lack of politics/diversity discussions, but I agree with the way it’s handled here. Those discussions need to be had, but do they need to be had here? They are divisive, and often leave lasting wounds which lead to the creation of factions.
Mostly though, the internet is short on places like HN, and long on places to endlessly discuss politics, usually in a very predictable circle. I don’t believe that much good comes from anonymous text exchanges online where politics are concerned.
People like discussing things on hn because the quality of discourse tends to be (relatively) very high. Naturally people would especially want to discuss politics or anything else that's almost universally a shitshow in a place where they thing commenters are thoughtful and fair and level-headed. Of course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here _because_ debating politics is discouraged.
Of course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here _because_ debating politics is discouraged.
I strongly believe this, and I think the evidence is the content of threads where the mods gave people a chance. The volume, in both senses of the word, becomes extreme, with hundreds of angry nested comments.
There's another phenomenon at play with political stories, I think. Much of what occupies the front page is sort of implicitly siloed. Rust programmers are the active writers in Rust threads. Data science programmers are active in ML or word vector threads. People interested in math are active in math threads. There's a story on the front page about Google's "TPUv2's". I don't even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal with my comments on that thread.
Not so political threads! Everybody is on equal footing in them. There's no "people with expertise relating their experience" and "people asking questions" and the rest of us reading with interest. Rather, everyone's broadcasting.
That's not inherently bad, I don't think; there are lots of other kinds of threads that are like that and they seem to be fine (for the most part) for HN's culture.
But politics is a particularly toxic combination of broad-spectrum and polarizing. There are never voices of reason or experience, the most active participants are often on a hair trigger, and participation is amplified because everyone's got an opinion.
Just a side note, but... why are people using github as a content publishing platform? It just isn't a good UX for that, and there is no lack of workable CMS systems out there.
Yeah, exactly this. If your article/gist/etc gains some traction it's an easy way to get people to look at your other projects. Github's success is largely dependent on the social aspect.
Because the author starts a list and then hopes that other people will contribute to it.
I currently have 2 repos with ~1k+ stars, and both of them are not code-related. The rest of the repos (most of which have code) receive <50 stars, so it's a good way to receive cool reputation within GitHub.
And finally, managing these ain't an easy task as well. The level of knowledge necessary to contribute to them is "knows a tiny bit of Git and the topic involved". Want to contribute to a popular repo? Contribute to a non-code repo just to see the process.
I seem to recall 'dang mentioning this can happen, and that they can whitelist accounts. If you see it happening to yourself, you can contact them and they'll look into it.
Could be a popular VPN. For example my VPN is very popular so I would be shocked if others weren't using it, and it must look like all users are coming from the same place.
I think moderators can bypass that as well. I'm fairly sure I've seen accounts go from green to normal within hours when it was the author of some paper or project that someone submitted finding out they are on HN and making an account to answer questions. I suspect moderators authenticated the user separately, or used the comments to do so if it was completely obvious.
> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which--although not an explicit benefit--does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
Thought I was going crazy for a bit, but submitters names do show up in red for me. Possibly an extra feature of the Hacker News Enhancement Suite :). TIL.
I was hoping to find all the unlisted URLs some of which I can never remember, like /leaders etc.
Interesting nonetheless.
There does seem to be some attempts to game HN lately that I don't remember in the past - like a recent tendency of some new accounts to ask dozens upon dozens of questions. I can only assume there's some karma gaming behind that.
I don't understand the difference between this and the regular front page. I can see it has different content, but why? Does it use a larger time factor? It seems like everything there is older, but maybe that's just because it calculates less frequently?
It uses the same ranking system, but only counts votes from very early users. To me the interesting thing is how little it differs from the regular front page, although I think the explanation is disappointingly boring: the main predictor of upvotes—for all users, early or not—is already being on the front page.
Has anybody analysed how karma works for submissions that make the front page? It feels like there's either a rate limit on how much karma you can earn from a submission, or the amount of karma earned per upvote is inversely proportional to the number of upvotes, or something.
I've noticed that I earned 1 karma for 1 upvote for the first few upvotes, and also 1 karma for 1 upvote when the article's been off the front page for days but people are still reading and occasionally upvoting it. But in between it's definitely not a 1:1 - maybe more like 10:1 or even less.
It feels like there are probably some really interesting rules involved :)
I've also noticed this and would like to know more. I feel like this didn't happen on HN 5 years ago, but it does now.
I always wondered if maybe it keeps track of who has voted on your submissions in the past, and only gives you karma if the voter hasn't voted on you before.
Not sure whether it's influenced by your existing karma. My perception (with sample size of one) is that when my karma was lower I accrued at closer to 1:1, whereas now definitely not accruing at 1:1.
To my knowledge, upvotes which are suspected to be inauthentic do not count toward the overall karma gained (I have no citations, which is why I did not include it in the list)
Do you ever notice that you'll lose two points on a comment at the same time, then later they'll come back? I see that relatively often (once every couple weeks), and on completely uncontroversial comments, which is how I started noticing it. I wondered if it was some vote manipulation detection, where they've linked two accounts voting similarly and nullified their upvotes, but later clear them so they votes are reapplied. In any case, it's always two together (which is why I don't think it's an accidental downvote), and seems to be close to the same time if not the exact same time.
I'd be interested to see which kind of abuse. As stated in my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442242 I am not knowingly participating in abusing behavior. So, if its not voting rings initiated by me, would it be voting rings initiated by others? Or posting topics which are mainstream on HN?
There is also the "Slow down, you're posting too fast" feature that kicks in, likely to calm down flame wars, Unfortunately it seems to block everything, not just the thread in question.
We're always happy to take the rate limit off if people give us reason to believe that they want to use HN as intended and will abide by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html in the future.
For me, "Shadowbanning" or "hellbanning" means that the post of the user/site are [dead] but the systems lies to the user and to nim/her show the post as alive. And the only way to notice is to logout or get another computer and check the post from there.
Killing the post form an user or site automatically, and showing to the user that the posts are [dead] is not shadowbanning. I call it "autokilling" but I'm not sure that it is he official name.
Almost all the recent case/discussions of similar cases were simply autokilling. In the initial times of HN it was more common to have hellbanned users, but it's very rare now. Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he said that they were considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use autokilling. I'm not sure if they finally made that change.
> Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he said that they were considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use autokilling. I'm not sure if they finally made that change.
Nope, that change has not been made. I'm hellbanned.
From what I understand, the ban _mechanism_ is still a shadowban in that you can still post and other users can vouch your comments, but the mods will tell you when they've banned you which goes against the original purpose of shadowbanning (banning people without them catching on).
Right, if an account has any substantial history, we tell them we're banning them, usually after multiple warnings. There are some exceptions, like new accounts that are related to past spam or troll activity, or accounts that have been used only to break the site guidelines or post obvious fluff.
I didn't mean to complain. I respect and accept your decision to ban me. There are large parts of this community that truly aren't for me. I just wanted to say it to educate the people that the shadowban mechanics are still active, with myself as the example.
@Kenji : You have a sibling comment that now is [dead]. Do you see it marked as [dead] or it looks to you like a normal comment? How do you know that you are banned?
[EDIT: Someone vouched your comment, so I see it now as a normal comment. I was going to vouch it after the experiment :( .]
Just to be 100% sure that we are using the same definitions: Can you post a screenshot in imgur of your sibling comment, so we can see how it looks to you?
I'm too lazy to make a picture, but I see them solid black like a normal comment, there are no markings like [dead] or anything. Even for that sibling comment. For me it all looks normal except that my comments are always at the bottom.
> There is no upper limit on the score of a comment, but the minimum score is -4 points.
According to the The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ [1] this is only partly correct, but I don‘t feel like testing it.
[1]
> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?
> HN is ‘subtle’ in that not everything always is what it seems. Votes are not always counted and those votes that are counted are not always displayed. So even though your vote count for that comment shows as -4, in actual fact it may be much lower. Take your lumps, analyze why you got those downvotes and if you feel they were justified then try to do better in the future. A side effect of the votes still being counted past -4 seems to be that people tend to delete their comments with a much higher frequency than in the past to cap the damage to their karma.
I think what your parent is getting at is that you'll lose at most 4 karma regardless of how many downvotes a comment may eventually accumulate. At least in my experience I haven't seen my karma fall more than 4 points due to a single comment, as far as I can remember. Have you a different experience?
My favorite little-known HN feature (not even mentioned on this link!) is the noprocrast mode. You can set in your profile to be locked out of HN for a set amount of time, after another set amount of time on HN. Prevents procrastination :)
Oh wow, that's a good one! My favorite is being able to change the nav color (`topcolor`). I changed it to the purple brand color from our startup [1].
I can imagine that being used as a security feature for UIs, against phishing attacks: now that you are registered and logged in, choose one of these colours/pictures for this certain, easily visible area of your dashboard. If the use saw a different colour, would know that's phishing.
407 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadI'd like to be able to turn this off in my profile. Or maybe it can be linked to "showdead".
Many of those undocumented behaviours are described with speculation - why don't we have a clear image of the capabilities and inner workings of Hacker News available anywhere? Security by obscurity?
Something about the mystery and the relatively tight moderation has kept HN from becoming too off topic and silly. Do you think Hacker News has somehow avoided Eternal September?
It being owned by a multimillion dollar VC company might have something to do with it.
I suspect that if this were just a tech and programming forum, it would be about as popular as a niche imageboard like lainchan.
I'm willing to grant that I might be missing things I would otherwise agree with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16439776
You might want to shoot the mods an email to check the if there’s something particular with your account.
Otherwise it's not an option on the normal comment page.
Thanks for clarifying.
You need to click the [x time ago] link to see the flag/vouch option.
EDIT: The post was dead at the time I checked, but it's possible it still shows as dead after it has been deleted, which I assume removes the vouch option.
I'd rather call it in-house than proprietary. Maintaining or even publishing a project in the open is a lot of work, and it's not like there aren't a lot of open-source forums available, so I can imagine the maintainers deciding it's really not worth it.
In fact, the comment system of LWN is in-house as well, and I doubt anyone would accuse them of proprietary sympathies. They're getting there, but it's just nor a priority, or even that important in the open source world.
But then I learnt pg said basically 'downvote if you disagree', which IMO makes the site much worse. Also then votes were hidden and so I spend most votes on things I disagree with because they made a good point and I believe others should at least be able to see the text of the comment.
I also dislike hidden censorship, hidden rules, and hidden moderators/moderation (eg covert post promotion for Ycombinator companies).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683
> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716
> [...] Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057338
What was the motivation for hiding scores? Was it to prevent exactly what you describe? (i.e. downvoting based on view that a comment received "too many" upvotes)
What happened to polls; HN used to have them. Wouldnt they accomplish the desired behaviour? (i.e. measurement of disagreement)
Even uncontroversial statements of fact get down-voted.
Take this:
>"Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything beyond warm fuzzies." //
assuming the commenter didn't lie then it is a fact, they started their thought. Now the down-voters may know vouching revives comments, but that's no reason to downvote, that's reason to respond with a source.
Even if they are mistaken, it's harsh to downvote a view that can't be easily corrected because of hidden information.
Meh.
I don't believe it is quite so simple. Remark ordering also appears to incorporate
* freshness (new remarks get a moment at the top)
* reputation (remarks from high-karma accounts linger higher, longer)
and I may possibly have also observed:
* a penalty box: hidden downweighting, or reduction in effective karma, imposed by moderators upon troublesome users that weren't egregious enough to ban/shadowban.
I have, in the past, seen [dead] comments that (IMO) shouldn't have been, clicked on "vouch", and when the page refreshes they are no longer [dead].
Or maybe HN just shows it that way to me and it is, in fact, still [dead] (kinda like hellbans).
I would guess that some comments take less vouching to be reborn than others though.
As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
[Edited]
For one thing you're not really 'censoring' anything but even if we say, for the sake of argument, that you are why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote? The mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation is also quite compelling. What's the counter to that other than stuff that mostly seems to boil down to some version of 'getting downvotes kind of feels bad' (of which calling downvotes 'censoring' seems like a particularly overwrought variant).
>why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote
If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add "censuring" as a better word.
>mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation
Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is behind-the-scenes for now.
[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing -- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.
Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).
The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.
No need to make it visible why a user's karma is dropping, it just is. Could be they're getting downvoted, or they're using their voting action and reducing it themselves.
The only other option that works well is a meta-moderation feature like /. has, but that's impractical for this site, the way it does things.
I doubt that really happens, other than for that very brief moment and tiny minority of users who are right around the threshold. The karma losses are capped, it's hard to lose meaningful amounts of karma without actively trying to.
So we're both at 1000 karma, I downvote you. You go to 999, I go to 999.5. Repeat. If I'm only downvoting, I'm forfeiting my karma to that moderation action. Optionally the same for flagging and other things.
This becomes a constraint because a user who just got to 500 karma and downvotes would lose the privilege immediately. A user at 10k karma can downvote pretty much everything. You could also have it cost more to downvote more in a period of time. Like 0 karma to downvote once an hour. 0.5 karma for two or three times an hour. 1 karma for four times an hour. Some scale (linear or faster).
This would prevent or mitigate people going through and downvoting all of a particular commenters posts in a thread just because it's controversial or they wrote one controversial thing. It creates a cost for moderation.
On HN, this would also favour commenting participation over curating participation. It's not obvious this is a win over the way things work now.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-dow...
[2]: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/supportqa/why_was_the_dow...
But the Disagree vote isn't a downvote — it doesn't affect karma or sort order. It justs shows how many people disagree about something. That can be good to know, so one can avoid harmful advice. Or just because one is curious about others' opinions.
There is a downvote too, actually, but only available for staff and core members. It works a bit like the downvote here at HN (e.g. removes "karma" and moves the comment downwards, dims it a bit).
Here's how the disagree vote looks: https://www.talkyard.io/please-note-2
One of the biggest questions I have: are downvotes an accurate way to moderate low-quality comments? I'm not sure how that can be proved by data but it would be interesting to see someone prove it.
But it is fitting that the political monoculture of the valley would give rise to an HN moderation regime that includes aggressive censorship.
I love HN and have learned a great deal from the articles and comments, but censoring political discussion is a form of sides-taking and HN mods are unabashedly responsible for it. It's a truly shameful dark cloud in what is otherwise a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem of ideas.
It did not go well.
The outcome that people threw giant hissy fits about not being able to Trump-bash or insist that Silicon Valley is the most sexist institution ever created for a week does not mean that the experiment didn't go well.
In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite. It illustrated how deeply embedded a certain sociopolitical view is on this site despite everyone constantly patting themselves on the back over how smart, tolerant, and accepting they are. I think the experiment went quite well at illustrating what HN has become.
If anything, the moderators have probably been too lenient about letting political content through. It's starting to become the HN equivalent of a junk buffet. Far too little of it passes the bar of "satisfying intellectual curiosity," and far too much appeals only to tribalism and emotion.
This may be true of some political discussion, but one could equivalently say that most technological discussion is about big screen televisions and mobile phone service plans.
Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
Whatever your view of tech discussion, this is a tech site.
It should, but it often doesn't. For some reason, politics short circuits people's brains. And one way to encourage people to dig deeper is to keep shooting into the trenches, being more aggressive about downvoting political content than apolitical, technical content.
I think this is a very cynical view. To some extent the demagogues and "ruling class" among us try to oversimplify things and create emotionally potent talking points.
But ultimately as citizens we must figure out reality for ourselves without the emotionally potent, over-simplified explanations offered by partisans.
We must be patient that some of us may not have realized (yet) how to think in a rational way about politics, not just abandon it completely.
"people who were strong at math were able to effectively solve an analytical problem. However, when political content was added to the same analytical problem – comparing crime data in cities that banned handguns against cities that did not – math skills no longer predicted how well people solved the problem. Instead, liberals were good at solving the problem when it proved that gun control reduced crime, and conservatives were good at solving the problem when it proved the opposite"
Not an endorsement of this paper, just something I've seen going around on social media. When I followed the citation for the statement quoted above, it didn't seem quite as cut and dry, that summary is eliding quite a few details of the the experiment I think, but I just skimmed.
I agree; it is an abdication of our responsibilities to our communities (Internet, countries, world) to say the current political situation, including the lack of intelligent and productive interaction, is not our problem and to abandon the field. Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work, and then which could be duplicated elsewhere (and arguably many people here are directly responsible for the currently poor performance of online communities in this regard). Rather than give up, people at HN are accustomed to taking on problems that others assume are intractable, and are comfortable and flexible enough for experimentation. Imagine the effect success would have on the world - is there any app that would have a bigger impact?
At the same time, the unfounded assertions and exaggerations ("horrible", "aggressive censorship", "unabashedly", etc.) in the parent are, IMHO, the kind of communication that causes political discussion to fail.
Exactly.
> the unfounded assertions
Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.
Because of the aspect of HN that is professional networking, most people are afraid to call out the mods on this, but someone needs to.
I've had contact with them, and I haven't observed any self-righteousness or interest in censorship.
That's so inaccurate a description that I wonder how anyone could arrive at it.
The big goof up is in the idea that all discussions with widespread disagreement are harmful. It’s an absurd view of manners akin to saying that discussion about the ethics of slavery is simply rude to participate in regardless of one’s views and regardless of whether any of the comments are actually rude or disrespectful (or are even, themselves, partisan. The votes may be where partisanship gets introduced).
Slavery is a bad example because it seems morally obvious and thus the enlightened side seems obvious. But many issues today lack moral clarity which is why intelligent discussion of them is deeply important.
Politics can be messy but in many ways political topics represent the conflict between values as some values gain or lose prominence.
It's possible to either vote up, or flag, articles. Political articles which hit a major divide may see much of both actions. I've seen and been disaappointed by articles I thought should get more play that were flagged off the front page.
That's not a direct reflection of HN admin actions, but is undeniably tied to site mechanics, and so is something of an admin metaaction.
I've inclued several of these in my Favourites list
Addendum: Poe's law is alive and well.
(The above is of course my take, and other people will follow their own best practices)
Of course, I am the typical HN'er who runs with JS disabled. So perhaps that is a factor.
Ahh that's why I don't see a downvote button :) - I thought it was a feature reserved to super privileged users
If you're here for politicizing or snide remarks, then yes I hope it's hard to to get to 500.
But then, I don't comment often and I don't care about being able to downvote, so I think I'll survive.
* Comment when you have something to contribute. The contribution can be small, even just adding your own experience. A "me too" comment will likely get downvoted. A "Me too. I often experience/feel this when..." will likely be left neutral or upvoted, depending on topic and content.
* Assume the other party in a discussion or argument is acting in good faith. Try to look for alternate interpretations for offensive or upsetting comments, and ask, if at all ambiguous. Even if it's clear the opinion is at odds with your own, don't condemn someone outright, ask why (and try to do so in a way that doesn't sound like you're setting them up).
* Tangents are okay. Responding to a particular comment but addressing the conversation is okay. Try to make it obvious when you are not addressing the person you replied to specifically. Context matters, especially for those that see the reply, and it's easy for them to assume it's supposed to be meant as a rebuttal to them when they've been seeing lots of rebuttals.
I just wanted to point out that in my case, getting points was not that easy. But I actually don't care about it, so everything is fine for me. :)
Using only myself as an example:
* I write a comment about databases and data science that comprises hard-won insights borne out of years of experience and mistakes -> {0, 1, 2} upvotes.
* I write a throwaway comment about IBM PC-DOS -> many more upvotes (>10).
I'm not complaining. I think HN merely conforms to the broader pattern of the world.
It does have one downside: very often, soundbite comments that are naive or wrong get upvoted a lot. [0]
[0] http://danluu.com/hn-comments/
On the other hand, in general I don’t care about the occasional wave of downvotes. They’re fake internet points—-no reason to tie your HN karma to any measure of self worth. Literally anything can and will get down-votes here. Hell, just yesterday I wrote a long-ish story about some ethical issues I encountered as an engineer. No arguments or judgment passing or controversial stands—just a “here’s a little snippet of my career” and it got a couple downvotes. No need to sweat them. The advice to not complain in-thread about downvotes and not attack/question your downvoters is good advice. It’s pointless because everything, including uncontroversial comments, high quality comments, correct, incorrect—-they all get a few downs.
Sound advice. It's easy to collect some downvotes by posting about anything people feel passionate about -- there's always going to be somebody who downvotes out of dislike for your opinion. Also, I believe criticizing certain national governments attracts an outsized share of downvotes / flags.
These exist, but I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that. Sometimes arguments you've seen, or made yourself, that were open ended and/or asking for discussion get downvoted, but sometimes it's just a week later and they don't. I think a lot of it has to do with the context people see it in, their own state of mind, and whether someone happened to take up reasoned discussion on the topic before downvotes started accumulating.
Put another way, I think there's a lot of people that see someone looking to talk about a topic and immediately assume they are looking for an opening to express their outside views rather than explore the topic (which is not fair to assume, IMO). Seeing people discuss that topic rationally stalls or negates that knee-jerk reaction.
In other words, it's a crap shoot (but there are strategies for broaching these subjects that work better than others).
the whole system is rigged and it's just not appreciating your awesomeness. maybe you're seeing a pattern that's not there? might it be your opinions that are flawed? or maybe your communication skills or style are left wanting? i don't know but those things are certainly possibilities too.
you didn't actually make an argument about what you think the "similar views" are, how the mechanism works, who's involved, or anything worthy of consideration and discussion.
might that be representative of the problem right there?
They can be good ideas, bad ideas, horrendous ideas... Regardless, if SV thinks its good, then it passes muster here.
I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct. They just challenge the precepts that are held holy in the 'Valley.
You may not be the most unbiased judge of that.
That is the distribution of everyone who hit the site last month at all, regardless of how much they used it. If we weight the numbers by the number of days they used HN, then US has 44%, Europe 33%, Can/Aus/NZ 8%, India 3%, China 2%. And Silicon Valley is 8%. That's surprisingly low, given how many people assume that HN == SV.
Rudeness and pointless ramblings get downvoted quickly, which is likely a model learned quickly by newcomers. Arguing an unpopular view is unlikely to get beaten hard -- I do not recall ever getting more than -3 or so on a comment (but maybe I am just a conformist).
(That said, I almost never downvote.)
I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.
I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.
If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.
> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But go ahead, be mad about it.
Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.
It's the same all over social media "circles", which is why I just gave up on it all, it's more like show off media. If you participate, share your actual thoughts without trying to fit in.. Or just take full on advantage of the circus. Cue the downvotes.
If you want a community that is hard to get started in look at StackExchange. You can't even comment until you've gotten quite a few points.
One reason for me to stay here is the diversity (and civility) of the comments, I don't think it's too bad. Another favourite read of mine is Arstechnica, but the comments there don't reach the quality of the comments on HN, imho.
Often I feel it's not worth replying to obviously wrong stuff because it'll just get downvoted so low that nobody's likely to see my eloquent and carefully-worded rebuttal anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
It seemed to take forever, and I was counting the numbers when I was at like 490, but now the downvote buttons are there, I find it's very rare that I get a chance to wield them in anger.
Mostly though, the internet is short on places like HN, and long on places to endlessly discuss politics, usually in a very predictable circle. I don’t believe that much good comes from anonymous text exchanges online where politics are concerned.
I strongly believe this, and I think the evidence is the content of threads where the mods gave people a chance. The volume, in both senses of the word, becomes extreme, with hundreds of angry nested comments.
Not so political threads! Everybody is on equal footing in them. There's no "people with expertise relating their experience" and "people asking questions" and the rest of us reading with interest. Rather, everyone's broadcasting.
That's not inherently bad, I don't think; there are lots of other kinds of threads that are like that and they seem to be fine (for the most part) for HN's culture.
But politics is a particularly toxic combination of broad-spectrum and polarizing. There are never voices of reason or experience, the most active participants are often on a hair trigger, and participation is amplified because everyone's got an opinion.
Damn there goes our shot to hear what serious crypto people are really saying about Google TPUs.
:P
* It's free
* People are already signed up for it
* It brings exposure to your github profile
Seriously, dead links to github.{com, io} are super-rare IME.
[0] https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy/
I currently have 2 repos with ~1k+ stars, and both of them are not code-related. The rest of the repos (most of which have code) receive <50 stars, so it's a good way to receive cool reputation within GitHub.
And finally, managing these ain't an easy task as well. The level of knowledge necessary to contribute to them is "knows a tiny bit of Git and the topic involved". Want to contribute to a popular repo? Contribute to a non-code repo just to see the process.
Wasn't certain whether this is a consistency issue or whether posting through a VPN isn't possible.
Anyone know why? May be good to add it to the document.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (Last item)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
edit: under 2 weeks old
> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which--although not an explicit benefit--does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
Submitters' names aren't highlighted in any way.
Interesting nonetheless.
There does seem to be some attempts to game HN lately that I don't remember in the past - like a recent tendency of some new accounts to ask dozens upon dozens of questions. I can only assume there's some karma gaming behind that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Thanks for the explanation!
I've noticed that I earned 1 karma for 1 upvote for the first few upvotes, and also 1 karma for 1 upvote when the article's been off the front page for days but people are still reading and occasionally upvoting it. But in between it's definitely not a 1:1 - maybe more like 10:1 or even less.
It feels like there are probably some really interesting rules involved :)
I always wondered if maybe it keeps track of who has voted on your submissions in the past, and only gives you karma if the voter hasn't voted on you before.
We're always happy to take the rate limit off if people give us reason to believe that they want to use HN as intended and will abide by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html in the future.
For me, "Shadowbanning" or "hellbanning" means that the post of the user/site are [dead] but the systems lies to the user and to nim/her show the post as alive. And the only way to notice is to logout or get another computer and check the post from there.
Killing the post form an user or site automatically, and showing to the user that the posts are [dead] is not shadowbanning. I call it "autokilling" but I'm not sure that it is he official name.
Almost all the recent case/discussions of similar cases were simply autokilling. In the initial times of HN it was more common to have hellbanned users, but it's very rare now. Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he said that they were considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use autokilling. I'm not sure if they finally made that change.
Nope, that change has not been made. I'm hellbanned.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
You got several warnings, and then you were told you were banned.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938232
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14960370
EDIT: just for clarity: I'm not a mod.
[EDIT: Someone vouched your comment, so I see it now as a normal comment. I was going to vouch it after the experiment :( .]
Just to be 100% sure that we are using the same definitions: Can you post a screenshot in imgur of your sibling comment, so we can see how it looks to you?
For comparison: I see https://imgur.com/a/1Z3dF
PS: Please don't downvote the GP comment, so we can have a nice conversation. Try to keep it black, or at least dark grey.
According to the The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ [1] this is only partly correct, but I don‘t feel like testing it.
[1]
> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?
> HN is ‘subtle’ in that not everything always is what it seems. Votes are not always counted and those votes that are counted are not always displayed. So even though your vote count for that comment shows as -4, in actual fact it may be much lower. Take your lumps, analyze why you got those downvotes and if you feel they were justified then try to do better in the future. A side effect of the votes still being counted past -4 seems to be that people tend to delete their comments with a much higher frequency than in the past to cap the damage to their karma.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq#badcomment
>> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?
[1]: https://canny.io