Reply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
It mostly does the opposite because it means getting replies quickly tapers off. After a few days the odds of keeping up a discussion are low, and older discussions are baiscally locked out forever.
Look at any post that gets a significant number of comments and then scroll to pick out the deepest threads. When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. When the depth comes from a small number of people going back-and-forth, it’s usually not very interesting.
Adding more of the latter type would make HN worse and that’s what you would get more of if they made HN work more like Reddit.
> Reducing back-and-forth discussions is a feature.
So your opinion is that discussions are bad.
> When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high.
That's not a discussion that’s a lot if people broadcasting into the void (it’s also not true, if lots of people are replying to the same comment they’re usually adding identical or strongly overlapping information on a relatively basic subject).
Honestly it's hilarious how much attention this is getting. It's a link that took me several years to find. It's the second link on the page. And a bunch of IT pros are delighted to find it!
Ux is hard. Personally, I had clicked the "comments" link and it was not what I was looking for, and then it took a moment of curiosity several years later to try again. I think the moral of the story is, if you want something to be discoverable, don't hide it behind a less obvious naming choice when the more obvious looking choice is used nearby. But who knows.
I use Glider (from F-Droid) on mobile for browsing HN. On desktop, I use the normal website. Thus, the link is useful for me when on desktop. It's not a thing in Glider.
you are pretty much guaranteed not to see replieds to older comments.
I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere. In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion. I don't see any value in making it easier to sustain that.
Maybe a way then to flag a comment to watch for a response? Sometimes I ask a question I'd love answered, or if someone else responds to a conversation I think is important - I'd be happy if they eventually replied.
You could also do some sort of “Tell HN: this is why I moved from tech to law and back” post, although it does seem like the site penalizes those sort of posts so it might not be very visible either.
> I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere.
That tends to happen even when there are notifications in my experience - it only takes one participant to stop.
> In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion.
As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none. I'm also not looking for extended discussion, just being able to see if someone has something to add to an old comment of mine.
> As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none.
I’ve certainly felt that was happening here a few times. I’m glad the “threads” list is so short, because I’m not immune to the siren call of https://xkcd.com/386 even though my better self wishes I were.
Im not sure i agree with that. old forums used to have interesting threads that would go on for a while and in depth. One thing I dont like about this, idk what this is called, new generation of message board?, is that past 3 or 4 comments deep everything dies and past like 12 hours commenting dies. it actually feels a lot more shallow
I suspect that may be a result of those boards being more specifically focused on a particular topic. But, that's just a hunch, not something I can prove.
This is one of my own frustrations with HN. The issue isn't quite as bad as on other discussion sites, but generally, conversations ... fade quickly. I'd like to see some kind of mechanism which works against this tendency.
That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.
Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:
- Notifications were for specific discussions.
- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.
- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.
- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.
- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.
- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.
- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.
It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.
A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.
I agree about the problem of quality conversations fading too quickly.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
I meant "conversations" and not posts. Kinda like https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments but highlight the ones that have the best overall cluster of comments in a continuous thread
I’ve replied to multiple days old comments and been replied to in turn.
I think when you do this you’re not performing for an audience but responding to another person or couple of people individually. The fact not many people are going to see it should be irrelevant - is a piece of art (or a notebook doodle) not worth doing because it has an audience of one?
I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was, I want to continue an old comment thread, but then I wonder if its worth doing since the other party probably isn't going to respond or even know that I replied.
I use the Threads link to see recent conversations. Replies can only come in for two weeks (IIRC), and 99% of replies happen within 24 hours, in my experience.
I'm less curious about late replies than I am about late upvotes. Sometimes karma ticks upward and I can't figure out what people liked. It'd be nice to be able to figure this out — does anyone know if any of the browser plugins offer such a functionality?
As an ccasional replier, that's a plus for me.
If I am interested in the past, I can go look (and I have done), and then reply.
Look forward to reading your reply....perhaps in a couple of months.
If I actually still need an answer to the question, I'll be checking my threads. Otherwise, I'd prefer not to be interrupted by someone's nitpicking a point I made about wastewater management three days ago or something; it's unnecessary stress. I find reddit's reply notifications to be a stressful anti-feature, and they're a primary reason that reddit is IP-blocked on my work laptop while HN is not.
An edge case like that isn't really the point. I mean, what percentage of "responses to old comments" fall into that bucket? My guess is that it's a very small percentage. Weighed against the "propagating / encouraging low-value flame wars" possibility, I absolutely consider the lack of such notifications to a Good Thing.
Especially considering somebody who's particularly motivated to find delayed answers to specific questions can always bookmark the particular comment and check it manually, or just occasionally scroll-back through the "threads" page or whatever. If they're not motivated enough to do that, then maybe the discussion wasn't that important to begin with.
Since "low-value flame wars" are already explicitly against the community guidelines, using that as the argument against notifications is like banning knives because they are potential murder weapons. And then having people defend that decision as a "good thing" that we can't cut vegetables.
You can already flag inappropriate content. We don't have to fear it.
Because conversations have lifespans. If I want to see said answer I can visit my profile and check. But I don't want the website constantly pestering me "someone responded to that thing you said a week ago!"
If I'm still curious of the answer a few days later I can check my profile a few days later
Why not make subscribing to a thread manual? You can subscribe to a thread of you think it is important. The subscription will last for 3-4 days or maybe a week. Someone will probably make a client that automatically subscribes you to your comments. But that will probably be a vanishingly small number of users. And flame wars would require both sides of the war to have their subscription on. The notifications themselves can be delayed too, so you can either manually follow it to stay fully up to date or deal with a few minutes or hours of delays.
Basically too inconvenient for a troll, but usable for most probably productive purposes.
Philosophers have been answering, or at least asking, the same questions for centuries and millennia. Technical and scientific questions can span years or decades. Political and social ones, decades and centuries.
No, it's not necessary to drag all of past discourse into each individual conversation. But neither is it reasonable to demand that all discussions die within a few hours, or a day at the outside, on the most perfect text-based global communications platform ever developed.
HN is not for directly communicating with single people. HN is for conversations with a large community. By commenting you can discover and/or influence the collective opinions of a large number of people. But that only works while the community's attention is on a discussion. Once the community moves on, there's no point in continuing a discussion here.
Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.
I wish it had something like a reply counter. I understand that creating and maintaining a notification system is not ideal. But if there is a counter for the number of replies I've gotten, and the number is larger than yesterday, then I know I have to check my comment history.
>Most are so subtle you wouldn't notice, and that's the point.
That can't be the point. There's no reason to introduce new features with the expectation that no one will ever notice or use them. Honestly, I think this forum cargo-cults its "minimalist" aesthetic far too much.
Obviously GP comment is saying you don't notice because the changes integrate so well into the existing system, not saying it's desirable for users to literally not notice the features. Otherwise the maintainers of HN are morons introducing features that no one will use.
Honestly... nitpicking comments with some dumb hyper-literal interpretation to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
> Obviously he's saying you don't notice because the changes integrate so well into the existing system.
Yes, to the point that people literally never notice them, which is (or should be considered) a problem. People still complain that HN lacks thread folding, even though the feature's been deployed for months. They don't see the links or never bother clicking them. People have been here for years and never noticed the site has a footer with links to other features.
That's not a feature of elegant integration, it's the fault of a purposely obscurant layout.
>Nitpicking comments to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
As is the assumption that all criticism of HN and its features is pointless nitpicking. Be less defensive.
I find them very useful. Whenever I've gone deep enough in a comment thread, I use the "parent" link to navigate to its root, and then I either collapse it or use the "next" link to read the next thread.
That parent one is super useful! Sometimes I go too deep in a discussion and realize I don't want to be there but can't find my way back easily by eyeballing the indent depth of the comments.
Sorry, missed your comment (haha). I don't recall it in full detail, but just remembered it look like a more modern UI with rounded corners and more padding. But still the same colors and functionalities.
I don't there's anything deliberately evil about it, it just happens to be effectively credentials harvesting - your auth cookie ends up on someone else's server. If they get compromised, all those HN accounts get compromised. Some people might be ok with that risk, if aware of it.
And Scott 'sctb' Bell. Don't think he comments as much though (at least, that I notice/in threads I read). (Oh or actually.. not active since 2019? Maybe you're right.)
I use hnreplies and quite like it. Another option is https://hnrss.github.io/#reply-feeds which gives you a feed of replies to a user (quite possibly yourself). The RSS option is of course more flexible because you can do whatever you want with the feed but I just read my RSS via email anyways so I just use hnreplies. IIUC it is also faster because it is polling for everyone quite frequently whereas individually polling the RSS feed I would probably do it at a lower interval.
I just click on the Threads to see what happened to something I wrote. I like that it is minimalist. I think it invites a more considered approach to what I write.
If I see my karma go up, that usually tells me that someone may have replied to something I said. Otherwise, I'm glad there's no alert for new replies. Conversation should be intentional. If I'm gonna be reading what someone said in response to me, I better already have enough motivation to check back and see if someone replied. When I don't check back, it's probably because I've got something more important to focus my attention on, and when I reply to someone I assume there's only a small chance they'll actually see it or reply back.
An extension to alert for replies to recent comments/submissions could be really easy to make, though. Just check `/threads?id=` every few minutes, compare the content of the previous page snapshot, and collect unique replies into a set.
I use a custom style sheet to hide my karma score (except on user profile page where I can go if I'm super curious). It's broke an unhealthy cycle I would subconsciously try to craft the perfect reply and get an addiction-inducing high from some big karma boost. Or big productivity-killing negative response.
Same here! Down to a T. I actually think the consideration to hide it came from the fact that everyone *else's* votes are hidden.
Incidentally, rather than a custom style sheet to hide the score, I have the entire top bar set to the karma color. This means I cannot see any of the actual links, and I have to really squint at the screen and hunt for them. Long-tail accessibility issues seem part of HN's brand, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, I can imagine that'd be good for many people. I get no thrill out of my karma. To me it's just a signal that something I said got attention and that I might want to quickly glance at my comments page in case there's an opportunity to engage with someone. The number itself is pretty meaningless and doesn't drive me to HN.
Me too, as of a month or so ago. So far it has been an improvement in my experience with HN. I wouldn't mind this being a toggle on the configuration screen.
I've had an ... interesting ... experience having made the Leaders page, and at one point suggested to dang that the feature might be removed.
I later heard from someone else who'd made the list and had somewhat similar responses to it.
HN reduces gamification in most respects, but not all, and even in the ones that remain the psychological impacts are interesting.
Yesterday's Black Bar for example. It's a subtle note, but I immediately knew what it meant (and that there would be inevitable questions about its meaning).
uBlock Origin filters are good for this. I also hide scores on Reddit and likes on Twitter in an attempt to not be influenced by what the mob thinks of comment X as well as the reason you mentioned. Unfortunately, it is one click away to un-hide so that second intent is mostly a failure, I end up checking anyway.
I have thought for some time that votes should come in two flavors. X if you make a comment, X/10 if you don't. Drive-by voting is of little value, and for abusive posts that need downvoting we have flagging to accomplish quick removal. Giving more weight to people who write a reply would encourage more conversation.
Of course, then there is a question of whether it would encourage more thoughtful comments or not, and I cannot answer that.
Allowing comments on a news aggregator doesn't mean it's a forum. The fact that HN purposely doesn't have much of the standard functionality of a forum should clue you in to the fact that it isn't one.
Collaborative filtering ... has issues. Most simple or single-factor fixes don't address the larger problems.
Much of the time, it tends to amplify interesting, and diminish nonproductive contributions. Spam, trolling, clickbait, and vacuous responses seem to get quickly downvoted and flagged on HN, which is good. Comment voting has numerous other connotations, however.
- Simple and short expressions tend to be disproportionately upvoted. They're easier to assess. Sometimes they are insightful, most often, only tapping a common sentiment.
- Controversial views tend to be downvoted. Sometimes controversy is flamebait, sometimes it isn't. There's not much distinction made between the two.
- Truth isn't a popularity contest. HN often, but not always, avoids this trap. True expertise in complex topics is rare, but at times necessary. An epistemic system should reflect this to a greater extent (though also be aware of misuses of such claims of expertise or authority).
- Topics strongly shaped by remunerative interests, ideological alignments, and tribal allegiances tend to perform most poorly under popular voting systems. There is a List of Things HN Cannot Discuss, and most of these seem to fall under this umbrella. Dang has voiced frustration with this on occasion, and I've had numerous email discussions with him about this ... more in the past than recently, I think. HN is guided to an extent by its moderator team. It is not directly steered by them. And the overall philosophy is broader than critics of the principle current political tribes seem to admit.
Collaborative filtering / the wisdom of crowds was all the rage in the late 1990s / early 2000s. Whilst it has some uses, there's been an overreliance on it.
I'm not entirely sure how best to patch the system, though I have some thoughts.
- Bounding ratings to a range rather than a simple sum seems more useful.
- Weighting individual's ratings by their own assigned mean similarly. If someone always hands out 5s (on a 1--5 scale), then those are re-scaled to a median score. Rescaling ranges similarly: someone offering only 1s and 5s might see that rescaled to 2 & 4 repectively.
- Factoring in expertise, or rescaling based on other factors such as truth, tone, conciseness, accuracy, references, etc., might help. Goodhart's law applies. But sometimes, what you want isn't the average opinion of the passengers, but a competent pilot.
Another point is that HN doesn't aim simply to be a place where truth is sought, but a conversational platform. Excessive strictness would probably diminish this.
The default is not, as explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But we turn them on whenever we see a case that isn't abusive. I don't know of a way to automate that.
One less dopamine hit that I can definitely live without. I also feel it gives people less incentive to craft replies for others and instead comment intelligently (yes, there are many replies which are not that, but I have faith the majority are)
Thanks for the tip, I just installed (via MELPA), added it as a secondary select method, and restarted Gnus. I can see the "groups" show up, but when I try to enter them I get
Its typical that everyone is defending the status quo. I doubt the reason it doesn't have that feature is because they are against it. I think it's just one of those things that adds a significant amount of complexity without a ton of benefit for most people. But I also think if they had several developers working on the site, they would have done it.
You can just scan down recent threads to see if there are replies.
But it's objectively a missing feature that could be somewhat useful.
There are people from different types of technical (or not!) backgrounds in all stages of their careers here. Your litmus test for who is correctly "on HN" seems unnecessarily exclusionary. I'm not sure if you meant it to come across like that.
It probably did come out wrong. The point is that those people need to have enough motivation to stay and put up with the difficulty of using the site. This might seem counter-intuitive, but I'm convinced the quality of discussions can be proportional to the user hostility of the website :). See Reddit, Facebook, etc.
An automated mechanism of getting instant replies would create flame wars much more easily too.
In your opinion not knowing when a response occurs improves "discussion quality"
Objectively, it reduces the opportunity for "discussion" - since you don't know someone is actually having a "discussion" (or trying to have one) with you
Whether that correlates to better or worse "quality" is highly debatable :)
From replies, it seems that most people prefer it that way, so I wouldn't say it is _highly_ debatable. It appears to be different from your preference and that's about all.
It is highly debatable - that some people happen to think letting conversations die because they can't find when someone is trying to engage them is ... certainly a different way of interacting with the world than is normal
I feel with HN. If you want specific behavior, program for it. When you're done, preferably don't publish the code, so that it can easily take the extra few requests that you're making ;-)
Long ago dang shared with me that reply chain length is proportional to the tendency to violate the HN comment guidelines. HN is passionate about high quality non-toxic discussion.
Like the other comments, I also feel that would be a bad idea. I have seen, like, two of my submissions hitting the home page. I then jump in and start commenting. It is all over the place and I would NOT want any notifications for that frenzy.
Most of the times, I just quietly read the comments and try to converse where it makes sense -- either I'm getting something or giving something in return.
There's nothing in the HN UI that I've yet noticed that shows when a comment is upvoted (or downvoted) beyond the fake internet points counter next to my username
Up/down votes are irrelevant, though, in this context: if I've asked a question, I shouldn't have to go hunting to find out if people replied (or if they've asked something back, etc)
I don't write so many comments so I can always keep track of everything. Also, HN creates contextual threads for comments, the ones involving you, and I haven't had any bad UX to report so far. The system in its current form works.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadReply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
Look at any post that gets a significant number of comments and then scroll to pick out the deepest threads. When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. When the depth comes from a small number of people going back-and-forth, it’s usually not very interesting.
Adding more of the latter type would make HN worse and that’s what you would get more of if they made HN work more like Reddit.
So your opinion is that discussions are bad.
> When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high.
That's not a discussion that’s a lot if people broadcasting into the void (it’s also not true, if lots of people are replying to the same comment they’re usually adding identical or strongly overlapping information on a relatively basic subject).
Ux is hard. Personally, I had clicked the "comments" link and it was not what I was looking for, and then it took a moment of curiosity several years later to try again. I think the moral of the story is, if you want something to be discoverable, don't hide it behind a less obvious naming choice when the more obvious looking choice is used nearby. But who knows.
Threads are part of the HN home page header when logged in.
How does your browsers disable this link? Does it disable other header links as well?
I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere. In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion. I don't see any value in making it easier to sustain that.
Like, I "owe" people a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30310575#30310784
I am trying to put some degree of effort into the answer, but it feels like they might not even see my responses to their comments.
They thought it'd make a good blog post too, so you can repurpose it for that?
But I have been thinking about making one, maybe this can kick it off. Would have to be anonymous until I successfully make it back into tech.
That tends to happen even when there are notifications in my experience - it only takes one participant to stop.
> In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion.
As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none. I'm also not looking for extended discussion, just being able to see if someone has something to add to an old comment of mine.
I’ve certainly felt that was happening here a few times. I’m glad the “threads” list is so short, because I’m not immune to the siren call of https://xkcd.com/386 even though my better self wishes I were.
I'm saying notifications would exacerbate those situations, which is why it's good that HN doesn't have that facility.
In my experience, the "hot takes" are often low quality comments. Quality comments take time and thought, and HN isn't conducive for that.
That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.
Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:
- Notifications were for specific discussions.
- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.
- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.
- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.
- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.
- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.
- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.
It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.
A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
That said, it still won't highlight conversations which have come back to life.
I'm less curious about late replies than I am about late upvotes. Sometimes karma ticks upward and I can't figure out what people liked. It'd be nice to be able to figure this out — does anyone know if any of the browser plugins offer such a functionality?
If I reply to a post or comment that's over several days old there's almost no chance the author will ever see it.
That is a Good Thing.
If you ask a question, and I happen to see it a couple days later and can answer it, why would you not want to see said answer?
Especially considering somebody who's particularly motivated to find delayed answers to specific questions can always bookmark the particular comment and check it manually, or just occasionally scroll-back through the "threads" page or whatever. If they're not motivated enough to do that, then maybe the discussion wasn't that important to begin with.
This is the normal case for commenting :: if someone replies, it shouldn't be difficult to find that out
You can already flag inappropriate content. We don't have to fear it.
If I'm still curious of the answer a few days later I can check my profile a few days later
Basically too inconvenient for a troll, but usable for most probably productive purposes.
Philosophers have been answering, or at least asking, the same questions for centuries and millennia. Technical and scientific questions can span years or decades. Political and social ones, decades and centuries.
No, it's not necessary to drag all of past discourse into each individual conversation. But neither is it reasonable to demand that all discussions die within a few hours, or a day at the outside, on the most perfect text-based global communications platform ever developed.
Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.
Some in recent memory I can think of:
* prev/next/parent links
* Show HN can now have both a text body and a link (they used to only have a link and you had to submit a reply with your explanation)
That can't be the point. There's no reason to introduce new features with the expectation that no one will ever notice or use them. Honestly, I think this forum cargo-cults its "minimalist" aesthetic far too much.
Honestly... nitpicking comments with some dumb hyper-literal interpretation to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
Yes, to the point that people literally never notice them, which is (or should be considered) a problem. People still complain that HN lacks thread folding, even though the feature's been deployed for months. They don't see the links or never bother clicking them. People have been here for years and never noticed the site has a footer with links to other features.
That's not a feature of elegant integration, it's the fault of a purposely obscurant layout.
>Nitpicking comments to find something tiny and pointless to disagree about is an aspect of HN I could do without.
As is the assumption that all criticism of HN and its features is pointless nitpicking. Be less defensive.
how many people complain versus how many complained before the feature was introduced? That some people don't notice a change means not so much.
I certainly notice every time I fat finger these useless links.
That parent one is super useful! Sometimes I go too deep in a discussion and realize I don't want to be there but can't find my way back easily by eyeballing the indent depth of the comments.
Thanks for the lesson!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367395
makes me think of this (possibly too glamorous) video of how I imagine HN moderation goes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY4cVhXxW64
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27555072
An extension to alert for replies to recent comments/submissions could be really easy to make, though. Just check `/threads?id=` every few minutes, compare the content of the previous page snapshot, and collect unique replies into a set.
Incidentally, rather than a custom style sheet to hide the score, I have the entire top bar set to the karma color. This means I cannot see any of the actual links, and I have to really squint at the screen and hunt for them. Long-tail accessibility issues seem part of HN's brand, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess I should learn how to build that custom style sheet myself. Unless you can share yours here? ;-)
I later heard from someone else who'd made the list and had somewhat similar responses to it.
HN reduces gamification in most respects, but not all, and even in the ones that remain the psychological impacts are interesting.
Yesterday's Black Bar for example. It's a subtle note, but I immediately knew what it meant (and that there would be inevitable questions about its meaning).
Of course, then there is a question of whether it would encourage more thoughtful comments or not, and I cannot answer that.
That said, I'm not asking for notifications on upvotes (like Stack Overflow does)
I'm asking for the basic functionality of all internet fora I've interacted with for the last close to 30 years that tell you if you have any replies
forum, noun: An Internet message board where users can post messages regarding one or more topics of discussion.
HN is clearly a forum.
Much of the time, it tends to amplify interesting, and diminish nonproductive contributions. Spam, trolling, clickbait, and vacuous responses seem to get quickly downvoted and flagged on HN, which is good. Comment voting has numerous other connotations, however.
- Simple and short expressions tend to be disproportionately upvoted. They're easier to assess. Sometimes they are insightful, most often, only tapping a common sentiment.
- Controversial views tend to be downvoted. Sometimes controversy is flamebait, sometimes it isn't. There's not much distinction made between the two.
- Truth isn't a popularity contest. HN often, but not always, avoids this trap. True expertise in complex topics is rare, but at times necessary. An epistemic system should reflect this to a greater extent (though also be aware of misuses of such claims of expertise or authority).
- Topics strongly shaped by remunerative interests, ideological alignments, and tribal allegiances tend to perform most poorly under popular voting systems. There is a List of Things HN Cannot Discuss, and most of these seem to fall under this umbrella. Dang has voiced frustration with this on occasion, and I've had numerous email discussions with him about this ... more in the past than recently, I think. HN is guided to an extent by its moderator team. It is not directly steered by them. And the overall philosophy is broader than critics of the principle current political tribes seem to admit.
Collaborative filtering / the wisdom of crowds was all the rage in the late 1990s / early 2000s. Whilst it has some uses, there's been an overreliance on it.
I'm not entirely sure how best to patch the system, though I have some thoughts.
- Bounding ratings to a range rather than a simple sum seems more useful.
- Weighting individual's ratings by their own assigned mean similarly. If someone always hands out 5s (on a 1--5 scale), then those are re-scaled to a median score. Rescaling ranges similarly: someone offering only 1s and 5s might see that rescaled to 2 & 4 repectively.
- Factoring in expertise, or rescaling based on other factors such as truth, tone, conciseness, accuracy, references, etc., might help. Goodhart's law applies. But sometimes, what you want isn't the average opinion of the passengers, but a competent pilot.
Another point is that HN doesn't aim simply to be a place where truth is sought, but a conversational platform. Excessive strictness would probably diminish this.
Same, in my profile I ask to upvote if replying to start a discussion. Simple and does the job of catching my attention.
I agree that it would be nice for HN to manage this directly.
Works great
Example of an HN text submission where links are clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201
> Symbol’s value as variable is void: t1
Open an issue at https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews ?
You can just scan down recent threads to see if there are replies.
But it's objectively a missing feature that could be somewhat useful.
Here is your latest reply RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/replies?id=warrenm
An automated mechanism of getting instant replies would create flame wars much more easily too.
no thanks :)
Objectively, it reduces the opportunity for "discussion" - since you don't know someone is actually having a "discussion" (or trying to have one) with you
Whether that correlates to better or worse "quality" is highly debatable :)
It is highly debatable - that some people happen to think letting conversations die because they can't find when someone is trying to engage them is ... certainly a different way of interacting with the world than is normal
They recently tweeted
> In the last 30 days, Hacker News users sent out 337,875 comments, responding to 29,258 users.
https://twitter.com/magicbell_io/status/1488441548857561095
Edit: more information in the HN announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590720
Most of the times, I just quietly read the comments and try to converse where it makes sense -- either I'm getting something or giving something in return.
Up/down votes are irrelevant, though, in this context: if I've asked a question, I shouldn't have to go hunting to find out if people replied (or if they've asked something back, etc)