Most of its usage is on platforms where engagement is how they make money. Any kind of engagement. Considering flamewars, nitpicking and arguments are goldmines that capture user attention, it's in the platform's best interest to draw attention to threads via notifications.
Is this the right thing for HN? I don't know. But they've decided it's worth the trade off, I think.
And most forums break down into toxic fights since the dawn of time. What’s the problem with his view?
On a forum it really is much better when you give your 2c and then forget about the thread than hovering over it intercepting every new utterance. Time to close the browser tab.
> Dang thinks this basic feature that has existed in forums since the dawn of time promotes toxicity.
It lowers the barrier to entry, coddling and inevitably inviting the lazy, thus nudging the needle towards the lowest common denominator, which is ill-advised.
If there were a way to add votes in other dimensions, this would be less of an issue. You could then weight a matrix to get a view of things tailored to your preferences without using 3rd party tools.
Examples of multi-dimensional voting:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603656085390270464
My plane is not trackable without using non-public data (twitter.com/elonmusk)
Up in Elon Musk, Twitter, ADSB, Politics
Down in Truth
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999983
The Suppressed Electrodynamics of Ampère-Gauss-Weber (2001) (21sci-tech.com)
Up in Physics, Fringe Science, Rant, Rabbit Hole
Down in Truth
There are lots of things that get lost when you are forced into a single dimension.
There is a HUGE gain, and that's the fact that it forces the community to agree on what an upvote or downvote means, at least it should.
It has often been unclear to me why things get voted the way they do. Splitting votes into many dimensions might fix that.
I agree; I would prefer to get rid of the voting entirely if it is limited to one dimension. If votes are available for many dimensions, then the votes might be good and useful; as they are, I do not like them and do not use them, and would rather have an option to use chronological display order. (If you can download the file on your computer and run your own SQL queries, then you can also make up your own criteria however you want to do. However, in such a case, it should need to support incremental updates.)
20 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadthe fact that something was used for a long time means only that it was used for a long time, and everything else is up for interpretation.
Is this the right thing for HN? I don't know. But they've decided it's worth the trade off, I think.
On a forum it really is much better when you give your 2c and then forget about the thread than hovering over it intercepting every new utterance. Time to close the browser tab.
It lowers the barrier to entry, coddling and inevitably inviting the lazy, thus nudging the needle towards the lowest common denominator, which is ill-advised.
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Examples of multi-dimensional voting:
There are lots of things that get lost when you are forced into a single dimension.There is a HUGE gain, and that's the fact that it forces the community to agree on what an upvote or downvote means, at least it should.
It has often been unclear to me why things get voted the way they do. Splitting votes into many dimensions might fix that.