I'm glad you spent your time making an extension so I can block people on this superficial website. Are you going to pitch it to investors? If it doesn't work are you going to publish an article name: "Here's how not to start a startup."
- mocking the stupid shit that is sold to VCs here (and the stupid shit VCs invest in)
- mocking the "holier than thou" attitude that people often have about HN/community/content
- mocking the need to have an extension to prevent yourself from reading something from someone you don't like
- mocking how worked up people get over this "superficial website"
I wouldn't want to knock the dev, I think that's tacky. I find the usefulness of the extension to be something of a reflection on the person who needs to use it. Anyway, I liked the bits of the comment that are self-mocking of HN, not the extension.
I've been working on the same thing for firefox as a userscript. It's certainly more equitable then hellbanning, and inane threads about how subject x is turning hn into reddit.
I wouldn't say it's a big issue, per se. Rather, I'm tired of seeing comments denigrating other comments. If you don't like what people have to say, better to ignore them silently than respond antagonistically.
I find it pretty easy to ignore people here and I don't tend to remember who makes comments on my comments. But I can certainly see how blocking someone would help cut down the flame wars.
It'd be amazing if it had a time limit. "Block Bob for 2 hours" or 2 days. That would give me time to calm down and respond to Bob in a sensible way, or to ignore Bob. Other people have discipline.
I fear now we'll be having a lot more inflammatory, useless, space-filling remarks like "I can't see what he just said I have him on ignore".
My philosophy is to simply ignore trolls without any extension (since fortunately there aren't many on this site, it's not hard), so I'm not really sure if this extension is so necessary.
I fully support this addon, I think it's the best way to do blocking, on the client. That said, I am not looking forward to comments that consist of nothing more than "blocked" "added to killfile" "plonk" etc. These are nothing more than implied calls for others to block someone. It encourages groupthink imo.
Should I just peak at their posts individually in case each one might have useful content as well?
I like the Hyde Park approach, see a crazy dude? Keep on walking, and sometimes, as you walk by, you will hear something enchanting and then you have a happy hour in front of you.
That's why I have showdead on, and frankly I almost never regret it.
User blocking doesn't appeal to me, I just ignore and move on. But maybe I'm just not that sensitive.
The only HN extension that has withstood the test of time for me is a thread folding one, https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027. I imagine there are other variants. It let's you quickly ignore those giant flame-war or off-topic threads.
Nice tip. It looks like it doesn't persist which comments you have closed. Might be worth a few minutes to get that working, assuming that Chrome extensions let you use local storage or similar.
Not only does it give you collapsable comments, but it also ads the ability to mark comments and submissions as "read," so you can easily see what's new.
awesome. so how about the ability to add regexps(?) so that we filter people based on content? mentioning no names, but some users are great when they're talking about technical issues, but not so great on the social / political side...
Interesting, Fark has this built-in and it is sometimes really useful, but it does cause problems in some threads.
I've been thinking about something that would allow you take notes about other users and have those notes pop up when you hover over their name[1]. It is sometimes hard to remember who is who. It would probably be helpful to have a way to save comments that you thought were pretty cool.
1) I also thought this would be a great Google Glass app for older users (note about person or place appears when seen / there), but without facial recognition it wouldn't work.
ISTR once reading about a HN-specific tool like that. (The URL above points to a tool that returns results for Reddit and Twitter as well as HN.) Anyone know of anything like that?
One solution would be to save the HN bookmarklet, and click that to submit the story to HN. If it's already been submitted, you'll be directed to the existing discussion. If not, you can start the discussion.
Yep, until a strong enough AI exists to discern the useful information out of the flaming.
The problem with people who you'd want to block is that a good amount of the time they say something that gets you to think things through in a different light. It sucks to get flamed, but boy is it a good tool to force a reassessment of what you've said. Sometimes you realize you were dead right, and sometimes you realize the guy you want to block has a good point.
Even before I looked up your profile information, I knew that you were over 35, because "weenie" hasn't really been a popular pejorative in a long time.
You were around in the Usenet days (or at least are old enough to have been), haven't you heard of kill files?
For those of you wondering why someone might use something like this, I had someone who made a fake account to follow me around on HN and insult me for a while. They got shadowbanned, but I like to keep showdead on, because it's interesting, so I still had to read it.
Woulda been nice to be able to just block them, but luckily with no responses they moved on to twitter (!) to harass me instead.
Reminds me of the a scene from the '50 first dates' movie where Adam Sandler asked Alexa a question, and replied, "Then again, there are always ways around such things, for example, if I promised a woman's father I would not see her, I would simply shut my eyes while she serviced my manhood.".
Those people are real people not bots and spammers, blocking them are simply an absurd way to do it, or 'shutting your eyes to get around with it'. A quick solution, but you are not solving the root of the problem.
39 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] thread- mocking the stupid shit that is sold to VCs here (and the stupid shit VCs invest in)
- mocking the "holier than thou" attitude that people often have about HN/community/content
- mocking the need to have an extension to prevent yourself from reading something from someone you don't like
- mocking how worked up people get over this "superficial website"
I wouldn't want to knock the dev, I think that's tacky. I find the usefulness of the extension to be something of a reflection on the person who needs to use it. Anyway, I liked the bits of the comment that are self-mocking of HN, not the extension.
an example, i would block you just because you're using "per se" :)
It'd be amazing if it had a time limit. "Block Bob for 2 hours" or 2 days. That would give me time to calm down and respond to Bob in a sensible way, or to ignore Bob. Other people have discipline.
My philosophy is to simply ignore trolls without any extension (since fortunately there aren't many on this site, it's not hard), so I'm not really sure if this extension is so necessary.
That's why I have showdead on, and frankly I almost never regret it.
Also, chances are anyone who uses it is going to get bored with it in a week and ignore it anyway.
The only HN extension that has withstood the test of time for me is a thread folding one, https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027. I imagine there are other variants. It let's you quickly ignore those giant flame-war or off-topic threads.
Not only does it give you collapsable comments, but it also ads the ability to mark comments and submissions as "read," so you can easily see what's new.
also, have you consider trying to unify user ids across websites? http://www.acooke.org/cute/Automatemy0.html
oh - and another feature (now i open the site on my laptop) - sharing across computers!
I've been thinking about something that would allow you take notes about other users and have those notes pop up when you hover over their name[1]. It is sometimes hard to remember who is who. It would probably be helpful to have a way to save comments that you thought were pretty cool.
1) I also thought this would be a great Google Glass app for older users (note about person or place appears when seen / there), but without facial recognition it wouldn't work.
[edit: with -> without]
On Reddit, you can do this via the Reddit Enhancement Suite.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement...
Now that I think about HN extensions, I could really use something that correlates articles and HN discussions in both directions.
More than once I've read something sourced elsewhere and ended up doing a site:news.ycombinator.com search to look find discussion for the same.
Why?
Only a true weenie would feel the need to block someone on a global scale.
More reasonable users simply ignore what they don't wish to read.
The problem with people who you'd want to block is that a good amount of the time they say something that gets you to think things through in a different light. It sucks to get flamed, but boy is it a good tool to force a reassessment of what you've said. Sometimes you realize you were dead right, and sometimes you realize the guy you want to block has a good point.
You were around in the Usenet days (or at least are old enough to have been), haven't you heard of kill files?
Woulda been nice to be able to just block them, but luckily with no responses they moved on to twitter (!) to harass me instead.
Those people are real people not bots and spammers, blocking them are simply an absurd way to do it, or 'shutting your eyes to get around with it'. A quick solution, but you are not solving the root of the problem.