Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

HN is where I follow the tech news. For discussions, if we take civility as politeness and elaboration of one's points, HN is quite good. But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good. Here there are some certain and strong biases and dogmas, and the moderation is oligarchic. I've learnt to not post on political stuff and philosophical questions about tech, as all you get is downvotes, flags, thread-detaching and whatnot. I believe any politics post is off-topic here, and for philosophical questions on tech, if the tech is liked, sceptics are lapidated.

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Your comment under the thread I link below is a case in point. You make a reasonable counter argument, but it still got greyed out. In this case, Upton Sinclair best explains why: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330325

> But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good.

I agree. But how could it be made better?

As I suggest in another comment, Hacker News should be hackable. The only way to find a better solution is with a lot of experimentation. But because you need a large userbase to do a proper experiment, we've been limited to a dozen or so experiments to-date (HN, reddit, slashdot, etc).

Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. Look at the experimentaion that the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.

If making votes publically visible in the API is a no-go, there are other options, such as Y-combinator accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and produce alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.

By fixing the problems that I cite in the sentence after the one you quote. I doubt that it is possible though.

But those are the problems and I'm looking for solutions. What could change on the HN site or in the rules for its community to fix these problems?

I'm not sure anything can be done, which is why I ask.

We would need tools to vote negative content to be categorized as dissonant, circular reasoning, or speaking for other's feelings/blaming.

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