Quiet Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Quiet Hacker News

quiethn.com

69 pointsjoelclaudio60 comments

Nice idea, but I must admit though, that I often look at the comments first to ascertain the quality of the article posted. If I see civil, structured discussion, then I am more likely to visit the link afterwards.

However, if I see off topic rants and arguments, then I tend to dismiss the article as an opinion or puff piece.

Generally like that the comments on here tend to stay on topic and thoughtful, although I am disappointed that some of my posts on here lately, which have merely been questions about aspects of the article, have been downvoted. Hope HN doesn't turn into another StackOverflow imitating over-moderated "that doesn't belong here" type site.

This is exactly my behaviour. I end up with a bunch of tabs and ctrl-w/ctrl-tab through them with a small set of simple heuristics, the primary being quality of the first few comments.

Yeah I can understand the motivation for creating this. When I first started browsing HN, I couldn't believe how supplemental, civil and noiseless the comments were. However, after several years, I've started to jump straight to the comments, especially when I have a vague clue about what the article is about. That's when I don't feel the incentive to actually read and create my own opinions. I've also started to view HN as more entertainment than education because of the way I consume it, instead of the how I used to believe speeding over comments was informative. I've since accepted that it is entertainment veiled as education. I still learn more here than any other news source I follow.

> I've since accepted that it is entertainment veiled as education.

Hacker News is neither entertainment nor education. It's just other people having conversations about a common topic of interest.

I would love to agree that comments on HN can be substantive and civil, but the downvote power afforeded to 'elite' users is horrible, leaving a comment which is perhaps a little challenging to a charged view or commonly held belief is often simply downvoted without explanation, usually once but sometimes up to thrice. Downvoting on HN serves the ingenious function of signalling to others "This comment isn't worth reading", by making is appear gray, similar to the site's background. It is only one step above Reddit in which comments are hidden completely (though that appears to happen here too sometimes).

Edit: Good to know the system works?

Reminds me of Churchill's quip on democracy: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

HN users will definitely downvote challenges to their deeply-held convictions, but so will any other community, and almost always more vigorously. I say this as the proud recipient of many such downvotes. :)

Some forums don't have downvotes at all, and I find that controversial discussion flourishes there. The moderators also are much more laid back than in HN; they enforce rules like spam and illegal content rather than the task the HN mods have tasked themselves with: preventing flamewar, even when good discussion and education results from it, i.e they see themselves as parents, acting in a preventative measure, we are the children. To further the analogy, there is literally an account flag that the HN mods can put onto your account[0] which puts you into a 'timeout', like sitting in the corner wearing the dunce hat.

This was done to me, such that if I post too quickly, I am banned from posting except for twice every two hours for a while. This, I believe, will stick with my account for as long as I have it - because I apparently post too fast, engage with too many people etc.

One gets the message: "You are posting too fast. Please slow down." Mother and father dang and sctb have told me off. I must therefore go to bed early.

I think it's also a fabulous bit of trickery pulled here - there aren't "rules" for HN, there are "guidelines"; this leads you to believe it is laid back, and being guidelines, they are not enforced. How wrongly one is misled! They are rules in evey sense of the word, as rules are differed from guidelines only in their enforcement. I know many places which say they have rules and enforce them less than HN enforces its "guidelines".

Slavoj Zizek made a point here I think is relevant - when the father tells his son "Visit your grandmother, for if you don't then I will punish you", the son is much more likely to rebel, to complain - he reacts against authority. But another father may say "Please see your grandmother, she is very sick and old, she misses you" -- the circumstance is the same, but the mode of violence used is different, and agruably much more powerful. Few sons can resist this kind of force.

[0] https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L15...

But Hacker News just isn't that, and it doesn't want to be that. Sometimes you just have to do as the Romans do.

I'm sure HN wasn't a lot of things but has become them. For the majority (I'm guessing) of users, HN isn't a place you can downvote. Perhaps this experience of the website should be widened. I respect that I am on a different website, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't campaign for it to change.

I think it would be the best thing in the world if they got rid of user karma altogether, and either made it invisible or just applied it to stories. I can't imagine it happening any time soon, though.

But then again, shadowbanning being publicly reversible seemed like a major step in the right direction, and HN survived that, so I suppose never say never.

Indeed. I see this incomprehensible "You are posting too fast" - mostly when I try to submit a link, which I now no longer do. I also limit my visits to the comments section to once or twice a week because fuck random downvotes. I don't give a shit about imaginary internet points, but I give a shit about the feeling of hanging out with a crowd of smug, self-satisfied know-it-all hipster webdevs that are offended by different points of view that cannot be bothered to engage in meaningful discussion and the hyper-focus afforded to them by their adderal doesn't allow for more consideration besides clicking that fucking "down" button. (I apologise if I omitted to offend your specific stereotype, leave a comment and I will be sure to include it next time)

I know that the majority of HN visitors actually are not like that, but if you spend some time considering your point of view, write it down in coherent and mostly grammatically correct English, just for some lazy fucker to come along and click "down" it is they who contribute to the low signal to noise ratio and devalue the HN experience, not you, and that is the feeling you are left with - the visible results to your efforts.

I like how some other sites do this - no downvotes, only a "spam" flag, or a significant cost to downvotes (several karma points or something).

I have been here long enough to know that this will be grey before the database is backed up, and nothing will really change, so I fully applaud "Quiet Hackernews". I personally use an RSS feed. Just came here to check the submission would be flagged (it was - you are sure predictable, if nothing else, HN)

> Indeed. I see this incomprehensible "You are posting too fast"

Email the mods and ask them to turn it off.

I don't know how they make that decision. I guess if they've had to give someone many warnings about flamewar behaviour they may not want to turn it off. But I'm not a mod and I don't know how it works.

I don't know either, but I started seeing it after making a bunch of polite comments that challenged a popular political belief. They got a lot of downvotes, but they got a lot of upvotes too. I hope it was an algorithmic error (assuming that the goal of the algorithm isn't too punish polite but controversial conversation) and not petty moderation.

sigh. It gives me the down vote button, so I guess I am l33t.

I have noticed a sociological trend in Silicon Valley that equates meritocracy with "I outrank you so this discussion is a waste of time".

Your comment is maybe kinda whiny (i wants my leet downvotez), but nowhere near the level of trolling I would reserve for a downvote.

Also, you make a good point. For me, -1 means "this comment is in bad faith and should be censored", and I have noticed it being overused on my journey to l33t status.

For what it is worth, you too almost have the downvote button, and if I see too many upvotes without some gray flickering at first, I feel like I am pandering.

Anyway, keep fighting the good fight and enjoy my upvote. Also, remember this when you get the down vote button.

Absolute power, and all that. ;-)

I categorise myself as one of the 'elite' beacuse you only need 500 karma in order to downvote; it's not about the fact that I don't have downvoting ability (I do) but about the fact that downvotes do so much to discourage potentially controversial discussion. Thank you for upvoting.

I would likely never use this. I'm almost always here for the comments on the Show HN & Ask HNs as well as the Stories.

The comments on the Ask HN, Show HN are usually very informative, and have helped me a lot in my own side projects and entrepreneurial pursuits.

The comments on stories (for me) act as a curation tool, and based on what I read, I actually decide to either read the posted story, or pass on it.

W.r.t. stories posted, 9 /10 times, the comments are more insightful and offer unbiased commentary that the original stories -- many of which (on the internets, not HN) are click-baity / shock'n'awe type posts -- often lack.

Couldn't agree more. So many times I have searched if something was discussed in HN, just to read the comments.

You might be interested in a site I created, Day Old Hacker News (http://dayoldhackernews.com). This shows Hacker News as it was exactly one day ago, so the comments are always full.

Don't forget to read the about page: http://tomspeak.co.uk/posts/quiet-hacker-news

I somewhat agree. For example I try to avoid discussion with more than 100 comments. Usually the small discussions are more technical and have a better signal to noise ratio.

The collapsing feature is helpful, usually longer threads wane into an infinite stream of increasingly off-topic rants. But because it happens after when the page is loaded, it messes up the feature where when you navigate history it jumps to where you left, and with collapsed comments it scrolls past there.

Long threads are paginated too, now. I wonder how long that's been a thing.

Agreed, but I wish HN would experiment more with new technical tools to improve civility. For all its flaws, HN is still home to some of the very best discussion, and there's no reason to throw up one's hands. For instance, removing public vote counts seems to have been a net positive (although I mistakenly opposed it at the time). Even a small nudge to get people to vote based on constructiveness rather than agree/disagree could have a large impact.

I'm not certain there is a technical solution to incivility, or at least, I suspect that technical solutions can only go so far.

Incivility is a social problem, and that requires community involvement and reinforcement of accepted norms, not attempts at operant conditioning through the UI.

Lots of incivility problems have been ameliorated by technical solutions in the past (up/down votes, flags, bans, etc.). I don't know why one would downplay attacking the remaining issue this way, especially since technical solutions are vastly more replicable and scalable. Indeed, internet incivility is a problem caused by technical difference from real-life interactions.

Lots of incivility problems have been ameliorated by technical solutions in the past (up/down votes, flags, bans, etc.).

But the fact that flags and bans are necessary means the incivility still exists, so those problems haven't really been solved. And votes create as many problems as they solve, because with them you get people posting for votes, complaints about vote fairness, etc.

> I don't know why one would downplay attacking the remaining issue this way, especially since technical solutions are vastly more replicable and scalable.

I don't believe the effect of these solutions scale with them. If they were, Twitter would be a bastion of civil discourse, because there's little that HN does in that regard that Reddit doesn't also do at a much greater scale.

Huh? If you just define the problem as only "really solved" when you aren't fixing the symptoms with technical tools, then, yes, technical tools can't work by definition.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the problem hasn't been solved because the incivility still exists. I don't believe these tools do fix the symptoms, only hide them.

> Why did you use Go to write this? You know Go does not have generics, right?

This is going straight to my quote archive.

This contradicts the very essence of HN. Personally I come here mostly for the comments. Regardless of how good (or bad) a story is, the comments are what give it value because you get to read educated opinions that make remarks even the original article doesn't. HN is the only place in the web where you can see such quality in comments. Remove them and then everything becomes blunt.

Why does it seem easier to scan the links on the front page of reddit than on HN?

Often when I'm looking to upvote a link I just clicked on HN I will scan through all the links but miss the one I'm looking for. Is it the contrast and boldness of the titles that makes reddit better in this regard?

I think it's the background-colour.

Every other link on reddit has a slightly darker background, which helps separate the links. HN doesn't have this, preferring to simply number the links as its way of differentiating

If one was so inclined one could make a custom css for HN. everyone has there quarks and can not make everyone happy.

You are triggering my OCD. It's my problem though.

Everyone has their strangeness and charm. Not sure they have quarks but I'm quirky like that.

Reddit also has thumbnails, which in this use case serve as icons (whose purpose is to be faster to understand at a glance than text).

Only four articles are visible at a time on mobile, vs 6 on HN.

document.querySelectorAll("td.subtext").forEach( function(currentValue, currentIndex, listObj) { currentValue.hidden = true; } );

you can't use forEach with a NodeList ;)

JS's lack of macros strikes again.

Easiest solution is to wrap the NodeList with Array.from(...) first. Just wanted to point out how handy that function is.

Also if we're going to make a snazzy one-liner, let's cut out the unused arguments:

  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("td.subtext")).forEach(currentValue => { currentValue.hidden = true; });

or just inject (via extension or JS)

    .itemlist .subtext {display: none;}

Can't you just use the regular HN site and avoid clicking the comments link? How hard is that? I do it daily and comment rarely. The only time I ever see HN comments is when I choose to see them.

Also if you want to avoid comments in general on the internet or on a per-site basis, install something like the ShutUp extension (which I use to remove comments on some areas of the web, such as YouTube)

I care about the comments. I use http://hckrnews.com/

Nice. Sorry for plugging this but I also wrote a similar one https://hn.etelej.com as a PWA that just focuses on the top 60 posts every 5mins and allows searching through the; links to comments though

I wish there was a link to the comments. Oftentimes they're the first (and last) place I go.

Wait, are you being facetious or did you not catch on to the fact that the comments not being included is what makes it "quiet HN"?

Even after your comment, I do not make that connection. If that was the intent, it fails...e.g, Why not duplicate the site faithfully and just eliminate the comment links?

It succeeds in being 'quiet' (less noisy) in design.

I think it literally does exactly what you just said, content (posts) is duplicated, comment links are eliminated.

I'm not sure you know what "literally" and "exactly" means, after that comment. Stop using those words just because you disagree vehemently. Here's the "literal" version you haven't imagined:

https://imgur.com/a/hJTC2

I also thought it meant a less noisy design and I thought the lack of comments was part of being less noisy.

Your comment reminds me why "No Feigned Surprise" is a virtue (https://www.recurse.com/manual#no-feigned-surprise). Yes, it is entirely possible to miss the tiny link at the bottom that says "What is this?" and even then still possible to skim or dismiss it thereafter.

except there was no "Feigned Surprise" in the comment you respond to..

I was asking genuinely because I could not tell whether the person I was replying to was being sarcastic about the idea of not having comments or if they just didn't make the connection between "quiet" and "no comments".

> Slowly over time I noticed that I begun spending more time in the comment sections, and less time opening links. To cut a short boring story shorter, that trend continued into 2017. I am now at the stage where I very rarely open the links, I simply open the comments and am able to deduce the gist of the link through the unfolding arguments.