Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

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803 pointsminimaxir391 comments

More and more websites are getting rid of user comments on their websites. Just in the last couple of months the National Review and The Atlantic have got rid of comments.

In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.

So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet. What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low.

So, keep it up, dang and sctb!

The beauty of karma, and community moderation.

To counter your argument: take a look at reddit.

Community moderation has also the risk of creating an echo chamber.

I wonder if a big part of the difference is that HN has only one stream of postings. If there were a HN-politics, HN-tech, etc. each may end up as an echo chamber like reddit.

I participate on HN but only lurk on reddit due to so many upvoted garbage-comments on the latter. I don't much care if reddit posts/comments in futurology are always "woo! yay technology! future!!" and everyone in babyelephantgifs is just celebrating baby elephants all the time, with no dissent.

I do care about endlessly repeated/upvoted noise in comments. Puns instead of topically relevant comments, political sniping completely unrelated to the story, catchphrases from the poster's favorite movies/TV series/games, and basically everything from reddit site:knowyourmeme.com. Yes, I know, smaller subs and content that never makes it to the front page don't suffer in the same way. I do enjoy reading the rust, programming, and AskHistorians subreddits.

Select parts of Reddit are fine. The frontpage is a shitshow. I avoid it. But some of the quiet out of the way subforums contain a lot of good stuff.

HN is an echo chamber too. It's no different than reddit. Just much smaller.

It can be on certain subjects, but I would argue it is reasonably open to discussions as long as one argues well and civilly.

My experience is that you can speak about nearly everything here if you keep it civil, relevant, and substantial. Being nice and polite helps as well. There are exceptions of which I sadly have made my share of experiences (and my own mistakes!), but I still consider HN to be a remarkable place.

I wonder to what extent you've tried arguing positions that are unpopular with the San Francisco set.

Yes, HN has good comments on average. But my experience of moderation has been that it often seems wildly random and can be very politically biased. There was a story some time ago about the Guardian and when I first looked at the comments section, it was full of comments describing disappointment or mocking what sort of paper the Guardian had become. A few hours later it was a morass of greyed out, flagged and dead comments ... apparently some voters can't take criticism of that paper no matter how civil. One of my own comments on that thread got downvoted to the min and it consisted only of links to stories the Guardian had actually published, so was pure fact!

Perhaps it got a bit better lately, it's hard to tell, but HN's community is not a representative slice of opinion around the world and it's kept that way deliberately. This is especially true of anything that crosses into criticism of modern identity politics or feminism, even if the contents of the comment criticise ideas and not people.

Indeed doing a Damore on HN is a fast way to get lots of min voted or dead comments and a ticking off from the moderators for "engaging in ideological battle", although of course people posting the opposing ideas are never "engaging in ideological battle". The politeness, civility or level of research involved has no impact on this: it's purely about position.

although of course people posting the opposing ideas are never "engaging in ideological battle"

To me this bias is quite evident, although the mods certainly don't see it that way.

E.g. I once tried to submit a story from Breitbart. It had to do with soon-to-be-laid-off US workers being replaced by H-1B. But of course the hate here for Breitbart is strong, so my non-political story couldn't even be submitted. Breitbart is shadow-banned in its entirety. Submissions don't appear in "new" except to the submitter (and maybe if showdead is on?).

Fine and good. Their web site, their rules. But at the same time, the mods were cool with allowing submissions linking to rt.com. The hate for conservatives / right-wing is so strong here that mods were more accepting of stories coming from Putin's government-funded international propaganda network.

I haven't seen any submissions from RT lately, so I think it has now also become shadow banned. C'est la vie.

the signal to noise ratio on HN is a hell of a lot better than Reddit.

The amount of civility on HN is almost unbelievable. The behavior of the users is one of the HN's biggest strengths.

I once said something slightly political and my comment was downvoted into oblivion.

So that helps.

I say fairly political things all the time -- roughly 10% of my comments, I think -- and they generally stay positive.

Politics and economics and ethics are inextricably intertwined with technology these days, so it's usually on topic to comment about the political aspects of a situation.

My political comments are some of my most popular ones I've made. I think it's more about saying something that's actually constructive or different. I think also the fact that hackernews is not ideologically segmented has to do with it, too. We're here for programming and decent, thought-provoking reading, not having people tell us we're right. You can get away with being political if you're genuinely trying to contribute to the conversation.

> actually constructive or different. > not ideologically segmented

i dont think that's really the case. HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum. This is why you don't see many trump voters here, or bigots or the very conservative. Anyone who attempts to bring discourse with such an undertone will get downvoted.

I'd say HN has more groupthink than the people here would care to admit.

> HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum.

No, it's not. While class and profession have some loose correlation to ideology, the class/profession combination you describe includes people from all over the political spectrum, including all of the ones you say are excluded from HN for this reason (whuch, contrary to your description, seem to be well represented; well, not overt bigots but HN moderation is aimed pretty directly against that, and perhaps merely Trump apologists, who may or may not be Trump voters.)

Sounds like an empirical question to me. I'd ante a moderate sum though that @chil's assessment is closer to the truth in terms of homogeneity of political leanings on HN and, if you could somehow measure it, that there is "...more groupthink than the people here would care to admit" on HN.

I don't think career correlates quite so closely to the liberal-conservative spectrum as you may think. Yes, there are a lot of liberals, but I get the impression that libertarians are over-represented as well. And there may not be as few Trump voters as you think ;)

Well it seems you and I have had different experiences.

I’ve whitnessed threads where users were basically going “no politics pls.”

Maybe the threads that I end up clicking on attract certain kinds and the threads that you’re on attract other kinds.

I didn't know you could downvote on here. I only see up arrows.

Once you attain 501 karma, you're allowed to downvote.

I'm fairly contrarian and don't shy from political and economic commentary. Responses vary, though I'd argue it's generally net positive.

Not getting too heavily invested in any one comment helps, as does addressing any responses strongest rather than weakest points.

I'll call out (and occaisionally report) comments thaat eem unjustly downvoted. Sometimes (frequently) the mods agree, occasionally they don't.

There are also numerous shadowbanned accounts. It is possible to vouch their positive contribuions.

HN isn't perfect, but it's better than a tremendous amount of the Web, for discussion.

I wonder if the idea that you may be interviewing or be interviewed by any of the people you are conversing with means that one “behaves” better?

I am convinced that the combination of voting up good comments with strict, clear and fair moderation is an important reason. Add to this that reputation among peers may matter to people and maybe that is the formula.

I find that I see the civility on here and it makes me want to behave similarly.

I'm not so sure about the interviewing part. First, I am one of the few who does not use a pseudonym on this site, most do.

I have also seen people say some pretty absurd things using public Facebook comments that have their real name and details attached to them, I don't think people are considering that they may be making some career limiting moves when they get mad in comment sections. I also think that tech people have a lot more job options and freedom of movement between companies than other careers.

Sites like reddit that gather karma also create a "reputation" scenario for users, yet it still contains trolls, so I don't think it's that either, but it may be a contributing factor. That combined with the broken windows theory and the very specific target audience may be what make the comments mostly civil but certainly not immune to parody.

You could say the same about Japan, and to a certain extent China.

As others have noted, by way of very active and generally nuanced moderation.

I've discussed this before in a direct comparison to a "kinder, nicer" site which proved to be neither.

Moderation and site dynamics are curiously subtle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...

I think there are a few factors:

(1) The culture started by Paul Graham, back when he used to write lots of essays, emphasized a certain "hyperrationality" and attracted a lot of super-logical people in the beginning.

(2) Heavy moderation to keep things from deteriorating and discourage overly polemical debates.

The bottom line is that people quickly get an idea of what is tolerated and what is not tolerated so they work to stay in line which doesn't seem to happen as much on other websites.

CBC in Canada made commentors use their real name and disabled comment sections on particular stories that would normally incite a lot of uncivil behaviour.

I'm not sure if things got better as I left and never looked back.

> In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.

Has nothing to do with that. It's because their comment section gets no activity to merit investment. Instead they are investing in "managing" social media via twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.

> So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet.

It also has the worst and most biased comment section. It's why traffic is down and hardly anyone uses HN.

> So, keep it up, dang and sctb!

Only on "hacker" news would someone support censorship.

The spirit of hacker news died years ago.

I find it bizarre to see people equating forum moderation with some sort of freedom-bashing censorship. Does no one remember Usenet? Active moderation is essential for discussion forums, even if only to clean out spam and trolling.

There's just too many people on the internet, and only so many are housebroken.

Yeah, IMDB was my top 10 site for 10+ years back in the days of the boards and i had 2-3 visits since the removal. The fun part is that i had 0 posts and used it only to find recomendations / plot explanations. It's beyond me how you can remove the killer feature...

We lost so much behind the scenes history/trivia with the removal of IMDB comments. Some frequent users migrated their comments to www.themoviedb.org but it's nowhere near the amount of what was there from what I can tell. Top movie listed has 1 post, Shawshank Redemption has 11.

I lost so many comments on IMDB.

I haven't even bothered to visit since they removed the forums.

I understand why they did it, the racism and trolling was ridiculous there, but there were some good comments, especially on the forums for the less popular movies.

The mods here do an exceptional job, but it was also like that before there were active moderators (though it was a much smaller site). I think it's largely the culture here that keeps it civil - commenters that aren't civil get trained to do better by swiftly being sent to the bottom of the comments in an unreadable shade of gray.

There were active moderators from day 1. The set was mostly {pg}, but few people have any idea how active he was.

Oh, I didn't realize he spent much time moderating. I figured most of his time on HN was spent on improving the systems like voting ring detection.

It's all about clear standards and strong moderation. I visit another forum that has a great community. No karma, no voting, just those two things. I've also run a large community in the past that I believe was successful for those reasons.

The moderation is strong but not heavy-handed. The clear standards allow commenters to understand why they get downvoted or flagged which is nice. I have seen nitpicky over-active moderators on a different forum site effectively wipe out community engagement over the course of a year and it wasn't fun.

In general, downvotes are fair but sometimes, unfortunately, it gets misused to express disagreement of opinion which isn't the purpose on HN.

If I was allowed to make one change on HN it would be that a downvote had to be accompanied by a comment as to why the downvote happens.

That seems like a decent idea but a bit tedious for the voter. I also like the Stack Overflow model where each downvote costs 1 of your own karma points.

I'd probably just abolish downvoting entirely: rely entirely on upvoting. There's already a bias towards upvoting in the system due to the min cap but not the max cap.

You make it sound like voting-as-disagreement is rare but in my experience it's by far the most common way downvotes are used. I have showdead switched on and I keep toying with the idea of finding an extension to un-grey comments, because over and over I find comments in grey that are well written, erudite and merely express an opinion that goes against the current startup-culture HN zeitgeist. They aren't actually bad comments though.

So why not just let good comments rise to the top.

Perhaps you are right. I have experienced downvotes primarily in semi politicized discussions like automation, economics blockchain, diversity discussions. Most technical posts seems fairly balanced.

Perhaps yeah abolish downvote and only have flag for admins and people with high karma is a good idea.

The user style I've made for HN reduces the level of greying out considerably - dead comments are only 50% black instead of 14% black for instance.

https://userstyles.org/styles/156181/hacker-news-improved-re...

If you had a user style extension you could just change the five styles used to grey out down-voted and dead comments.

Add The Economist to that list of publications getting rid of comments.

They seem to have disappeared from the site in the last two weeks.

General interest news cannot do commentary. People literally believe that they are fighting some sort of war with people over political nonsense.

I saw a piece yesterday that claimed that a woman was flagged for suspicious activity on Twitter because 98% of the 5,000 accounts she followed were Russian troll-bots. The lady spent hours arguing with these bots.

Apparently this is a big part of Twitter's bot problem — actual humans, that don't really get Twitter, acting bot-like unknowingly.

Twitter's bot problem is largely imaginary. If actual humans are acting "bot like", given the fact that nobody has made a bot that passes the Turing test so far, perhaps that means these accounts and tweets are actually human and being mis-classified for political reasons.

Wow, so this comment just got me more karma than any other comment I've ever made in almost 7 years on HN!

I honestly didn't think anyone would read it, the article was already several hours old when I wrote it.

It's obviously not because it's a brilliant comment, probably a combination of timing and of saying something that "struck a nerve" with enough people.

A few more of interest:

• You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed. (There is no time limit for upvotes.)

• You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own. (There is no restriction to downvote further descendants.)

• You cannot unvote/undown a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.

• You cannot reply to a reply to one of your comments for a certain number of minutes, which increases based on some relation with nesting depth. However, the reply link appears sooner on the permalink of such comments than it does from the story page.

• You cannot edit a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.

>You cannot reply to a reply to one of your comments for a certain number of minutes, which increases based on some relation with nesting depth.

Is this the 'you're posting too fast, please slow down' message?

That one shows for a number of conditions, including if they have limited your account to X comments pr Y hours...

No; in the case of replying to a reply, you simply are not shown the reply link.

You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed.

This is a nice feature. One reason I stopped using certain subreddits was that people would look up your comment history and downvote all your comments that weren't archived. I think those downvotes would eventually disappear, but it annoyed me enough that I stopped reading the subreddits where it happened.

Eh, it's all fake internet points anyway. I occasionally get hit by an angry downvoter, but as long as your normal content is quality their effect is a drop in the bucket.

So many people don't understand this.

It's not like accumulating 10,000 karma will get someone a free cup of coffee at Starbucks.

I don't deliberately troll to try to get downvotes, but I also don't fall to pieces when I do pick up a few.

I would actually take the opposite side of this, I think saying "karma is just fake internet points" is missing something important. Karma is a rough metric for social approval, and social approval is one of the most important things for people.

Now, karma isn't actually that great of a measure of social approval (you're unlikely to encounter your downvoters in real life; it's easy to get karma by making short uncontroversial comments; etc.), but it still means something, and it makes perfect sense to me that people would care about how much karma they have.

I would discourage using karma as any measure of worth for the reasons you described. If a user has lots of negative karma that might be something else, but a large positive karma may mean nothing more than the person has been active on the site for a long time and tends to post a lot and doesn't troll frequently.

It doesn't mean they're super smart or some incredible subject matter expert or anything like that. They just have a lot of time to post and aren't a complete shithead.

In fact site operators should put extra scrutiny towards accounts that accumulate karma too quickly. That could be a sign of bot activity or "account optimization" firms making a mockery of your reputation system.

Then people on HN are just being lazy, by not writing software to auto-downvote all future comments by people they dislike.

nice idea for a saas.

AFAIK, HN has no OAuth2 or similar, so a SAAS would not work for this task; the users would have to host such software themselves on someplace that they trust with their HN password.

I can tell you are a very creative, intelligent, and resourceful person and am confident you have better uses for your time :)

If you tell me your password and I downvote everyone you hate, why is that less of a service than it would be if, instead of telling me your password, you gave me a special password with fewer permissions?

The first service comes at the cost of losing one's entire account. The second one does not. Therefore the second one is far more valuable.

Abusive voting can lead to revocation of your voting privileges. So perhaps people are just not wanting to screw themselves over.

Whenever I feel sad about downvotes I remind myself that no-one will lie on their deathbed wishing they'd scored more points in the internet popularity contest.

On reddit you can not downvote comments from the user page. The downvote button is there but it doesn't do anything. People who know this can get around it possibly, but it's stopped a lot of that.

(There is no time limit for upvotes.)

I don't believe this is still true. I think it was at one time.

I can still upvote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072520#15075020

They do still appear on your personal upvoted comments list, which I appreciate.

I've also noticed that certain network issues can cause comment voting to silently not be registered, unless you happen to reload the page and notice your upvotes are gone.

I use a browser extension to highlight voted posts. I often find this useful when revisiting threads on my desktop after voting for comments on mobile.

There is a limit of how old a comment is that will accept an upvote. If you do, it will tell you that you can mark it as a favorite instead.

We changed that because users complained. The comment DoreenMichele linked to explains.

> You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own

Update: my apologies, seems that I'm wrong. The quoted statement is correct. I'm sure I saw a downvote arrow there once, though (but that was in 2017, haha)

Old comment: Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think one can - they just need to click "N minutes ago" permalink to see the down arrow. Maybe it doesn't affect the score or just cosmetic, but IIRC it's recorded and persists. Unless this was changed recently - can't check (but I swear I saw it there!)

Feel free to test it with this comment. I haven’t seen a case where I personally can. Can you downvote it?

Oops, seems that it's gone now. I only see an upvote arrow.

Looks like it works for others. Successful test!

Doesn't seem to work for any of the replies to my above comment.

> There is no upper limit on the score of a comment, but the minimum score is -4 points.

According to the The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ [1] this is only partly correct, but I don‘t feel like testing it.

[1]

> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?

> HN is ‘subtle’ in that not everything always is what it seems. Votes are not always counted and those votes that are counted are not always displayed. So even though your vote count for that comment shows as -4, in actual fact it may be much lower. Take your lumps, analyze why you got those downvotes and if you feel they were justified then try to do better in the future. A side effect of the votes still being counted past -4 seems to be that people tend to delete their comments with a much higher frequency than in the past to cap the damage to their karma.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq#badcomment

Counting system sounds like Reddit voting system where 1 upvote != 1 vote

I can confirm that the minimum display score is -4 points regardless of the amount of karma lost on a comment.

I think what your parent is getting at is that you'll lose at most 4 karma regardless of how many downvotes a comment may eventually accumulate. At least in my experience I haven't seen my karma fall more than 4 points due to a single comment, as far as I can remember. Have you a different experience?

Yes, of course. Downvotes are not shown (past the 5th), but karma losses are. Just as described in my parent comment:

>> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?

Wow. How recently? IIRC, that faq (though helpful) is out of date in sections. I assumed that that was one of them.

Not all that recently, but I see no reason to assume the behavior has changed.

And you're probably as willing as I to test its current status :). Cheers for clarifying this for me.

No, it doesn't do that. I think it did at one point, when we were experimenting, but it hasn't since at least March 2015.

A nitpick about notation:

For me, "Shadowbanning" or "hellbanning" means that the post of the user/site are [dead] but the systems lies to the user and to nim/her show the post as alive. And the only way to notice is to logout or get another computer and check the post from there.

Killing the post form an user or site automatically, and showing to the user that the posts are [dead] is not shadowbanning. I call it "autokilling" but I'm not sure that it is he official name.

Almost all the recent case/discussions of similar cases were simply autokilling. In the initial times of HN it was more common to have hellbanned users, but it's very rare now. Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he said that they were considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use autokilling. I'm not sure if they finally made that change.

> Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he said that they were considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use autokilling. I'm not sure if they finally made that change.

Nope, that change has not been made. I'm hellbanned.

It might be "no more shadowbans" rather than "revert all shadow bans".

From what I understand, the ban _mechanism_ is still a shadowban in that you can still post and other users can vouch your comments, but the mods will tell you when they've banned you which goes against the original purpose of shadowbanning (banning people without them catching on).

Right, if an account has any substantial history, we tell them we're banning them, usually after multiple warnings. There are some exceptions, like new accounts that are related to past spam or troll activity, or accounts that have been used only to break the site guidelines or post obvious fluff.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Not really. Hell banning is a silent action. You don't tell the user they were banned.

You got several warnings, and then you were told you were banned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938232

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14960370

EDIT: just for clarity: I'm not a mod.

I didn't mean to complain. I respect and accept your decision to ban me. There are large parts of this community that truly aren't for me. I just wanted to say it to educate the people that the shadowban mechanics are still active, with myself as the example.

@Kenji : You have a sibling comment that now is [dead]. Do you see it marked as [dead] or it looks to you like a normal comment? How do you know that you are banned?

[EDIT: Someone vouched your comment, so I see it now as a normal comment. I was going to vouch it after the experiment :( .]

Just to be 100% sure that we are using the same definitions: Can you post a screenshot in imgur of your sibling comment, so we can see how it looks to you?

For comparison: I see https://imgur.com/a/1Z3dF

PS: Please don't downvote the GP comment, so we can have a nice conversation. Try to keep it black, or at least dark grey.

I'm too lazy to make a picture, but I see them solid black like a normal comment, there are no markings like [dead] or anything. Even for that sibling comment. For me it all looks normal except that my comments are always at the bottom.

> Both are very responsive when contacted at hn@ycombinator.com

True in my experience when I asked for my comment to be deleted.

> Complaining about being downvoted is discouraged and usually results in even more downvotes.

It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life. After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising rapidly and is now resting at +22.

> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are marked as a [dupe] and will be killed without the ability to vouch.

An addendum is that from my experience, it is unclear which story the mods will consider the dupe, sometimes the earlier posted story will be called the dupe.

> Relatedly, moderators can also invite users via email to resubmit a post which didn't get much traction.

This happened to my "All the goodness gone from tea (1688)" [2] submission. I am amazed that a moderator read a submission that was only +2 in its original form and also had difficult ergonomics because it was on google books.

> One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation ... This trick doesn't actually work.

So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't exist? I have trouble believing this. This seems more like a call to not even try claiming that it won't work, because it just might work. I wish some charitable soul with gray morals would step up with their story of voter manipulation that wasn't detected. Tooling could be developed to curb its use by other individuals. They can do this privately to the mods.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994458

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324547

> So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't exist?

I think rather the point was that this particular way of manipulation is detectable and is being detected. That of course doesn't preclude other ways of manipulation which are not.

> It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life. After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising rapidly and is now resting at +22.

Downvotes are also disabled after a period of time. A comment can only go up or maintain its rank once that has happened. This is evident when reading older threads.

That probably doesn’t account for all of the upvotes in your example, of course.

> It works sometimes however.

Tone counts for everything when complaining about downvotes. Asking politely where you think you went wrong often does work. If it's hostile like "wake up sheeple", you're digging your hole deeper.

Indeed. Asking politely for what went wrong or for counter arguments usually helps. But it does not always.

Two points I got downvoted for without much substantial dicussion was when I said that security through obscurity does work (to some degree) and that tinkering with crypto is okay for everybody, and with certain preparation, can even be used in production in some cases. I stand by these points and are open to debate, but for the big majority I just get silently downvoted or arrogantly spoken to as if I didn't knew what I'm talking about.

I think this is a pity because tinkering with stuff is an essential part of being a hacker.

My favorite little-known HN feature (not even mentioned on this link!) is the noprocrast mode. You can set in your profile to be locked out of HN for a set amount of time, after another set amount of time on HN. Prevents procrastination :)

Oh wow, that's a good one! My favorite is being able to change the nav color (`topcolor`). I changed it to the purple brand color from our startup [1].

[1]: https://canny.io

I can imagine that being used as a security feature for UIs, against phishing attacks: now that you are registered and logged in, choose one of these colours/pictures for this certain, easily visible area of your dashboard. If the use saw a different colour, would know that's phishing.

noprocrast is in the FAQ, which is why I didn't add it.

Maybe you should add "There's an FAQ" as an often-unrecognized feature.

It's linked in the intro paragraph.

Also, IDK if this is mentioned anywhere, but HN comments have a maximum character limit. Once I made a veeery long comment [1], had to split them up in three pieces (which when I downloaded them using the API, take up 7.5kb, 6.5kb and 5.9kb respectively. I guess 7.5kb is a good approximation, but I did not try to make an accurate measurement.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373653 This was about the decline of schools in my country, so I guess I'm going to be excused for this much of logorrhea :)

Wow that is long

:D I can talk about this topic for days, only stopping to hydrate and eating every twelve hours. It's my pet peeve.

"after users reach 500 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment"

Ahh that's why I don't see a downvote button :) - I thought it was a feature reserved to super privileged users

But not it made me wonder, how a positive enforcing behavior is only allowing down vote until you reach a threshold. It makes you engage and understand the community better before making your judgment.

It is also a way to manipulate HN to allow those with similar views to prosper and reinforce those same ideas. Those who don't agree have less power...

It's not hard to get to 500 thru purely technical commentary.

If you're here for politicizing or snide remarks, then yes I hope it's hard to to get to 500.

I don't find it easy personally, my most upvoted comment has 14 points, most are under 4 points.

But then, I don't comment often and I don't care about being able to downvote, so I think I'll survive.

Comments are worth a point, so as long as you're not posting comments that are regularly downvoted, just participating will get you there.

No, the default point doesn't count towards your karma.

It's still true that just participating will get you there. I'm pretty sure my median comment has 2 points.

It takes a while in the beginning, then you learn what works and what doesn't, which thankfully aligns fairly well with the community values as I see them. Here's a distillation of how I see them:

* Comment when you have something to contribute. The contribution can be small, even just adding your own experience. A "me too" comment will likely get downvoted. A "Me too. I often experience/feel this when..." will likely be left neutral or upvoted, depending on topic and content.

* Assume the other party in a discussion or argument is acting in good faith. Try to look for alternate interpretations for offensive or upsetting comments, and ask, if at all ambiguous. Even if it's clear the opinion is at odds with your own, don't condemn someone outright, ask why (and try to do so in a way that doesn't sound like you're setting them up).

* Tangents are okay. Responding to a particular comment but addressing the conversation is okay. Try to make it obvious when you are not addressing the person you replied to specifically. Context matters, especially for those that see the reply, and it's easy for them to assume it's supposed to be meant as a rebuttal to them when they've been seeing lots of rebuttals.

Sure, but most of the time I don't feel like I have things relevant to add to the discussion, I'm more of the lurker type.

I just wanted to point out that in my case, getting points was not that easy. But I actually don't care about it, so everything is fine for me. :)

I believe the top comment in an high voted thread can get 100+ points but winning the thread is extremely difficult. In almost 6y I only was able to make it 3 or 4 times. The quality is really high and it's amazing how there is always somebody in a better position to comment it.

Aaaaaaaand now this comment is my most upvoted comment. Obviously.

...or by submitting some awesome content once in a while.

I find that true technical commentary is often less appreciated than superficial technical statements.

Using only myself as an example:

* I write a comment about databases and data science that comprises hard-won insights borne out of years of experience and mistakes -> {0, 1, 2} upvotes.

* I write a throwaway comment about IBM PC-DOS -> many more upvotes (>10).

I'm not complaining. I think HN merely conforms to the broader pattern of the world.

It does have one downside: very often, soundbite comments that are naive or wrong get upvoted a lot. [0]

[0] http://danluu.com/hn-comments/

Anecdotally I find the largest factors affecting number of upvotes are time of day and how recently the thread has been on the front page.

dat true!

Comments higher up on the page also get more upvotes. Not everyone reads all of the comments and you get this effect.

For all the complaints about the hivemind, I see a broader range of opinions here than anywhere else. Perhaps the reason for complaints is that the visibly broad range of opinions creates an expectation that any reasonable opinion will be tolerated, when in fact some reasonable opinions will be suppressed by the community. In such a generally open context, this suppression seems particularly unjust.

In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.

On the other hand, in general I don’t care about the occasional wave of downvotes. They’re fake internet points—-no reason to tie your HN karma to any measure of self worth. Literally anything can and will get down-votes here. Hell, just yesterday I wrote a long-ish story about some ethical issues I encountered as an engineer. No arguments or judgment passing or controversial stands—just a “here’s a little snippet of my career” and it got a couple downvotes. No need to sweat them. The advice to not complain in-thread about downvotes and not attack/question your downvoters is good advice. It’s pointless because everything, including uncontroversial comments, high quality comments, correct, incorrect—-they all get a few downs.

> In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.

Sound advice. It's easy to collect some downvotes by posting about anything people feel passionate about -- there's always going to be somebody who downvotes out of dislike for your opinion. Also, I believe criticizing certain national governments attracts an outsized share of downvotes / flags.

That or any google proguct. They seem to have the forum locked down tight. Look at the posts that rise after a while in any AMP, Gmail, or Talk thread. Its a clear shift when workers come online. I often wonder how many people are employed to influence and steer technical discussion on sites like this.

Certain topics are predictsbly for/against on HN. Nuclear power is one such topic where for example arguments against Thorium reactors gets HN voters up in arms and prompt downvotes.

> No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried.

These exist, but I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that. Sometimes arguments you've seen, or made yourself, that were open ended and/or asking for discussion get downvoted, but sometimes it's just a week later and they don't. I think a lot of it has to do with the context people see it in, their own state of mind, and whether someone happened to take up reasoned discussion on the topic before downvotes started accumulating.

Put another way, I think there's a lot of people that see someone looking to talk about a topic and immediately assume they are looking for an opening to express their outside views rather than explore the topic (which is not fair to assume, IMO). Seeing people discuss that topic rationally stalls or negates that knee-jerk reaction.

In other words, it's a crap shoot (but there are strategies for broaching these subjects that work better than others).

Yes, preservation of the “house style” is an explicit goal of HN’s design and moderation. Preventing newcomers from “democratically” hijacking the forum and turning it into something else is something it’s explicitly built to thwart.

it's interesting to note that that's exactly the kind of position you might have if your opinions are just not that great.

the whole system is rigged and it's just not appreciating your awesomeness. maybe you're seeing a pattern that's not there? might it be your opinions that are flawed? or maybe your communication skills or style are left wanting? i don't know but those things are certainly possibilities too.

you didn't actually make an argument about what you think the "similar views" are, how the mechanism works, who's involved, or anything worthy of consideration and discussion.

might that be representative of the problem right there?

It's called groupthink. And I've heard many people outside the SV scene complain precisely about SV groupthink issues.

They can be good ideas, bad ideas, horrendous ideas... Regardless, if SV thinks its good, then it passes muster here.

I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct. They just challenge the precepts that are held holy in the 'Valley.

> I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct

You may not be the most unbiased judge of that.

The HN community is overwhelmingly not in SV. Less than 10% by many measures.

Do you folks have any anonymized demographics data? I’d love to see it over time in particular, since I’m guessing early on it was much more SV. When I travel and am in a vastly different time zone (like say to Europe or Asia), I notice the active participants on HN are fairly different. Is 10% by viewership, accounts, activity, all of the above?

I was just looking at this. 5% of "users" (it depends how you define a user who isn't logged in) last month were in SV. A third were in the US, a third in Europe, 8% in Canada/Australia/NZ, 6% in India, 3% in China.

That is the distribution of everyone who hit the site last month at all, regardless of how much they used it. If we weight the numbers by the number of days they used HN, then US has 44%, Europe 33%, Can/Aus/NZ 8%, India 3%, China 2%. And Silicon Valley is 8%. That's surprisingly low, given how many people assume that HN == SV.

That's way more Europe MAU percentage than I was expecting. Thanks, and good to know!

Sure, it does act as a stabilizer, but IMO it affects discussion style much more than opinions expressed. Which is, to me, is a good thing.

Rudeness and pointless ramblings get downvoted quickly, which is likely a model learned quickly by newcomers. Arguing an unpopular view is unlikely to get beaten hard -- I do not recall ever getting more than -3 or so on a comment (but maybe I am just a conformist).

That argument seems wrong to me; the subset of the community with karma > 500 is as fractious and divided as the community as a whole.

In my opinion, it creates an echo chamber where in order to be a "full member" of the community you have to already espouse views the community supports. It is a big reason why I don't participate much.

I certainly think it's possible to clear 500 karma by playing to the echo chamber, but I don't remember having had much difficulty doing getting 500 and most of my comments have either been technical or about niche policy-ish stuff like urban planning or energy. I think my personal views on particularly echo-chamber-y things are probably at least somewhat different from any normative HN values that may exist, and that hasn't really been a barrier.

(That said, I almost never downvote.)

I espouse a lot of views that the community does not support. I am also the first woman to make the leaderboard (under a different handle -- my retired handle has 25k karma).

I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.

How do you know you were the first woman to do so? This is a psuedo anonymous internet forum where people aren't required to state their gender or even their real names.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-do-i-kno...

I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.

My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.

> I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on,

If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.

> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.

I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But go ahead, be mad about it.

Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.

What do you think is being echo-chambered?

I don't participate much because unlike, say, reddit, HN seems much more focused on delivering people to other destinations. That might just be my perception, but I think reddit has much more sophisticated community features, where as comments have always felt like an add-on for HN

That's so different from my experience. I often read the comments on HN before the linked article. I generally find reddit comments, even in subs dedicated to topics I care about, to be garbage. In contrast, I learn a lot from reading HN's comments.

Why do you think "views the community supports" is the only thing that people upvote? I upvote entire threads where people are disagreeing because the whole conversation has value. I also upvote comments that add something new to the conversation. I think you have a naïve sense of participation.

You don't have to join the hive mind to get to 500 karma. People around here are pretty free with the upvotes.

If you want a community that is hard to get started in look at StackExchange. You can't even comment until you've gotten quite a few points.

I reached that threshold mostly via submissions, I don't comment that much (but also downvote very rarely). Surely, also submissions may add to the echo chamber, especially if they hit a nerve.

One reason for me to stay here is the diversity (and civility) of the comments, I don't think it's too bad. Another favourite read of mine is Arstechnica, but the comments there don't reach the quality of the comments on HN, imho.

Then again, if you feel that you need to be able to downvote people in order to "participate", maybe it's good that you don't have a downvote button yet ;-)

I always thought the little [-] button downvoted!

HA! That made me think of what might be an interesting feature on a forum, if the parent gets downvoted, all the children do as well. Might prevent feeding trolls or expanding off-topic conversations.

Would also punish users for posting rebuttals to controversial or factually incorrect posts. I feel like that's a net negative.

Perhaps an additional feature to explicitly mark your post as "rebuttal"? Then only the non-rebuttals would inherit the downvote?

And why would users not simply mark all of their posts as rebuttals? There'd be no downside.

Because rebutting something that was subsequently upvoted would incur a downvote!

That's sort of what happens on reddit.

Often I feel it's not worth replying to obviously wrong stuff because it'll just get downvoted so low that nobody's likely to see my eloquent and carefully-worded rebuttal anyway.

I've been slowly creeping towards downvoting for the better part of 2 years as I comment very infrequently. I imagine it'll be anticlimactic once I get there, but it's relatively exciting to be so close—it's the last frontier of Hacker News-ing.

After that there's the "leaders" list. The treadmill never ends :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

We'll probably get rid of that list or at least change it to show different kinds of leaders. I've been saying that for years, but like an alligator, we lunge eventually.

It took me almost eight years

Both of you can have an upvote!

It seemed to take forever, and I was counting the numbers when I was at like 490, but now the downvote buttons are there, I find it's very rare that I get a chance to wield them in anger.

This is a great resources, but i'm forced to laugh at this bit:

> However, as of recently, the line between technology and politics has become extremely blurred.

> as of recently

We really, really need to require CS majors to take ethics classes. Everything you do as an engineer has an impact on the world around you. Everything. This is actually really good, because most of us are good people! But you can only escape "politics" by escaping people and you simply will never do that.

Right on both counts, that it can't be separated and that it isn't recent. The OP needs to amend "The Guidelines state that political discussion is off-topic". The actual guidelines say most and probably, precisely to indicate not all.

Political articles that are on topic are those that contain material of intellectual interest, aren't just garden-variety politics or ideology, and contain substantive new information. Those are comparatively rare, but better able to support substantive discussion. Sometimes they get more upvotes than flags, or we may turn off the flags. There are plenty of examples of this—so many that we hear the complaint "HN has been taken over by politics" at least as often as its inverse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426

I think the greatest possible contribution to all of science that hacker news (the piece of software + the community) could provide would be to extend its general self-reinforcing conversational tone to include issues of conscience and the ethical, moral, and political implications of the subjects discussed here. We simply can't treat the two groups as separate.

That sounds great, but isn't doable. It only seems doable, because of the dynamic described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438476. What would actually happen is that it would make the community nastier and dumber until it died. Whom the gods would destroy, &c.

The fundamental tradeoff: the better HN gets, the more people want to use it for things that worsen it. This puts a cap on how good HN can ever get. All we can do is find ways to wriggle out of that tradeoff here and there.

Well that's depressing XD

Missing from that list is everyone's favourite feature:

  Using code blocks as block quotes so as to make them almost unreadable on mobile. Especially when the post is already indented a few levels.

    Using code blocks as block c

What's wrong with that?

The default styling results in it having too narrow a view so it requires a lot of side scrolling on mobile devices. It gets really annoying for block quoted text past 80-90 characters.

I'm on android Firefox at the moment and I can confirm that it becomes problematic after about thirty characters. That's what I meant by my previous post.

Unofficial HN community guide: Short comments meant to be viewed as sarcasm end up being interpreted incorrectly often when used in a serious forum. A short clarifying rider sentence explaining your real opinion often helps. That may ruin the joke, but if your comment was just to make a joke, it probably wasn't strong enough reason to comment anyway (for additional info on jokes, see the section entitled How to make a joke and not get downvoted).

Addendum: Poe's law is alive and well.

(The above is of course my take, and other people will follow their own best practices)

Sarcasm marks (e.g. "/s") are another option, although I was able to get it without the annotation.

Not to mention that, on some mobile browsers, it doesn't scroll at all - it drops all the content after the place where it should reflow.

Yup, mine cuts off hard, with no scroll option.

Of course, I am the typical HN'er who runs with JS disabled. So perhaps that is a factor.

Guess that was a joke.

The funny thing about this, is that on portrait on my phone even this deliberately shortened version is cut off.

I was hoping to find all the unlisted URLs some of which I can never remember, like /leaders etc.

Interesting nonetheless.

There does seem to be some attempts to game HN lately that I don't remember in the past - like a recent tendency of some new accounts to ask dozens upon dozens of questions. I can only assume there's some karma gaming behind that.

> I was hoping to find all the unlisted URLs some of which I can never remember, like /leaders etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Thanks! That's one I hadn't encountered! :)

Interestingly enough this doesn't include Hacker News Classic, one of my favourite frontends: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

I don't understand the difference between this and the regular front page. I can see it has different content, but why? Does it use a larger time factor? It seems like everything there is older, but maybe that's just because it calculates less frequently?

From what I can remember, it uses an older ranking system which is less correlated with upvotes/popularity.

It uses the same ranking system, but only counts votes from very early users. To me the interesting thing is how little it differs from the regular front page, although I think the explanation is disappointingly boring: the main predictor of upvotes—for all users, early or not—is already being on the front page.

It sounds like you guys basically left it in as a cross-check to make sure the community isn't deviating too far from the original premise. Very cool.

Thanks for the explanation!

Question on “hidden” features: Sometimes sub-level comments (not even particularly deep) don’t have a ‘reply’ button - is this turned off for particularly controversial (in voting) comments?

> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are marked as a [dupe] and will be killed[...]

The addition to this is that after a while this isn’t enforced - which is why you’ll see the same articles coming up reasonably regularly.

I've noticed the missing reply button; my impression is that it won't appear right away after a post is submitted, which is probably intended to reduce flamewars.

It's still possible to reply directly, but you have to click the permalink above the specific comment (the one with the time in it - "X minutes ago") before the reply button/box are visible.

Not sure if this fits with the purpose of your page, but there are "easter eggs", like in the "Ask HN: What has HN given you?" thread( which is an awesome read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768 )

I noticed a MailGun cofounder mentioning the "HN Cofounder wanted spreadsheet" at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sygd1fhGYRS-ZvRP0IVV... which is how he ended up involved with MailGun

EDIT:

this probablly isn't suitable for this page. I've started a page to track these things for myself at https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity/

If anyone has any other gems that are worth tracking I'd love to know about them.

sorry if I'm being ignorant but how is that an easter egg?

It's not in the sense it's not built into HNs website, but it's an easter egg of the community in that you wouldn't know about it and nothing really documents things like this specifically related to the HN community.

It's like your page you are making, it's another easter egg of the community. Just disappears from view except for those who track it.

I've noticed when using a VPN, my posts would be shown in my own account but not anyone else's. Thought this was a strange behavior.

Wasn't certain whether this is a consistency issue or whether posting through a VPN isn't possible.

Anyone know why? May be good to add it to the document.

HN has shadow-banning based on an unknown set of criteria.

To be clear, are you saying if you're on VPN you're shadow-banned, effectively, but the same account works fine when not on VPN?

I seem to recall 'dang mentioning this can happen, and that they can whitelist accounts. If you see it happening to yourself, you can contact them and they'll look into it.

Probably multiple accounts, and/or rate limits, coming from a single IP which is likely on a VPN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (Last item)

Could be a popular VPN. For example my VPN is very popular so I would be shocked if others weren't using it, and it must look like all users are coming from the same place.

It's also a good idea to review the guidelines every once in a while:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Something I noticed this week for the first time is the date on profiles changed from x days ago to the specific date a user's account was created. It's also now a link to the frontpage on that day.

We just did that. It seems like a neat way to tell people about https://news.ycombinator.com/front, plus it's amusing to look at how HN was on someone's 'birthday'.

We also made older timestamps say "May 4, 2009" instead of "3124 days ago".

Hadn't noticed the link aspect of the date. Cute touch! If I read into that more like a horoscope, I think it's suggesting I need brain training.

I do miss the x days ago, cracking the 3k club was nice.

I'm not entirely sure about that change either.

One thing I think it should have mentioned is that although comment scores are not shown to anyone but the user, it is easy enough to infer them, at least approximately. Obviously, negative scores are shown by desaturation. And positive scores are shown by sort order.

Don't new comments get momentarily bumped to the top before dropping, before they get any votes?

They do. I also have the impression that the number of childs influences sort order.

I hate the desaturation, I should add a user.css entry for it or something. Effectively silencing non-mainstream views seems so contrary to hacker culture to me.

Contrarian views aren't usually down voted here, low quality posts are. Troll posts that may have some semblance of an actual point should be rephrased to actually be part of a discussion.

I disagree - the are at least 2 top level comments on this story now that are greyed out. I consider them to be well-made, definitely not flames or spam, clearly written but contrary to the apparent majority view.

Even uncontroversial statements of fact get down-voted.

Take this:

>"Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything beyond warm fuzzies." //

assuming the commenter didn't lie then it is a fact, they started their thought. Now the down-voters may know vouching revives comments, but that's no reason to downvote, that's reason to respond with a source.

Even if they are mistaken, it's harsh to downvote a view that can't be easily corrected because of hidden information.

Meh.

Yea, I just finished a comment about this very topic before I read yours. People here will downvote anything. There’s a big voting audience, and chances are there will be at least some people who disagree with you on any topic. Best to just roll with it.

This isn't true on any political topic. I've seen people who are far better authors than myself have posts downvoted to dead because they disagreed with the prevailing opinion in a thread.

> positive scores are shown by sort order

I don't believe it is quite so simple. Remark ordering also appears to incorporate

* freshness (new remarks get a moment at the top)

* reputation (remarks from high-karma accounts linger higher, longer)

and I may possibly have also observed:

* a penalty box: hidden downweighting, or reduction in effective karma, imposed by moderators upon troublesome users that weren't egregious enough to ban/shadowban.

That's all correct except "remarks from high-karma accounts linger higher, longer". Account karma doesn't affect ranking.

What about https://news.ycombinator.com/best ?

And https://news.ycombinator.com/active

It's scary to think I've been here long enough to know things others don't.. Or maybe "those that would know won't tell." Either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

All the above are accessible from the "Lists" link at the bottom of most pages.

I'd like to see the second chance pool made public, if only as another entry under /lists.

That's already there, it's the new pages beyond the first one.

One question that's not answered: what do green usernames represent? Would honestly love to know!

New account

As far as I know, new users are green for a certain time period.

edit: under 2 weeks old

I thought earning enough karma would adjust the color to default, I guesd I am wrong.

Good catch. Added.

I honestly always assumed these are verified celebrities with a million karma.

I always thought they are original poster.

That's red, I think.

If you mean orange:

> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which--although not an explicit benefit--does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.

Submitters' names aren't highlighted in any way.

Thought I was going crazy for a bit, but submitters names do show up in red for me. Possibly an extra feature of the Hacker News Enhancement Suite :). TIL.

I didn't realize you could see all topbar colors that have been set on the site. Would be a really interesting way to implement message passing.

@minimaxir for your list: - Not possible to downvote some posters, as the authors have extreme karma (e.g. >10,000, though I don't know the exact number), even if you have >>500 karma.

It is notable that HN does not support blocking particular users, or indeed annotating that you like them. Though plenty of fans will upvote well known authors, it is not possible for you to keep a list of people who you think have written well in the past. I'd love it if I could, e.g., mark favourite author names in green.

HN is also notable from my perspective for having some people with good technical sense and clear writing, but very extreme views on other matters, to the extent that they would be pariahs in RL situations.

I've wanted a feature to "follow" certain users as well. Presumably it could be built as a separate app or into a browser extension.

How does one contribute to the code running HN? I read the site almost exclusively on my tablet, and I would love a "open links in new window" settings option and would be quite happy to help write the code to make it happen.

Not sure what tablet/browser you're using, but several have extensions to create a whitelist of sites to always open links in new tabs. I haven't tried this one in particular, but Chrome has an "Open in new tab" extension where the description actually says "Useful for websites such as hackernews where you would ideally like to open links in new tab."

I have a couple suggestions too.

This shouldn't be the default ever. I the user, have the control of I want a new window/tab or use the current one. Sites opening links in new windows/tabs try tomorrow me on their site, for their reasons, not mine. When building a web application: Make sure to not play with links in a way that Ctrl+click, context menu or, on mobile, long touch don't work, but allow me to open new tabs, and keep the state if I go away and then use the back button to come back. Even for non-powerusers this is a good habit. Non-powerusers are often surprised bu new windows popping up.

Never said it should be the default, just an option (like it is in Reddit). Also, one would hope even the below average HN reader wouldn't be surprised by a new window.

The code isn't generally open to outside contributions, but you can email your suggestions to Dan and Scott at hn@ycombinator.com.

>How does one contribute to the code running HN?

One doesn't. Unfortunately.

>I read the site almost exclusively on my tablet, and I would love a "open links in new window" settings option and would be quite happy to help write the code to make it happen.

Do what everyone else does and make it a plugin or userscript.

Has anybody analysed how karma works for submissions that make the front page? It feels like there's either a rate limit on how much karma you can earn from a submission, or the amount of karma earned per upvote is inversely proportional to the number of upvotes, or something.

I've noticed that I earned 1 karma for 1 upvote for the first few upvotes, and also 1 karma for 1 upvote when the article's been off the front page for days but people are still reading and occasionally upvoting it. But in between it's definitely not a 1:1 - maybe more like 10:1 or even less.

It feels like there are probably some really interesting rules involved :)

I've also noticed this and would like to know more. I feel like this didn't happen on HN 5 years ago, but it does now.

I always wondered if maybe it keeps track of who has voted on your submissions in the past, and only gives you karma if the voter hasn't voted on you before.

Not sure whether it's influenced by your existing karma. My perception (with sample size of one) is that when my karma was lower I accrued at closer to 1:1, whereas now definitely not accruing at 1:1.

Same with me. However, rules may have changed over time and I am only slowly accruing karma.

To my knowledge, upvotes which are suspected to be inauthentic do not count toward the overall karma gained (I have no citations, which is why I did not include it in the list)

Do you ever notice that you'll lose two points on a comment at the same time, then later they'll come back? I see that relatively often (once every couple weeks), and on completely uncontroversial comments, which is how I started noticing it. I wondered if it was some vote manipulation detection, where they've linked two accounts voting similarly and nullified their upvotes, but later clear them so they votes are reapplied. In any case, it's always two together (which is why I don't think it's an accidental downvote), and seems to be close to the same time if not the exact same time.

Not all upvotes count toward karma, for several reasons, mostly a composition of various anti-abuse measures.

I'd be interested to see which kind of abuse. As stated in my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442242 I am not knowingly participating in abusing behavior. So, if its not voting rings initiated by me, would it be voting rings initiated by others? Or posting topics which are mainstream on HN?

"Discussions about race/gender" is also political discussion, it's very strange that the author doesn't understand this unless he has some implicit intentions here and separates these topics on purpose.

Not to get too meta, but the fact that "discussions of race/gender in tech == politics in general" is a call-out that many may not think of.

E.g., an article discussing women tech leaders may not seem like regular politics, but recent politics tend to prove otherwise.

A good example of the Hacker News reaction to gender topics (and no relation to partisan politics whatsoever) is what happened when a YC engineer launched a online community for women: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159808

There's nothing strange about drawing a distinction. You calling it "strange" in an attempt to create controversy where there is none is uncool.

Political discussion should be understood to mean discussion about the activities and policies of governments. Discussions about race/gender are far more often about tech companies internal policies, and thus a separate (but related) category.

> One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation on Hacker News is to link to the Hacker News's /newest page of new submissions (instead of a direct link which would otherwise make voting manipulation obvious), and asking friends to upvote the submission from that page. This trick doesn't actually work.

How does this not work? I am failing to see how legit people visiting new can be distinguished between people who are told to go to new and search for {{$title}} and upvote.

I noticed that too. The voting ring detector may only use the landing page component as a part of the overall algorithm? Other factors likely include the time since posting and common shared upvotes?

One thing which is not clear to me: I just recently had a submission which had more than twice of upvotes than had been added to my Karma. As far as I understand voting rings may be responsible for that. I am however much too lazy for engaging that way (I also have no social media accounts), I spent my time rather on HN ;-). Does someone has an explanation for this? Do others engage in those rings to get favorable submissions onto the fron page?

It gets complicated, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440811 has the basics.

Better view the parent of that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438849

Great list minimaxir, thanks for that effort.

I’d love to know what the user activity is (over time zones) over a 24 hour period?

Obviously, YC is biased towards USA West Coast time (due to their location), so would be interesting to know how much user submissions vary by UTC time?

Also, I assumed that usernames in green type meant that those users had engaged/replied to one of your posts/submissions. But ‘green’ users - as in new - makes a lot of sense (once you know the ‘rule’).

I've wondered about the distribution across timezones for posts, comments, and votes as well. The HN data set on BigQuery might be helpful here.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502

>Implicit Downranking of Politics

The free pass given to certain genres of political content show which demographic lines HN is mostly homogeneous on.

I feel like this is not enforced enough

Implicit Downranking of Politics

The Guidelines state that political discussion is off-topic. However, as of recently, the line between technology and politics has become extremely blurred. Most tech related submissions with a hint of political partisanship will quickly be flagged to death by users (or die a slow death due to the inevitable flame war).

Yeah, half of what I flag is political articles thinly disguised as tech or science articles.

The guidelines don't state that, as you can see by reading the second paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and, to quote pg from long ago, noting those words 'most' and 'probably'. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426)

Think it would be interesting to include something on what the community expect from "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts — thought I'd double-check the guidelines/FAQ before posting one before & realised they're not mentioned there at all.

Also, would be good to call out what flavour of formatting is supported by comments.

Well now I want more karma so I can customize the top bar.

Please don't over feature-ize it. This is about as good as it gets, for a simple text-predominant mechanism. I could wish for some things, but I could also expect pushback for their consequences.

So ... well done I guess. You gots it about right.

> and moderators can set a comment to automatically be collapsed if necessary (e.g. meta-discussion).

I'd like to be able to turn this off in my profile. Or maybe it can be linked to "showdead".

You could send an email to hn@ycombinator.com requesting this feature. They're very responsive.

Something I frequently use is search HN on algolia.

That's builtin (bottom bar of hn)

They also have a "fun" half way house before shadowbanning, limiting your comments to X pr Y hours...

My latest campaign has been to find a way to add the tiniest bit of accountability for downvotes. I believe at a minimum the total number of downvotes given should be shown publicly on user profiles.

As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.

Why do any votes need 'accountability'? Their purpose is to identify comments worth reading. Almost everything people write about voting itself is not worth reading and the less of it, the better.

My intention is to ensure contributing to publicly censoring/censuring costs something (intentionally tiny, but greater than zero/nothing) each time, beyond the one-time minimum karma requirement. "Downvote to disagree" seems unlikely to scale indefinitely, particularly as mobile means less willingness to contribute beyond clicking up/down (specifically now that there are apps catching on that remove all "fat-fingered web UI" friction!).

It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!

[Edited]

I know it's perfectly fine, I'm trying to follow this (very common) line of thought and adherents never seem to explain it in a way I can understand.

For one thing you're not really 'censoring' anything but even if we say, for the sake of argument, that you are why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote? The mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation is also quite compelling. What's the counter to that other than stuff that mostly seems to boil down to some version of 'getting downvotes kind of feels bad' (of which calling downvotes 'censoring' seems like a particularly overwrought variant).

Thanks for taking the time to bring up these counterpoints!

>why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote

If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add "censuring" as a better word.

>mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation

Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is behind-the-scenes for now.

[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing -- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.

Worth reading is very subjective. I think you are looking at popular opinions. The current system works that way as opposed to some randomized insertion in between. One often problem with popular opinion is that readers might jump on that trail and build a deep thread, which probably reduce the incentive to read any further by either skipping the middle to the end, ir simply ignore the rest.

Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).

The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.

I always thought that a user's votes should be normalised by something sensible, like total number of votes or time spent online (with sensible scaling). That way opinionated clickers don't have outsize influence.

Downvotes could remove from users karma. It acts as a constraint. Basically, the more popular your posts the more moderation you can do, but you still lose moderation capabilities over time if you use it excessively.

No need to make it visible why a user's karma is dropping, it just is. Could be they're getting downvoted, or they're using their voting action and reducing it themselves.

The only other option that works well is a meta-moderation feature like /. has, but that's impractical for this site, the way it does things.

It acts as a constraint.

I doubt that really happens, other than for that very brief moment and tiny minority of users who are right around the threshold. The karma losses are capped, it's hard to lose meaningful amounts of karma without actively trying to.

Sorry, I reread my post. What I meant was that if I downvote someone, the mechanism could deduct from my karma (or a fraction of my karma) as well as theirs.

So we're both at 1000 karma, I downvote you. You go to 999, I go to 999.5. Repeat. If I'm only downvoting, I'm forfeiting my karma to that moderation action. Optionally the same for flagging and other things.

This becomes a constraint because a user who just got to 500 karma and downvotes would lose the privilege immediately. A user at 10k karma can downvote pretty much everything. You could also have it cost more to downvote more in a period of time. Like 0 karma to downvote once an hour. 0.5 karma for two or three times an hour. 1 karma for four times an hour. Some scale (linear or faster).

This would prevent or mitigate people going through and downvoting all of a particular commenters posts in a thread just because it's controversial or they wrote one controversial thing. It creates a cost for moderation.

Oh I see what you mean. You can see a system like that in action on Stack Overflow. I don't think it really does very much at all there either, under what seem like much more favourable conditions: harder to accumulate karma, lots and lots of permission thresholds, a community involved in far more moderation than here and piles of caps on all sorts of user actions.

On HN, this would also favour commenting participation over curating participation. It's not obvious this is a win over the way things work now.

And if you didn't like the notion of 1/2 karma, you could flip a coin to determine whether to subtract 1.

On StackOverflow reputation is subtracted when downvoting answers but not questions [1], which is a neat approach. On your own profile, you can see the proportion of upvotes to downvotes (as well as other activity), but others cannot (maybe moderators?). So, there is at least some personal impact to having a user be accountable for a downvote. There is also generally a culture of "if you downvote, you should explain why", which sometimes seems to be here on HN as well. I remember Disqus removed the downvote count some time back, and Facebook doesn't have a "Dislike" button, so there are different approaches to it. I wonder what some other approaches some communities have taken, and what would be effective? Or even, what is the desired impact?

[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-dow...

[2]: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/supportqa/why_was_the_dow...

I'm developing Talkyard which has its own voting system: there's the Like vote, and the Disagree vote.

But the Disagree vote isn't a downvote — it doesn't affect karma or sort order. It justs shows how many people disagree about something. That can be good to know, so one can avoid harmful advice. Or just because one is curious about others' opinions.

There is a downvote too, actually, but only available for staff and core members. It works a bit like the downvote here at HN (e.g. removes "karma" and moves the comment downwards, dims it a bit).

Here's how the disagree vote looks: https://www.talkyard.io/please-note-2

If either intended or not intended, talking about the downvoting system seems unnecessarily taboo(gets downvoted). Which is a shame because there is an interesting effect that it has on the community which would be worth looking into.

One of the biggest questions I have: are downvotes an accurate way to moderate low-quality comments? I'm not sure how that can be proved by data but it would be interesting to see someone prove it.

I find myself thinking of the Slashdot system (also used by Soylentnews, a Slashdot "spinoff"), where people get to "flag" a certain number of comments on an article they themselves have not participated in. And said flags can never lift the post above +5 or send it below -1, but the most common flag given to a comment is represented next to the score.

To anyone interested in reading Hacker News source code, it is available here: https://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar

It should be noted that that's an old, old snapshot of the code. The currently-live HN codebase is closed source.

There is also the "Slow down, you're posting too fast" feature that kicks in, likely to calm down flame wars, Unfortunately it seems to block everything, not just the thread in question.

That usually means your account is rate-limited. Various explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We're always happy to take the rate limit off if people give us reason to believe that they want to use HN as intended and will abide by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html in the future.

I'll add that I've also seen the [flagged] tag appear on submissions that aren't dead. I assume it means that it's been flagged heavily enough to downrank it but not to kill it.

>All comments start with a score of 1 point (but in order to prevent bandwagoning, the comment score is not visible to users other than the author).

How great would this be for news stories on Facebook?

To me, the quality of discussions across various forums is:

HackerNews > Quora > Medium(comments) > Reddit > Facebook > Twitter > everything else

And these days, I use only the first 3 :)

Great article, I learned a lot. I've wondered for a while why some usernames appear green, it would be nice to include that too.

New accounts are green. Seems that two weeks is the threshold for showing up normal.

I think moderators can bypass that as well. I'm fairly sure I've seen accounts go from green to normal within hours when it was the author of some paper or project that someone submitted finding out they are on HN and making an account to answer questions. I suspect moderators authenticated the user separately, or used the comments to do so if it was completely obvious.

Slight nitpick: I believe downvoting is available >= 501 karma, i.e., above 500.

It would be nice if 5x duplicates didn't show up in the RSS feed.

Thank you Max! Well done.

One more - flagging and vouching have an invisible weight to them, and I'm about 90% sure that weight is based on how well your flags and vouches line up with what everyone else does.

I've been here for years, and it used to be that when I flagged things, they went dead instantly. After a particularly controversial thread or two, not so much.

Vouch is the same way - one time I vouched a comment that was pretty plainly insulting, but had something that I thought was valuable for discussion in it. I vouched it, it went alive instantly, I replied, and it was apparently later flagged again. My vouches no longer appear to do anything.

I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff, to be honest. I've more than once stopped myself clicking "flag" because I know that I'll be penalized if I get it wrong (read: enough people disagree with me). And all that stuff above? It's pure speculation, because it's all the UI gives me.

Worse, barring the occasional bit of moderator invention to unkill a post, all of these mechanics serve to enforce a hivemind, whether or not that's the intent. Quality doesn't matter as much as consensus, because the consensus is enforced transparently, the quality with intervention.

I‘ve had the same experience.

I thought about not flagging anymore, but so what. I‘m offering my ratings, and if HN doesn‘t want to use them, so be it. And it feels good to flag shitposts.

> I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff, to be honest.

I'm sure most agree. But the purpose of the obfuscation is to make the jobs of those who wish to abuse the system harder. So we, normal users, are trading the inconvenience of an opaque system in exchange for (hopefully) a less abused system. I'm willing to make that trade and, as the sibling points out, you might as well flag/vouch/vote/downvote and let dang and company do as they please with the data you've offered them.

Personally, as long as HN continues to be better than Reddit, for the kind of discussions I come here for, I will continue to participate regardless of the underlying system.

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440450

You need to click the [x time ago] link to see the flag/vouch option.

This is pretty neat, thanks!

Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything beyond warm fuzzies.

I think it does.

I have, in the past, seen [dead] comments that (IMO) shouldn't have been, clicked on "vouch", and when the page refreshes they are no longer [dead].

Or maybe HN just shows it that way to me and it is, in fact, still [dead] (kinda like hellbans).

I'm pretty sure it works in the obvious way.

I would guess that some comments take less vouching to be reborn than others though.

It actually brings them back, they do not lie to you about them not being [dead] anymore. I've vouched for a number of shadowbanned users when they have a comment that ought to be visible and then other people reply to it. You can verify (should you run across this again) by logging out or using incognito mode to view the page after you vouch.

I've noticed that sometimes [dead] comments don't seem to be revived by - presumably - just me clicking vouch. Perhaps vouches and flags and other criteria are balanced against each other or something like that.

The OP article explains that vouch only works once, and if there are more flags it stays dead.

The value of vouching, like everything else on HN, is secretly manipulated behind the scenes depending on how much you agree with the hivemind. If you vouch for things that then get flagged again (because the hivemind doesn't want to read them,) your vouches will carry less and less weight.

It definitely does work. I suspect that vouching (like voting itself) has an influence weighted by the reputation of the user in question. Reputation being some secret sauce correlated with, but not identical to karma.

This is a FANTASTIC resource! Bookmarked! Thank you!

I would love to see something like this:

  (Steve Jobs Died) (14 articles, newest on 11th of fyftember)

Articles on the same event within short timespan would be compressed into a single line you can expand by clicking.

One implementation could be some kind of special purpose tagging functionality, similar to flagging, but with a keyword argument. Maybe the tag should even have a limited lifespan - until you can no longer assign it. Submissions under the same tag would be compressed into an expandable list, similar to threaded comments. Please make the chat flood stop!

The mods normally merge in comments from duplicates if the duplicates pick up a substantial amount of comments and the context is similar enough.

If they're true duplicates offering no new perspective, I guess. But if the articles each show the event from a different perspective, they don't technically fall under the HN "dupe" rule. But it is still a boring subject to some HN readers, and it can fill most of the HN front page.

This doesn't directly solve your problem, but if you click through to the comments section of an article and click the "web" link (between "past" and "favorite"), it'll search Google with the text of the post submission.

So if you're looking for multiple viewpoints, this is a ~frictionless way to start reading multiple perspectives.

My problem - hinted by the term "chat flood" - is that some of the events don't interest me at all. I want to hide redundant submissions!

It's times like those when I'm reminded how US-centric HN is. I understand Steve Jobs is an American hero, but many people outside US only want to know that he died.

Some major security vulnerabilities fall into this category too. Usually some people with deeper understanding need to take care of it and push the changes upstream. I only need to know to watch out for X or Y hardware or service Z.

"Vote on net neutrality" type political submissions - you need to be an US citizen to vote.

Auto-merging duplicates on the frontpage and only showing the latest comment from a thread on the comments page might go a long way towards soaking up the effect of high-traffic events. Also possibly increasing the size of the front page from 30 to some amount proportional to posting traffic.

Just a side note, but... why are people using github as a content publishing platform? It just isn't a good UX for that, and there is no lack of workable CMS systems out there.

It could be multi-fold:

* It's free

* People are already signed up for it

* It brings exposure to your github profile

Yeah, exactly this. If your article/gist/etc gains some traction it's an easy way to get people to look at your other projects. Github's success is largely dependent on the social aspect.

* github profiles are rarely deleted and content put up once will stay there for many years

Seriously, dead links to github.{com, io} are super-rare IME.

Aren't they deleted if they're inactive for N years?

I don't believe this is the case. They may become eligible for reclamation if someone else wants the name, per the Name Squatting Policy [0].

[0] https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy/

Probably the same reason people post long-ish blog entries on twitter.

Probably because you can accept changes into your content more easily.

It's not "content" it's "documentation". Github is good for keeping it up to date, checking out to older versions, accepting PRs etc.

Because the author starts a list and then hopes that other people will contribute to it.

I currently have 2 repos with ~1k+ stars, and both of them are not code-related. The rest of the repos (most of which have code) receive <50 stars, so it's a good way to receive cool reputation within GitHub.

And finally, managing these ain't an easy task as well. The level of knowledge necessary to contribute to them is "knows a tiny bit of Git and the topic involved". Want to contribute to a popular repo? Contribute to a non-code repo just to see the process.

The alternative is to post it on my personal blog, but then it can't be edited as easily, and the list definitely needs edits.

Yeah, and it's nice that there's an eternal record of every edit, and other people can contribute via pull requests.

Git + Markdown are a fucking awesome CMS.

I've always been amazed that a proprietary engine with unclear rules and unavailable source code is the dominant source of news for the hacker community. Although it is designed better than reddit, unpopular opinions are still punished, which can stifle discussion and results in users self-moderating themselves and preventing themselves, even subconsciously, from expressing certain opinions from fear of downvoting.

Many of those undocumented behaviours are described with speculation - why don't we have a clear image of the capabilities and inner workings of Hacker News available anywhere? Security by obscurity?

Obscurity is a poor sole means of security, but as part of a robust system it’s a valid layer.

There are lots of open source discussion systems, and lots of transparent ones. For whatever reason, the closed and opinionated Hacker News reached the popularity that it did. I don't mind it.

Something about the mystery and the relatively tight moderation has kept HN from becoming too off topic and silly. Do you think Hacker News has somehow avoided Eternal September?

>For whatever reason, the closed and opinionated Hacker News reached the popularity that it did. I don't mind it.

It being owned by a multimillion dollar VC company might have something to do with it.

I'm sure that helped, especially in the beginning, but at this point I think the number of people that value it for the community and discussion far exceeds those that use it to keep abridged of YC developments.

Still, being seen here has value in part because of who sees you, itself in part because of the VC and startup culture behind the site. Keeping abreast of YC developments doesn't even matter - some people want to hang around the water cooler where very important people might happen to walk by.

I suspect that if this were just a tech and programming forum, it would be about as popular as a niche imageboard like lainchan.

HN was already pretty popular while YC was only distributing $1M/year, back in 2010. But posting was encouraged to YC participants (IIRC), which probably did help it quite a bit.

I see plenty of disagreement in the threads I visit. The things I tend to see downvoted are things that contain blatant falsities and bigoted comments. I'm OK with people self-censoring those.

I'm willing to grant that I might be missing things I would otherwise agree with.

I see a lot of substantive comments that are grey; quite often there are dead comments that seem pretty good too.

I'll try to keep my eyes open and vouch/upvote those.

Do you get the option to vouch? I'm at >26k karma and still don't have the vouch option, which leads me to believe it's been turned off for my user.

It’s only visible in the individual comment view (like the flag link) iirc, and it’s only available for dead (not just flagged) comments. For example, I have a vouch link available for this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16439776

You might want to shoot the mods an email to check the if there’s something particular with your account.

Ah yes, you have to click the [X hours ago] link and directly flag/vouch from that page.

Otherwise it's not an option on the normal comment page.

Thanks for clarifying.

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440450

You need to click the [x time ago] link to see the flag/vouch option.

Checked it out. No vouch link. Thanks for mentioning it though.

EDIT: The post was dead at the time I checked, but it's possible it still shows as dead after it has been deleted, which I assume removes the vouch option.

It only shows up when the post is dead.

It's possible I'm mistaken then. My apologies. I did not intend for my suggestion to be perceived as a punitive measure had been taken ("which leads me to believe it's been turned off for my user").

> that a proprietary engine

I'd rather call it in-house than proprietary. Maintaining or even publishing a project in the open is a lot of work, and it's not like there aren't a lot of open-source forums available, so I can imagine the maintainers deciding it's really not worth it.

In fact, the comment system of LWN is in-house as well, and I doubt anyone would accuse them of proprietary sympathies. They're getting there, but it's just nor a priority, or even that important in the open source world.

A (very old) version of this software's code is available.

Back when we had scores shown most people would seem to vote towards their ideal score for that post -- that was the consensus in voting discussions I was party to (IIRC). I'd vote down highly voted comments that I agreed with because the comment wasn't that good; also upvote any comment that was negative that seemed to have value.

But then I learnt pg said basically 'downvote if you disagree', which IMO makes the site much worse. Also then votes were hidden and so I spend most votes on things I disagree with because they made a good point and I believe others should at least be able to see the text of the comment.

I also dislike hidden censorship, hidden rules, and hidden moderators/moderation (eg covert post promotion for Ycombinator companies).

pg said different things about downvoting. The last comment I link to seems to agree that some downvoting is a problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683

> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716

> [...] Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057338

"pg" is still making statements, e.g., in this thread, as "pvg".

What was the motivation for hiding scores? Was it to prevent exactly what you describe? (i.e. downvoting based on view that a comment received "too many" upvotes)

What happened to polls; HN used to have them. Wouldnt they accomplish the desired behaviour? (i.e. measurement of disagreement)

This is a great write up, and answered a question I had about comments which are automatically collapsed. I understand the frustration around the lack of politics/diversity discussions, but I agree with the way it’s handled here. Those discussions need to be had, but do they need to be had here? They are divisive, and often leave lasting wounds which lead to the creation of factions.

Mostly though, the internet is short on places like HN, and long on places to endlessly discuss politics, usually in a very predictable circle. I don’t believe that much good comes from anonymous text exchanges online where politics are concerned.

People like discussing things on hn because the quality of discourse tends to be (relatively) very high. Naturally people would especially want to discuss politics or anything else that's almost universally a shitshow in a place where they thing commenters are thoughtful and fair and level-headed. Of course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here _because_ debating politics is discouraged.

Of course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here _because_ debating politics is discouraged.

I strongly believe this, and I think the evidence is the content of threads where the mods gave people a chance. The volume, in both senses of the word, becomes extreme, with hundreds of angry nested comments.

You've put your finger on one of the fundamental problems of this site.

There's another phenomenon at play with political stories, I think. Much of what occupies the front page is sort of implicitly siloed. Rust programmers are the active writers in Rust threads. Data science programmers are active in ML or word vector threads. People interested in math are active in math threads. There's a story on the front page about Google's "TPUv2's". I don't even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal with my comments on that thread.

Not so political threads! Everybody is on equal footing in them. There's no "people with expertise relating their experience" and "people asking questions" and the rest of us reading with interest. Rather, everyone's broadcasting.

That's not inherently bad, I don't think; there are lots of other kinds of threads that are like that and they seem to be fine (for the most part) for HN's culture.

But politics is a particularly toxic combination of broad-spectrum and polarizing. There are never voices of reason or experience, the most active participants are often on a hair trigger, and participation is amplified because everyone's got an opinion.

> I don't even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal with my comments on that thread.

Damn there goes our shot to hear what serious crypto people are really saying about Google TPUs.

It will be interesting to see how we look back on the moderators' decision to stifle political discussion on HN. In my opinion it is a horrible abdication of responsibility among technologists to simply hide any content that pertains to politics.

But it is fitting that the political monoculture of the valley would give rise to an HN moderation regime that includes aggressive censorship.

I love HN and have learned a great deal from the articles and comments, but censoring political discussion is a form of sides-taking and HN mods are unabashedly responsible for it. It's a truly shameful dark cloud in what is otherwise a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem of ideas.

It's worth nothing there was a full-on Political Detox experiment awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

It did not go well.

I love the statement of fact here, as if your opinion alone determines what "went well" means.

The outcome that people threw giant hissy fits about not being able to Trump-bash or insist that Silicon Valley is the most sexist institution ever created for a week does not mean that the experiment didn't go well.

In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite. It illustrated how deeply embedded a certain sociopolitical view is on this site despite everyone constantly patting themselves on the back over how smart, tolerant, and accepting they are. I think the experiment went quite well at illustrating what HN has become.

I've seen what you describe as "hissy fits" (and well-reasoned, substantive comments for that matter) come from all points of the political and ideological spectrum. The most deeply embedded sociopolitical view I'm aware of is the natural human bias that "it's the $otherSide that's responsible for misbehavior".

HN is politically divided, much as the surrounding societies are. But each side feels like the other side dominates this site, often with intense conviction. It's striking.

I believe the "didn't go well" categorisation reflects dang and sctb's own assessment. Certainly the experiment wasn't extended.

Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip, and mainstream discussion dilutes the intellectual quality and purpose of the community and only hastens the Eternal September effect.

If anything, the moderators have probably been too lenient about letting political content through. It's starting to become the HN equivalent of a junk buffet. Far too little of it passes the bar of "satisfying intellectual curiosity," and far too much appeals only to tribalism and emotion.

> Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip...

This may be true of some political discussion, but one could equivalently say that most technological discussion is about big screen televisions and mobile phone service plans.

Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.

Ive seen a lot of talk of ethics here, just not politics. Thank goodness.

Whatever your view of tech discussion, this is a tech site.

>Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.

It should, but it often doesn't. For some reason, politics short circuits people's brains. And one way to encourage people to dig deeper is to keep shooting into the trenches, being more aggressive about downvoting political content than apolitical, technical content.

> politics short circuits people's brains.

I think this is a very cynical view. To some extent the demagogues and "ruling class" among us try to oversimplify things and create emotionally potent talking points.

But ultimately as citizens we must figure out reality for ourselves without the emotionally potent, over-simplified explanations offered by partisans.

We must be patient that some of us may not have realized (yet) how to think in a rational way about politics, not just abandon it completely.

http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364...

"people who were strong at math were able to effectively solve an analytical problem. However, when political content was added to the same analytical problem – comparing crime data in cities that banned handguns against cities that did not – math skills no longer predicted how well people solved the problem. Instead, liberals were good at solving the problem when it proved that gun control reduced crime, and conservatives were good at solving the problem when it proved the opposite"

Not an endorsement of this paper, just something I've seen going around on social media. When I followed the citation for the statement quoted above, it didn't seem quite as cut and dry, that summary is eliding quite a few details of the the experiment I think, but I just skimmed.

The parent comment is telling.

I agree; it is an abdication of our responsibilities to our communities (Internet, countries, world) to say the current political situation, including the lack of intelligent and productive interaction, is not our problem and to abandon the field. Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work, and then which could be duplicated elsewhere (and arguably many people here are directly responsible for the currently poor performance of online communities in this regard). Rather than give up, people at HN are accustomed to taking on problems that others assume are intractable, and are comfortable and flexible enough for experimentation. Imagine the effect success would have on the world - is there any app that would have a bigger impact?

At the same time, the unfounded assertions and exaggerations ("horrible", "aggressive censorship", "unabashedly", etc.) in the parent are, IMHO, the kind of communication that causes political discussion to fail.

> Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work ... is there any app that would have a bigger impact?

Exactly.

> the unfounded assertions

Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.

Because of the aspect of HN that is professional networking, most people are afraid to call out the mods on this, but someone needs to.

> Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.

I've had contact with them, and I haven't observed any self-righteousness or interest in censorship.

> to simply hide any content that pertains to politics

That's so inaccurate a description that I wonder how anyone could arrive at it.

If political discussions that evoke partisan loyalties end up being classified as “flame wars” due to the definition in the article, then if those involved in the so-called flame wars are censured (throttled etc) then effectively the topic has been discouraged simply because the votes averaged lower than the number of comments. Over time users learn to ignore such topics.

The big goof up is in the idea that all discussions with widespread disagreement are harmful. It’s an absurd view of manners akin to saying that discussion about the ethics of slavery is simply rude to participate in regardless of one’s views and regardless of whether any of the comments are actually rude or disrespectful (or are even, themselves, partisan. The votes may be where partisanship gets introduced).

Slavery is a bad example because it seems morally obvious and thus the enlightened side seems obvious. But many issues today lack moral clarity which is why intelligent discussion of them is deeply important.

Politics can be messy but in many ways political topics represent the conflict between values as some values gain or lose prominence.

That's an argument about how HN should be. I'm stating a fact about how it is. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442668 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443186.

As a received impression, it may accurately reflect an emergent property of HN, and many other popularity-based ranking sites.

It's possible to either vote up, or flag, articles. Political articles which hit a major divide may see much of both actions. I've seen and been disaappointed by articles I thought should get more play that were flagged off the front page.

That's not a direct reflection of HN admin actions, but is undeniably tied to site mechanics, and so is something of an admin metaaction.

I've inclued several of these in my Favourites list

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