Hacker News Reader

Comment by nukeop | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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)

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.

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

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