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Comment by SethTro | Hacker News Reader

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SethTro

free karma answer: "Hacker news"

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It's honestly the only site (excepting certain subreddits) where after 10 years I still read the comments.

Hacker News is a small niche site.

It gets five million visitors a month.

That's nothing compared to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

"Major". Hacker news is a small, heavily user-policed special interest site.

Isn't that the point of the article? to heavily user-police your site?

Sure. My point is that HN doesn't fit the "major" category. A group of people doing something that all know each other and fit into a single room is easier to run than a metropolis.

I also find "community" to not fit the bill, but that's another point.

Yeah no, when's the last time you've actually seen the rules enforced?

Often. Perhaps not as immediate and often as I'd might like, but often enough.

HN moderators are actually pretty active, but usually maintain a low profile compared to how things appear on other websites, so it can be harder to notice the work that they do.

All the time. I see dang smoothing things out like almost daily. You can also turn on “showdead” in your profile options, and maybe you’ll become more aware of it.

I do keep it on, because I want to see all messages even if most people hate it. Fortunately, they do not delete the messages permanently in such case, unlike some others do. (I also use custom CSS so that no messages are grey; all of them are black. If I can, I would also want to change the sort order of messages so that it is based on time (perhaps, of the most recent nested reply) rather than karma (if that is what is done; it doesn't seem to be sorted by time).)

Comments and articles both definitely have a time component in the sort. For comments, time might mostly be a tie-breaker, because up-votes do have a greater weight. Articles always drop over time, upvotes only keep them around for slightly longer. I don’t know what the precise sort is, but FWIW I think Paul Graham published what it used to be, once upon a time... you can probably find the old code. I’d guess it hasn’t changed all that much except maybe for how it handles gaming / voting rings.

I have "show dead" turned on and most of the time the same account posting dead comment after dead comment keeps it up for weeks.

I keep showdead on all the time, because sometimes I see insightful, thoughtful answers that are dead for no reason intrinsic to the comment. Then I can vouch for them, and I hope they become visible to others — though the workings of that system are opaque to me.

I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't.

Those two things are related. The warning messages are what happens before the account gets shadow-banned. Sometimes you can walk back in a dead commenter’s history to see what caused the problem and it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not apparent because it can happen for multiple reasons.

Personally, I’d rather have the constant out-of-bounds reminders than not. I’ve never seen one of those warning messages on a comment that didn’t deserve it, I’ll take the ‘please play nice’ requests all day if it quells ugly flame bait, and that’s exactly what it seems to do. He’s giving people both notification that it’s out of bounds and advance warning that there could be consequences. Much worse is out there and easy to find. Do you have examples that are much better, on a comparably sized forum?

Like I said, it's why this site works and others don't. I'm not aware of a better solution. Facetiously, I suppose you could take the approach of the app 'Yo': constrain the possible messages to exclude anything potentially offensive.

I used to work for Disney and we were tasked with constraining the possible messages to exclude potentially offensive material. It does keep out the obvious no-effort messages with swear words, and it does tend to reduce negative messages. But it was interesting and sometimes fun to see the creative ways people would write bad words or sexually suggestive materials or tell each other off. It’s not possible to stop all offensive content with constraints or technology. Not yet anyway.

>I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't.

The thing is I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Now you can have entire threads where the only comments are "lol" or something like that.

I was not aware what this feature did. Thanks for pointing it out. I generally enjoy reading things even if I disagree with them because they tend to at least give me something to think about.

ex.:

Can't see why you were downvoted?

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