A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors | Hacker News Reader

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

github.com

55 pointsqndev25 comments

Big discussion 4 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 (437 points/188 comments)

Comment collapsing is a useful feature. The problem with giving the largest weight to the most upvoted comment is it also gives a large weight to all replies (unless they're heavily downvoted). It's useful to be able to skip those replies once they get less interesting.

However, this does lead to yo-yoing: reading comments downwards, going back up to find the right collapse button then reading down again. It'd be useful to have a more direct "fast forward" button. Though admittedly I haven't thought this through in terms of UI design.

The new Reddit desktop site has a good solution for that - each comment draws a bar down the side of its children, which you can click on to collapse the paarent. You collapse any level of parent comment without havign to scroll back up.

> Downvoted comments (i.e. with a score < 1) reduce their placement on the comment thread and will appear desaturated to other users deemphasize them.

This desaturation is the most annoying misfeature of Hacker News IMO, it makes reading comments very hard and negates the "bandwagoning prevention" that not showing a visible score has (which is a good idea). I'd rather judge for myself a comment's worth than have it faded out for me.

(yes there are workarounds, like using Stylus to override the CSS, but my comment is against the misfeature not trying to find a workaround)

On a similar note, i see a lot of dead comments which i guess are marked as dead by getting flagged too much - essentially using the flag as a super-downvote and driving whoever is flagged out of discussion, not just because of faded out text (which can be worked around) but because you cannot reply to dead comments. The idea is only goon on a surface level (stomp out the bad commenters) but in practice it often backfires since if someone is spreading misinformation and their comment is killed, you cannot reply to it with the correct information so all what people will see is the misinformation.

>I'd rather judge for myself a comment's worth than have it faded out for me.

It's not for you, it's a feedback for the commenter. And making your comment unpleasant for others adds an emotional component into the feedback, which is quite effective.

But it also affects "me" and anyone who tries to follow a discussion by making the text harder to read. The commenter already has a feedback on the visible-to-them score. Why not make negative scores visible to everyone instead (even make the score red or whatever to point out this is a negative comment)? After all at the moment you introduce this visual change you do not care about the bandwagoning aspect anymore.

You can always read the comment by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page. The comment shouldn't be faded when you do that.

I don't believe it is for the commenter, they can see the number score of their comment.

I don't disagree, but other factors are dispositive. There need to be visual signals that the community doesn't support a post. Fading downvoted comments and displaying [flagged] provide such signals. Internally, this is important because it gives the community feedback about what kind of posts are wanted here. Feedback is the best way to regulate a complex system. Externally, it provides a check against people passing around links to dreck that showed up on HN and claiming that it represents the community. (For example, people sometimes do this on a popular twittering site that shall remain nameless.) With these visual signals, visitors to such links can see when the community immune system has rejected the comment.

Do these mechanisms get mis-applied to some comments that are unpopular but don't break the site guidelines? Yes they do. We do a pretty good job of undoing that in the case of flagging, but there are still some comments that end up getting downvoted and faded undeservedly. I don't know what to do about that, other than urge HN users to give such comments corrective a.k.a. compensatory upvotes. I don't believe that it would be good to reduce the power of downvotes, e.g. by not fading the comments. The bottom of the internet barrel gets ugly. We need those white blood cells.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

compensatory upvotes

I’ve been doing this, but didn’t have a name for it. Often times I’ll see reasonable comments greyed and give it an up vote. I think others are doing this to because just as often the comment will be black after some time. I suppose it’s easy for subjects in which I don’t have a side.

Some people call them corrective upvotes.

"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."

I use /newest to find and upvote new stuff all the time, are my votes being silently ignored?

I hope this implemented as filtering for users that cames from a same http referrer and leaves 1 vote only.

No. I looked at your upvotes from /newest and they have a very high rate of being counted.

Thanks for upvoting from /newest!

https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors is kind of fascinating (and ridiculous - why does it exist?).

Let me add some plots to the situation: https://imgur.com/a/KRzcQcU

Quite a range (I've always been happy with orange).

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97573 for why the topcolor option exists.

Does anyone know if 50 was the original karma limit for downvoting? I'm asking because I've always thought it was 50 and was surprised I was wrong by a factor of 10 :-).

To judge by the version at http://arclanguage.org/install, the original was 200.

'If the comment desaturation makes Hacker News difficult to read, you can click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page where the comment will no longer be faded, or you can install the CSS extension discussed here.'

Actually, it is also possible to just select the text. This will make it readable again, at least in my firefox.

Also there's https://news.ycombinator.com/whoami which will let you see your cookie values.

It's a great list, I've kept the link from the last time [0] it was posted.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973

That was the first time! Last time was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822.

Are you the person behind that list? If so, thank you! I referenced this list quite extensively last month when I was developing my iOS app HACK as it supports pretty much every endpoint referenced there!

No, it's minimaxir: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=minimaxir

Thank you mkl for answering me!

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