Hacker News Reader

Comment by mountainboy | Hacker News Reader

my approach:

let everyone rate content on multiple relevant criteria. Eg, quality, grammar, agreement, sexuality, violence, hate, etc.

Make some default filters that choose societally acceptable settings for each filter, and hides new content that is unrated.

Enable individuals to tweak the filters to any setting they wish, for a totally custom view, including viewing unrated content.

Enable individuals to share their filters with others.

Voila! A system that allows any content to be posted, but shows only "safe" content by default and allows individuals to bypass the filters if they wish.

View on HN

Except, in this system you're relying on users who choose to view unrated content to provide the initial ratings. Even places like 4chan have moderation and most people won't be willing to engage with content at that level to positively rate memes or more general discussion. Add onto that that untrained users are going to be largely garbage at actually classifying your content; this is somethign social media struggles with and they have trained moderators. What's the difference between hate and ironic self ribbing, what's the difference between sexuality, art, and medicine (see tumblr's hilarious attempt at banning "femme presenting nipples"), what kind of content can be legitimately traumatizing or otherwise dangerous (calls to violence; deadly misinformation; etc).

The closest thing to that model is something like the fediverse where you're choosing to federate with instances based on their moderation rules and your users choose to stay on your instance based on yours. Even that has problems with chains of trust and discovery though. At scale you can't assume good faith anymore

At least for voting, the fix is simple and I don’t understand why both Reddit and HN (with the default settings) don’t do it: make voting invisible. That is, you sort the comments by the vote value they have, as is done now, but you don’t display the value. Reddit displays the value directly, and HN by gradually greying out comments. The problem with doing that is that it leads to bandwagoning. If I’d had to hazard a guess, a solid 50% of downvotes are people blindly ramming the downvote button because that comment already has a negative vote value.

HN used to display points (like Reddit), and removed them in maybe 2012, I don't remember the details.

It was super controversial at the time, as I remember (I was new, so I didn't care that much).

>the fix is simple and I don’t understand why both Reddit and HN (with the default settings) don’t do it: make voting invisible

Because part of the purpose of voting/karma is operant conditioning - visually marking certain comments as "low quality" and others as "high quality" and to encourage commenters to prefer creating and engaging with the latter over the former through the constant feedback loop of reward and punishment.

> If I’d had to hazard a guess, a solid 50% of downvotes are people blindly ramming the downvote button because that comment already has a negative vote value.

That's the system operating as intended, ruthlessly separating the signal from the noise. I don't particularly like it either but Hacker News isn't about free discussion so much as curated discussion.

This sounds like granular trigger warnings, which people have voiced opposition to for reasons

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