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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

How appropriate, people being told to shut up on a post about people being made to shut up.

Dammit dang, downvote abuse is a real issue.

The very fact that people keep bringing this up should clue you in. Once or twice, okay maybe it's the complainer's perception that's wrong, but again and again, for over a year? Then your damn system has a problem.

The least you could do to address it is not let downvotes instantly affect a comment's visibility. Fucking delay it for a few hours to allow everyone at least a chance to be seen.

Why is that so painfully hard for you to do? Did you lose the source code or can't find another Malbolge maintainer to take over?

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>Dammit dang, downvote abuse is a real issue.

Maybe maybe not, but clearly not in this case. It was troll-ish and looking for a fight. Just like your own:

>How appropriate, people being told to shut up on a post about people being made to shut up.

Would you talk to your mother that way? It isn't respectful and it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

>Why is that so painfully hard for you to do? Did you lose the source code or can't find another Malbolge maintainer to take over?

I rest my case.

This is not a one year problem. And it will stay that way because, as you know, HN is a corporation. Not a public forum.

Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way.

The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a high level by not talking about the rules is at least condescending to the participants.

It doesn't matter to them if they lose you on these grounds since talking about the rules appears only on extremes which are shallow in a normal distribution. They will lose the few participants that care enough about that while maintaining those in the middle. (Of course, cutting of the extremes will grow newer ones in the empty space but I digress...).

What happens with time is that people adjust their discourse to the middle ground making it void of any new or interesting information. Thus, HN becomes an echo chamber of mainstream ideas and people will leave when they got bored enough of the same thing. We're already there and @dang is more vocal now because he knows it.

I only partly agree with your view. It might be so, but there is a genuine reason behind not discussing the rules: they're always off-topic. For people like me who come to HN to read an interesting discussion about tech issues, anything mentioning downvoting is almost automatically useless in the sense that it doesn't bring any new information, it's not interesting, it doesn't affect me in any way.

Yes, if I were in charge of HN I would solve certain issues differently, and so would you, but it's a private forum run by someone else, so we have to obey in order to participate, whether we like it or not. The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.

> The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.

Oh fucking boy, no. What even is that logic

We have a bunch of tabs open on a bunch of other social sites and forums. We don’t prefer HN to any other place, we just think something about it sucks badly enough to express our disdain of it.

Overton Window 201

Moloch is always and everywhere.

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