Hacker News Reader

Comment by vba616 | Hacker News Reader

2 pointsvba6168 comments

Demonstrably false by just visiting https://hn.algolia.com/ (default sorted to stories by popularity which correlates highly with number of comments). Tons of great content and tons of great discussion. It's not all going to be great, but you can choose not to self-select into the comment section of stories you don't want to engage with.

Ok, I looked. "Tons", but what percentage? Also, how many of those great threads had anything to do with intellectual curiosity?

Here is a prime example:

"“Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says"

Another:

"Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever"

They may be tailored for the HN crowd, and not some of the more toxic threads but can you make a case they're about intellectual stimulation?

There's no way to avoid all possible collateral damage. But also, if the guidelines are inoperative, something should be done to align them with reality.

FFS, "Stephen Hawking has died" is NEWS. It's not Stephen Hawking's new theory!

A message to our customers is also news.

If someone is capable of discriminating among news stories, that's all well and good. But they aren't. Probably due to lack of resources which dang often alludes to.

Another thing, "All time" is all time, by definition, it doesn't capture if things are getting worse, which I think they are.

What have we got for popularity in the last week?

"Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes(https://www.jremissing.com/)"

Oh, yeah, that's TOTALLY HN material!

Well, it is now, isn't it?

Something can be tech-related and still complete clickbait and by-the-book not appropriate.

And if that's what HN is, fine. Change the goddamn description of what it is, then.

You can have plenty of very interesting conversations within even a mass of comments.

Here’s my modest proposal: quit posting outage reports. They’re always temporary, it isn’t interesting, there’s bugger all to discuss, and all the big sites have their own uptime report sites.

Wouldn’t mind seeing Wikipedia links being blocked, too. They’re nothing but cheap-ass karma whoring, and virtually never entertain even a single damn comment. They don’t contribute anything to HN.

Wikipedia links have led to many interesting HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The best thing about those threads is that the topics usually aren't correlated with other topics that appear here. This is good for curiosity. Generic Wikipedia links on popular topics are low-quality submissions, but those rarely make the front page.

We do prefer a high-quality third party link to Wikipedia submissions when one is available: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

p.s. If by "outage reports" you mean posts like "$FooCo is down", we routinely penalize those. People aren't going to stop posting them though.

So would this give power to people who dislike/disagree with some thread to censor it by posting more comments? This policy would pretty certainly encourage more negativity, if putting out comments can get something deleted

Or maybe a random lottery where every comment has a 1:1000 chance of being deleted. That sounds like fun /s

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