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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I spent a few hours a while back writing up a reusable answer for this question, with lots of links from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.)

If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN, here are some links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

or you can look at these past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

p.s. In case anyone's worried, no, we're not letting (or going to let) HN be taken over by politics. The proportions are stable and carefully regulated, although there is fluctuation, as with any stochastic process.

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how do you manage all these replies? is it just bookmarked or do you keep a spreadsheet? I see you do this often.

I guess they're engraved into my brain like a wax recording by now.

I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones, but otherwise I just go find them in HN Search.

For those not familiar with it, HN's search, provided by Algolia, has syntax for searching posts, comments, by author, within date ranges, and (for posts) above or below thresholds, and more.

See: https://hn.algolia.com/help

It's also accessible as a DDG bang, !hn

I also make heavy use of search. Often searching for dang's comments ;-)

>I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones

More evidence that dang is a superhuman form of life.

> I guess they're engraved into my brain like a wax recording by now.

Because you had frequent access to these resources/links/texts as a part of your job, I believe they live in your brain's RAM.

Keep up the good work @dang!

I can call up specific tweets from years ago by searching keywords that I remember (or at least I used to be able to before Twitter nerfed search). Just sticks in the brain.

Hacker News's biggest problem is the chilling effect. The long-timers know that if you write too well and people start inquiring about a "follow" feature with you in mind, it's only a matter of time before you get banned because you're "too young" (well, he isn't anymore) to have that kind of "success" and less articulate people feel bad about themselves.

On politics, Hacker News itself isn't right-wing, at least most of its users aren't, but the fact that anything more than a standard deviation to the left gets you hammered through that passive aggressive rank-altering and "slowban" has really put a damper on the ability for people to indulge their intellectual curiosities. Simply asking whether we, who "hack" in service to corporate capitalism, are doing the right thing, is enough to get you in trouble.

There are some absolute top-notch people posting here, but there are far too many corporate shills, and the good ones know they have to be careful.

"...there are far too many corporate shills, the good ones know they have to be careful."

Huh. Today I learned I'm not one of the good ones.

You only have 258 karma. You don't have to worry yet. When you get into the mid-thousands, that's when things get dicey.

Tech is like card counting. If you actually figure the game out, you get punished and flushed out. If you keep gambling and losing and don't know why (because you're bad at what you're trying to do) there will be a seat at the table until everything is squeezed out of you.

Maybe. I don't invest enough time and emotion here to have anything substantial to lose.

I consider myself a tradesman who, naively or not time will tell, leverages a rarified skill set at market rate trying to deliever value to clients as best as I can.

Millenial enough to have no expectations of a charmed future, despite earning an annual income in the top decile, but not jaded enough to put a price tag on my soul, principles nor well-being.

Though I am reasonably active on HN, I actually have no idea what you mean. Could you go into more detail about 'the game' and what one should worry about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

...and I just lost.

I have ~12k karma and never experienced anything getting dicey. I’ve never been affiliated with YC or the mods.

In my experience it’s a pretty fair community and I’ve been downvoted many times.

Ditto what 'awb said, every word.

> Tech is like card counting. If you actually figure the game out, you get punished and flushed out.

Wouldn't this dynamic that you describe from your perspective exist in every industry?

Assuming there’s a “game” to be played, and you get pushed out, you probably didn’t understand the real game.

In the card counting example, the game isn’t blackjack, the game is the house always wins. If you’re card counting and losing money, no one cares.

I’ve been reasonably successful in tech and don’t know of any games besides the free market.

At least no games with underlying dynamics you would like to share, and I say that with a grin.

The discussion of moderation policies and topics in posting usually derive from a shared understanding of a forum as a group of people, rather than a trajectory where current community opinions in turn, create the future community.

There is also the origins of Hacker News as Startup News, which immediately creates a covariance constraint between seniority and topic. The only way this dynamism can be managed is having temporal aspects (e.g., boundaries, limits on accelerationism toward specific topics), included in moderating policies.

> You only have 258 karma.

And you only have 1 karma, so you're not qualified to say what you said in your previous post. Of course, my point is that I know how much karma you have, as much as you know how much karma any other person has, which is...you don't. And I've been here long enough to know that your original comment is getting downvoted, because it's largely full of false statements. Sure, you can cherry pick a few examples here and there, as you could on any site, but to say that is is HN's "biggest problem" is demonstrably false.

> I know how much karma you have, as much as you know how much karma any other person has, which is...you don't

FYI, clicking a username tells you have much karma someone else has.

For example, you have 4,258 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stronglikedan

I think the implication is that you don't know how many accounts into HN someone is.

For example, I could make a burner and appear to have 0 karma, but still have however much I've got on this account - much like sveno appears to have done.

I have 51000 karma. I am not playing any game. I just enjoy posting here, and try to make interesting comments. I far prefer it to Reddit and Slashdot, and rarely bother with them anymore.

Probably all thanks to dang!

I also have many unpopular views, and know I'm going to get downvoted plenty for them, but post them anyway.

My tactic is more trying to get people to either think through or substantiate their claims or positions than simply focusing on "unpopular opinions". Including in some recent exchanges with you. I make a point of challenging what I suspect are viewpoints adopted for conventionality rather than empiricism or reasoning.

That also occasionally seems to unsettle some readers. I think on balance it improves the site. All the more so when people respond or learn things.

(I've certainly learned from being challenged on my own comments, and make my own fair share of errors.)

I made one submission that got a LOT of traction. which got me to around 1k karma.

Karma is useless.

> Karma is useless

Exactly. I can't even trade it for a cuppa coffee.

Similar karma, also post as I think. Often disagree with viewpoints expressed, including many of those of WalterBright's.

But I agree with him here that there's been no general penalty observed.

The only things I've noticed are a couple of people reaching out on account of my being on the leaderboard (no, I can't get your posts approved, yes, I will report your trying to do so), and having corresponded with the mod team for years (occasionally viewpoint issues, mostly boring submission stuff such as titles, disambiguated URLs, and occasional spam), what I think is a fairly good mutual understanding. Not always agreement, but general respect. I'll make my case or argument, and almost always accept the moderation response. I've had numerous submissions entered into the 2nd chance pool.

Overall calibre of discussion for an open and general-interest website is excellent. Occasional visiting expertise is an added plus.

My own submissions sometimes succeed, are occasionally flagged, and mostly just languish in the "new" page.

It's a tech-themed reddit, bro. It's not that deep.

I'm finding this a little hard to follow but I'd love to see an example of anyone we banned for writing well or being "too young".

Y'all never banned me and I was definitely an articulate, immature asshole with a victim complex.

I'm REALLY glad I don't remember my username from my high school years.

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