Hacker News Reader

Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

It is simple and I do like it, but I also worry that the counterparty can simply not accept your comment and always have the last word.

So there is a reduced incentive to invest your time in writing a reply.

View on HN

Once a conversation is published, you can no longer choose not to accept your counterparty's messages. However, if you choose not to respond to further messages in that conversation, your counterparty's additional messages will be considered "post-scripts," which do not cause a conversation to rise to the top of the Explore page. The effect is that, while no user can claim the last word from a counterparty, you can make it unlikely for a conversation to be seen by simply allowing the other user to have the last word.

I think it will hide discourse rather than trolls since, I strongly believe, people just wouldn't approve things they disagreed with or go against their beliefs. I don't see a value in a public conversation that allows one to silence another (well, besides spam/trolls of course, but "trolls" has mostly lost its meaning).

I don't see why that's a problem. They always can start their own conversation about the same topic if I, the conversation starter, don't find their contribution to my conversation valuable.

Wouldn't that strengthen the echo-chamber effect? If the original poster supports position X and does not allow anyone who supports position Y in to the conversation, then a position Y person will eventually start another thread and not allow anyone from position X to reply. So now you have two threads: one for position X supporters and one for position Y supporters, with no cross-talk between the two.

Unless, of course, there's some kind of mechanism that gives threads with higher engagement more prominence? That might create an incentive to have more inclusive conversations. Although that might incentivise trolling too...

EDIT: Perhaps combine the above with a reputation system, where you can see how ban-happy an original poster is. Since people don't like to waste their effort writing a reply that just gets ignored, ban-happy posters would be penalised by lack of engagement. Then platform provided moderation could just become a kind of 'meta-moderation' - basically just banning people who try to game the system (e.g. posting threads saying 'please reply so I can get my ban percentage down').

This could just limit the types of conversations that flourish on the service.

If neither party is adult enough to participate, then perhaps twitter and facebook aren’t the right places to have controversial discourse.

I could however see it leading to echo chamber threads, or sham threads where one party is deliberately providing a weak counter-argument, a bit like a fox news interview to a right wing politician.

Reminds me of how "letters to the editor" have worked for ages. A good faith editor picks out the best responses both praising and criticizing.

I think it's extremely important to not assume good faith/lack of bias, with anything of importance. I would prefer the option to see all responses, with "accepted" responses, from the editor, being the default view.

Good point. Perhaps they could implement a feature that indicates there has been a response submitted but not yet approved. Possibly it could include when it was sent, who the reply is from, whether the approver has seen it (and when they saw it). That would at least make it apparent when someone is withholding approvals for an unreasonable time.

The "seen" feature on whatsapp/facebook is the most infuriating feature that ever existed IMHO.

It's just so frustrating to have no replies when you know the message have been read.

HN is free of such shenanigans and it's been so far the best experience I've had on the internet.

Sometimes I grab my daughter's phone because she left it there, and the most recent imessage notification shows up as soon as it detects being picked up. Most commonly seen "most recent message" is "Bitch leavin me on read angry emoji..."

I would prefer transparency, with the ability to see all submitted replies to a comment, if I chose to, to help bring to light any bias/shenanigans.

The system could provide a higher friction way of accessing the unaccepted comment. This allows for audits (so as to compute the good-faithedness of the deciding counterparty), but still keeps trolls out of the limelight.

Exactly my thought - I reply here all the time and simply ignore responses half or more of the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com