Hacker News Reader

Comment by namecheapTA | Hacker News Reader

I'm basically an expert in retail automobiles being heavily involved in car racing, selling cars for Audi Porsche for over a decade, and have a mechanical engineering degree. The amount of misinformation I see on Jalopnik articles, and the comments, is staggering. I attempted to post civil replies and corrections countless times. I was never 'ungrayed'. Not only did I eventually stop using the site, I can only imagine the thousands of people that missed out on useful knowledge.

View on HN

I have found that I'm always most disappointed in the comments in areas that I know something about, and I rarely comment on such article (luckily it doesn't happen that often). To be fair though I don't see HN as some kind of authoritative information source, it's just a place for somewhat like minded people to come and shoot the shit about stuff. So people have some dumb opinions about cars, they just want to talk about it, they're not writing legislation or something. It's like overhearing a conversation in a coffee shop, you can walk over and tell the people they're wrong, but my experience is that rarely leads to any kind of comeaderie. Better to just take part in the conversation and not worry if people are wrong (not that I'm good at following my own advice)

This sounds like Gell-Mann amnesia for forums.

That's a totally rational point about general coffee shop etiquette. But for an automotive website to have a comments section where only approved people can comment, and someone clearly posting well thought out details can't even get approved to post... Has a problem.

Over the years I've left a couple hundred comments on Jezebel and TheRoot. I'd say a third or so have gotten ungreyed — almost exclusively replies on existing threads that have been either approved or replied to by the author of the parent comment, in the same mechanism as RadioPaper.

Gawker staff used to participate in the comments, but those days are long gone. That means that a top-level comment by anybody who isn't already pre-approved will almost certainly remain in the greys.

I miss the way it was, but the Gawker properties have gone through multiple wringers.

So I agree that the Gawker properties have serious problems, but I think that the commenting mechanism actually yields some pretty great results. It would be fab if Radiopaper could iterate and improve on that model!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com