A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors | Hacker News Reader

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

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226 pointsbehnamoh68 comments

Ohh... I thought 'flag' was like a bookmark, for something that I wanted to read but isn't my 'favorite', but because I couldn't find the flagged articles I stopped using it...

O.D.G! Well at least you held your hand up to not reading the FAQ

To be honest I've probably read it multiple times, but they're usually not interesting enough to remember. :/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 2018 391 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 2019 25 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548010 2020 3 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 2021 255 comments

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 2019 188 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 2020 267 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 2022 67 comments

It's posted pretty often!

An undocumented behavior not on the list of undocumented behaviors is that vouching and presumably flagging as well can be shadowbanned. If you vouch for things which then get flagged again, the vouch link won't disappear, it just won't do anything anymore. So you should be careful if vouching or flagging something is "worth it".

Same goes for Up-/Downvoting on comments. I know because I've lost mine a couple years ago. ;)

Do you mean that you can vote on comments but it has no global effect anymore?

Not the one you asked, but for me it's exactly that. My upvotes are indicated by a disappearing arrow, but with no result on the comment.

How do you know it has no result if you can't see total number of votes or score for that comment?

I simply look at the member's kilarma. If the sum remains unchanged, my input has been discarded.

Are you sure that user karma is updated real time ?

Not 100 percent, but I'm convinced it's close enough.

If it's more than an hour delay, I might consider reconsidering.

Yeah, same as eth0up

That is true, I am not sure how it is calculated but flagging and/or vouching rights end up being shadowbanned if overused or disagrees with $deity

A new one I recently learned about: you can favorite comments!

You have to click on the actual comment context to do so.

It actually got me thinking if I ever would have favorited comments even if I knew about the feature. Caught me by surprise.

That's a handy feature. I have in the past favourite a thread more so for a the comments (book recommendations are a common one) than the actual article.

Post numbers may be ornamented with alternating red and green colour on Christmas Day.

As in 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20071225140214/http://news.ycomb...

This is one of those things I have probably never noticed out of colorblindness :P

What a cruelty of fate that society has picked the two^1 action colors from the pallet that affect colorblind people

1: I actually only recently learned there were multiple forms of colorblindness from the Chrome emulation drop-down

How does karma from submissions work? What percentage do you get? For example this guy has a submission with 196 karma but only has 104 karma:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikaelaustin

You get 100%, as far as I know. He may have a ton of downvotes from comments that net out some of that karma

Apparently this isn't the case in actuality. Here are a couple threads about it where Dan confirms that not all upvotes count toward karma:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459769

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438849

He has 0 comments and no other submissions, the account is less than a day old

Absolutely not the case, as others have mentioned

Cool, I like https://news.ycombinator.com/pool. Possibly more interesting than the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments is interesting as well. I have a recent comment with 74 points and it's only on the fifth page. I guess people are getting a lot of upvotes on their comments!

I think 'bestcomments' is for a certain timeframe because most that are at the top are about Google and Google Stadia, which was relevant not long ago.

I think the fact that posts like these turn up often and that a lot of users comment 'omg, I didn't know that' points to the need for Dan and the other mods to either update the sites FAQ or provide a new one. All joking aside, it should only take a day or two to do it and is obviously much needed as their userbase expands.

The source code for the software that runs Hacker News was available at one time. Are the undocumented features, voting ring detectors, and spam detectors not in the released source code? It would make sense that they weren't.

>The source code for the software that runs Hacker News was available at one time.

still is: http://arclanguage.org

>Are the undocumented features, voting ring detectors, and spam detectors not in the released source code?

Some are, but things like voting ring detection and spam detection aren't. YCombinator doesn't often share the code of changes they make to HN, unfortunately.

I've wondered about creating an extension for HN and Reddit to get around what I see as a problem in the voting system.

Nominally, downvotes aren't for disagreeing, they're for posts that don't add to the discussion. Upvotes aren't a perfect reflection: a comment with a high score or prominence implies consensus.

Sometimes I'll see comments where I think it has been unfairly downvoted - maybe greyed out for posting an unpopular opinion - but I don't think the comment deserves my co-signing or approval. I can upvote it, but then the negative votes may later turn out to be an anomaly and be cancelled-out by upvotes or by having the negative votes de-fuzzed. Then the comment is visible again but has my +1 and might be obscuring a reply that I thought did deserve an upvote.

My extension would be a third button on greyed-out comments. Maybe 'resurrect'. It will work as an upvote until the comment is allowed to be part of the discussion again, then it removes it.

With Reddit I'd just add it to the firehose but HN's lower traffic and greater risk of astroturfing means I'd seek dang approval first.

This is kind of what the "vouch" button is for?

> Nominally, downvotes aren't for disagreeing, they're for posts that don't add to the discussion.

On HN one should downvote for disagreeing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

That is incompatible with the practice of making it hard, or even impossible, to see comments which have been downvoted too much. I am guessing it also was not taking into account the type and volume of use/abuse that it sees today.

This problem will never be solved if it hasn't by now. Downvoting as disagreement, or to punish unpopular ideas, is rampant. And downvoting is not just a way of EXPRESSING disagreement, it's a way to suppress those you disagree with by hiding their comments. And, as pointed out here and elsewhere in this submission, the vouching mechanism that WAS meant to solve it will be silently disabled for your account if you use it to offset too many posts which are TOO unpopular or disagreed-with.

Thanks for this. I've been on this site for longer than my kids have been alive and I didn't know half this stuff.

The filter by points seems quite useful[0], especially as the amount of submissions has wildly increased in the last couple of years

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100

My biggest feature wishlist: Ability to search only within my favorites.

Mine is to either improve the markup sufficiently that it’s worth using, or remove it entirely.

Currently it sits at an awkward position where it’s not complete enough that it’s any good, but it’s too obtrusive to use “raw” text formatting à la plain text emails.

Shared Tagging of posts, perhaps like delicio.us had.

Using HNews as a database of knowledge, fallable as it is.

If it is overwhelmed a lot of the time, this wouldn’t make it any easier.

This 1,000,000x

To me it feels like the feature is not necessary at all, everybody can manage, organize and search their bookmarks on their own, the way they prefer.

For the greater portion of a year, I can no longer upvote comments. I can upvote submissions though.

I suspect this was mitigation against my upvoting comments which seemed unfairly grayed.

It's very kind of them to leave me the arrow icon, which at least pretends to accept my input.

How do you know or test this? You can’t see the numeric scores of other people’s comments. Use a second account?

You can see the person's total points

The other reply to your question is correct. Simply note the user's total sum.

I had this limitation on my account for a while too. It was because I was upvoting flame-bait comments that had been grayed out. My personal reasoning at the time was "but the other poster started it" (these were deeply nested angry comment chains). After a couple of months I emailed dang to request if I could get real voting back and he took the penalty off my account, after explaining why it had been put there in the first place.

If you see an ugly exchange of comments,

DO downvote (or ignore) provocations.

DON'T upvote provocative retorts, even if you think that the reaction was justified.

And if you get your account penalized, you can have the penalties lifted with an email to hn@ycombinator.com.

> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors users have set: https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors

Seems this is sorted by popularity? I'd have never expected the color I set (#ffcc00) to make it so high on the list. But then most people probably don't bother changing the default setting, so it can just be due to the low base effect. Would be great to know what it's like in absolute terms.

I set #0099FF, the opposite of the default, in order to quickly see if I'm logged in. I'd expect that being related to the default, it's a common choice. But it doesn't seem to be.

I've had #93A1A1 on for so long I forget it isn't the official color...

I really wish that link would show the tally for each color

I find it strange that there is no link in the navigation bar to open the "best" category. Only "new" and "past" is shown, but when you open

https://news.ycombinator.com/best

you get a different ordering of articles.

There are a whole bunch of pages like that. Click "Lists" (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) at the bottom of the page and you get:

https://news.ycombinator.com/front Front page submissions for a given day (e.g. 2016-06-20)

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool Links selected for a second chance at the front page

https://news.ycombinator.com/invited Overlooked links, invited to repost

https://news.ycombinator.com/best Highest-voted recent links

https://news.ycombinator.com/active Most active current discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments Highest-voted recent comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew The latest Ask HN (i.e. text) posts

https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew The latest Show HN posts

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories Submissions from new accounts

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments Comments from new accounts leaders Users with most karma

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring Monthly "Who Is Hiring" threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/launches Launches of YC startups

What about the one where you get shadowbanned from posting any new submissions but not comments?

If you've documented them, then they are no longer undocumented.

The same way you can't know something that is unknown

“We also know there are known unknowns — that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.”

The motivation for making this list was due to the deliberate sparseness of the HN Guidelines and FAQs.

From the 2018 thread [0]

> What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low.

This is something, I thought, has gotten way worse since covid. I always explained it (mostly to myself) from the sudden influx of people that arrived faster than cultural assimilation could happen. Back then, it was only cryptocurrency topics where I preferred not reading the comments.

Nowadays, it’s so many topics where I quickly nope out of the comments again. It’s still better than most places, but that’s because it started from a far superior position.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441306

Would it be an option to embrace that development? Instead of assimilating everybody the Borg way, it would also be possible to tag snarky people and allow each user to choose if their comments should be included.

The front page could be an example of good behavior, but people don't have to adapt instantly. They can be snarky, are flagged, and get the signal that the expectations are higher. With some resources for personal development, depending on the flagged transgressions, there could be a form of assimilation that scales.

I mean, what you are describing is still assimilation [0]. The way to get there can be multifold, but concepts like not being toxic (which seems harder to accept) and providing value instead of making joke-comments (which seems to be accepted somewhat readily) still need to be adopted by new people.

This is exactly how it should be, but it’s also a way that, at least IMO, does not scale and stopped working properly.

[0]: the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure

Well two of three years since COVID hit have been hotly contentious election years. I would expect things to rapidly cool down come this December.

Your words in whoever’s ears ;)

▲ ▲ ▲

...by which they become documented features and behaviors.

It's too bad the maintainer appears to have abandoned this, judging by the pull requests.

I haven't abandoned it, I just haven't gone though the PRs deeply.

The commit history is a better metric for repo activity.

Their censorship function is broken because you can just make a new account in 30 seconds from a new ip which is automatic now with safari relay. This is like my 50th account. And there’s no real benefit to amassing points except for the mods and users to threaten taking them away to keep you singing the woke village tune and not criticize YC startups. But you know that’s a loss to HN, because there’s a great deal of value in dissenting opinion. Don’t you want to know if you have a delusional bad idea? Of course that’s valuable feedback. The self censorship flagging is also a nasty feature allowing crypto zealots to control the narrative. Take for example that ridiculous eyeball scanning crypto scam. Any criticism was censored, and then twitter found out and shot it down in glorious style. Well and Edward Snowden. Would’ve benefited the creators to actually listen to the criticism, which was super valid, over censoring it on a backwater forum to give the false impression of endorsement by the bay.

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