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Comment by Temporary_31337 | Hacker News Reader

Is no one commenting for fear of being harassed?

In my experience (And observations), depending on _interest_ posts start gathering comments after at least the hour mark. This post right now is 25 mins old, although its' weird that it's so high in the front page (Probably a slow Saturday)

Off topic and probably the wrong place to ask, but how are the posts ranked? I have also seen posts that are very high but with little to no comments

From the FAQ:

How are stories ranked?

The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

Indeed, the "overheated discussions" factor probably downgrades (ed: rather, tends to downgrade) heavily-commented stories, not the other way around. I for one tend to regard a high upvote/comment ratio as a positive sign about a story.

Measures of “overheated discussion” probably can't distinguish easily between matters that are purely divisive and those that are genuinely complex/interesting/ground-breaking/surprising/etc (so deserving of that much of people's time). Whether punishing based on this measure for this reason is beneficial overall or not is a divisive discussion in its own right!

Not easily, no, but I think a very fast reply frequency, especially between lots of pairs of two people, is more indicative of heat than light. :) (who knows, maybe the algorithm will think that about this reply) Genuinely interesting topics probably require more time to write worthwhile comments on, and draw in more people.

(To be clear, I'm not implying nor do I think that HN uses raw comment-count as a signal of overheating, just expressing my surprise at the previous poster's surprise at seeing high-ranked stories with few comments, since the correlation should run the other way if at all.)

Well I was but now you mentioned it ...

:-)

I just think it's sad, and one of the many things we need to think about to fix FOSS, because FOSS will save us :-)

I have no affiliation with the ReactOS project but I honestly think that the doxxing could and should have been avoided (assuming the name included in the title is a person's real name). It probably also goes against some HN rules, but I may be wrong on that.

Posting the name of a harasser is not doxxing.

Yes it is, especially if it's posted with no evidence backing up the claims.

For all we know, this might be a private dispute between two people, and, if presented all the information, Bryan's side might be the side that sounds more reasonable...

> with no evidence backing up the claims

While the post fails to directly present evidence, and could be improved by doing so, given the nature of the complaint perhaps simply searching in the bug tracker and related forums would easily surface said evidence.

I was on HN when the Boston bombings happened, trust me, you don't want to let random people on the Internet doxx other people, no matter how smart or righteous the people doing the doxxing think they are.

that's a handy tool for doxxing, just claim some kind of ill-will and you're off the hook.

(( no, it's still doxxing. ))

It’s kind of hard when the person in question is doxxing themselves: https://github.com/Zero3K

At least, if you want to identify them at all. But a warning without the identity is a bit pointless I guess.

That said, I can’t find anything crazy in a quick look at either their Jira or Forum.

https://jira.reactos.org/browse/ROSBE-173?jql=reporter%20in%...

Zero3K seems to have been involved with ReactOS since at least 2019, and has quite a lot of issues reported.

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