I think he also found that as two people argued down a thread, their wall of text gets thinner and thinner, and more annoying to read, and hoped that was a deterrence as well.
They all invent some rationale for why they are better but all of them are, in the end, the same.
For example, Anonymity plays an outsized role in the equation. FB is as you said essentially the same as Reddit except (most) people self censor to a degree that keeps it mostly cordial. They’re not going to use certain language and allow their full opinions to be heard, because someone they actually know could be reading. (Some people don’t care and post unfiltered but speaking of the majority).
Generally People posting on LinkedIn is often going to be some form of HR speak, they don’t want to offend anyone in their professional network. They’re not going to talk about religion and politics and whatnot.
Mostly I don't. Nearing my 7th decade, I have spent most of my adult life seeking convergence of my private and public self. It's one reason that since the early 90s I have used my initials as my username everywhere.
I highly value privacy but have no need of anonymity, though I understand it's life or death for too many.
And I don't mean I would be the same around a stranger as I am my wife of 35 years. I mean I would be my honest, authentic self for each context. Twitter or nestr, Facebook or Reddit, church or mall, my hometown USA or Berlin.
I rarely comment here because I rarely have any value to add.
I too feel I'm my true authentic self in each scenarios, I'm just calculating risk, disruption, impact to reputation, etc and can always choose silence as a safe option. Although, safe discussion on these topics is often the most interesting to me. It's controversial stuff where my opinions have reason 'to me' but I'm open to hearing other points of view. I don't see my thoughts as immutable so if some stranger on the internet says something I haven't considered, I might just change my way of thinking entirely.
Maybe it's the way comments are weighted here, or the fact that post scores aren't shared, but it's definitely the best place on the web for me.
The non-contributors here here speak in full sentences, cite cherry picked links to back up their assertions of the local dogma and link to the Wikipedia page of whatever trope they want to reference rather than just stating it. These sorts of comments perform the same social utility (tribe signaling basically) to the people who peddle them as saying "yikes" and "the front fell off" on reddit and the snarky bigoted quips they use on the chans. Such non-contributions seem to be of roughly the same prevalence on all platforms, ours are just the most polished.
On the other hand, I really would not mind notifications for replies to my posts, and I don't think they would negatively impact my HN experience. What I like about HN is mostly the community, the content, reading the comments, the UX/UI comes quite behind.
It depends on how often that person visits HN, how busy is their "threads" timeline and how deeply they go into it. Then, finally, whether or not your comment requires or provokes a response.
Your reply actually made me curious and I logged into an old Hacker News account that I hadn’t used in a few years. Hundreds of comments on that account, many that had a very positive responses (thousands of total points). Yet not a single point was given since I switched accounts, likely because close to no one has read any of those comments since they were made.
On web forums it’s not unusual for me to get replies and reactions for comments that were made a decade ago.
That can be a problem, which is why some web forums lock threads against necroposting.
HN also doesn't allow necroposting. If you view some months-old posting, the reply link won't be there.
You’re welcome.
But https://www.hnreplies.com works fairly well.
I have found that it forgets about me, after a while, so I stopped using it.
Every now and then, one of my downvote stalkers likes to go to an old comment I made, and write an insult. I assume that because the comment is so old, the post defies the Banhammer.
I don't mind missing those, and I guess it makes them feel better about themselves, so it's all good.
A rare occurrence with technology.
One is https://alerthn.com that does full text search on topics and commenets. It works great for years.
The other is http://www.hnreplies.com/ and it sends email on replies to your comments. It works good, but it stops after some time but you can subscribe again.
I am following my comments through threads button in top, though it's not so easy to notice which have new reply and everything need to be checked manually. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=petodo
I wish there was some service where you enter your HN username and it would show you newest replies to all your comments.
I would want to be very confident that this was a bad thing before "fixing" it. HN's current culture must inevitably be shaped by this effect. How would it change if it was removed? I'm not sure i want HN to become another forum where pairs of people get into long back-and-forths.
The user interface you need to solve that problem is to be able to put in your user ID to see a timeline of all replies to any of your items whatsoever, not replies to a specific post.
Or, as petodo put it in the comment i was replying to:
> some service where you enter your HN username and it would show you newest replies to all your comments.
2,578 HN Users Signed Up / 10,453 Reply Notifications Sent in Past 30 Days
Created by Dan Grossman
If HNers wanted notifications they would’ve implemented it in the last decade.
HNers have been complaining about wanting notifications since forever, and several people have set up services to that end.
A tiny nit - computers are good at things, so the input box could easily take either a post id - eg 34520664 - or, for ease of use, the whole url - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520664 - and then do the trivial string manipulation to extract out the id.
Saves the bit of friction going copying address bar to using hntoast.
Just my 2 cents.
https://apps.apple.com/be/app/hacker-news-comments/id1602932...