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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Thanks—I appreciate your wisdom and I know that you're largely right. But I'm scared of unintended consequences.

It may be that there's a level-up here that we haven't achieved yet. But answering complaints and pushback is such a big part of what I do, and takes so much energy, that I'm scared to make more of the admin stuff public. I know it would explain things and have a settling effect for some; but others would misinterpret the information and get even more riled up by it. What the total effect of such a change would be is impossible to predict, but if it were 10x of the latter (the nightmare scenario), I'm not sure my heart could take it.

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I think if it were me, I would not reveal more than is already on the public record. I would wonder how to do repetition (of the already public bits) well for a smart crowd, knowing that smart people tend to loathe repetition.

For example, I might contemplate translating the guidelines into a few major languages (emphasizing in an intro that the site is in English and the translated guidelines are only intended to ease the onboarding process for a global audience). I think a lot of people fail to grasp how multicultural HN is and that a lot of dust ups are rooted in cultural and language barriers.

I second not sharing anything that isn't already public.

But there is this pattern where these discussions get hashed out either (a) when someone misbehaves and dang posts a reply to remind them about the guidelines or (b) like this, we have an impromptu comment thread on HN's mechanisms. In either case, the content gets buried pretty quickly and we're relying essentially on human memories to keep this institutional knowledge alive.

I wonder if it would help to explicitly collate this information somewhere. Think, something parallel to the guidelines. But the guidelines answer the question, "how should I behave on HN?" whereas this would be answering "how is HN run?" (Or perhaps, how is it not run.)

It's a half-baked thought, so don't take it too seriously, but I figured I'd mention it.

There once was a "undocumented features of hacker news" which was on github when "awesome" lists on github were the gimmick a few years back. I do not recall the link or name now.

Here you go. I usually email Max when I notice something missing from his list.

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments)

Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)

I've been doing an experiment on reddit to reduce its emotional impact on me, which is to hide all points. I was inspired by HN's approach of not showing you other commenter's points.

It works quite well. I'm much more true to myself and get into fewer combative situations. I bet it would reduce complaining to mods on HN as well. The site could still use points exactly the way it does behind the scenes, but users would be less concerned about their own status.

It's on my list to make it a profile option to hide all points/karma things.

Hiding it for everyone would be more radical and kind of scary to me. But we could maybe try it temporarly just to see what happens.

I used this method on reddit myself. It's just a userstyle, so I turn it off occasionally, but it makes it a voluntary action I have to turn back on if I want to see it.

Helped out, I think. Along with carefully practicing not escalating and picking when to just not comment.

This sounds well considered and I think you are doing well trusting your gut instinct on this.

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