Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Reposts are fine after a year or so (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and it's good to have the classics reappear from time to time as the newer cohorts of users don't know about them yet.

Related past threads... others?

Shirky.com is gone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31038660 - April 2022 (143 comments, including from clay_shirky - perhaps he'll show up in this one too!)

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706413 - July 2021 (61 comments)

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 - July 2020 (14 comments)

LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments)

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 - June 2017 (1 comment)

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments)

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4059338 - June 2012 (2 comments)

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 - Sept 2011 (15 comments)

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 - Sept 2011 (8 comments)

Ask YC: forums still a viable format (group-enemy problem)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 - Nov 2009 (6 comments)

Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 - Feb 2009 (13 comments)

A group is its own worst enemy... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 - May 2007 (1 comment)

A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 - March 2007 (3 comments)

For those familiar, today was the day after reading this essay so many times, I discovered Clay wrote books, and I ordered some.

Perennial links might make a great addition to the HN Lists page for readers new and old. I’d love to see what else I have missed out on.

> Perennial links might make a great addition to the HN Lists page for readers new and old.

For those who are new, the mentioned HN Lists page is at: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

You'll also find it in the footer of every HN page with Lists as it's anchor text.

Just a (very late) contribution to the 'It's Gone' discussion.

Anyone with a legacy blog that is causing headaches: perhaps wget to extract the static html pages and pop them somewhere?

Archive.org is always available as a last resort of course.

Have you considered adding some notes to the guidelines based on articles like this? It talks about group-forming habits that on HN I'd imagine you want people alert to and then avoiding.

I'd be interested in adding anything that is (a) important and (b) not derivable from the guidelines that are already there. But I don't know what that would be. Suggestions are welcome!

Some suggestions:

1. There is a lot of stuff in the HN Undocumented norms repo[0] that would be potentially good candidates.

2. Clear up some of the oft repeated norms around disagreement and downvotes. Downvotes in general (when do you get access to the downvote, what they are for, why there are no submission downvotes, etc).

3. Information about posting: reposting, file types (since only pdfs and videos are mentioned explicitly), pay walls. Add a note about year tags.

4. Info about why titles are sometimes changed automatically (since this is often confusing to people).

5. An explicit call out that bots and entirely (or almost entirely) generated comments are banned, with allowances for comments with substantial human contribution quoting eg ChatGPT output.

[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

> There is a lot of stuff in the HN Undocumented norms repo[0] that would be potentially good candidates

Specifically which items? We can't include all of them—the list would be too long. Actually https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is too long already. The longer we make it, the less people will read, so the bar for additions needs to be high.

> Clear up some of the oft repeated norms around disagreement and downvotes

A mere rule can't clear that one up. What clicks those buttons is the reptile brain, and the reptile brain doesn't know about rules.

> Information about posting: reposting, file types (since only pdfs and videos are mentioned explicitly), pay walls. Add a note about year tags.

Reposting is in the FAQ. Re file types—which ones? pdfs and videos are the main cases, and it's important for guidelines not to be laundry lists.

Paywalls—that's an interesting case. I think it needs to remain a grey area. Not grey like https://www.color-hex.com/color/dedede, mind you—more like https://www.color-hex.com/color/676767. But not black and white like it would be if we officialized it.

> Add a note about year tags.

To me that one's on the wrong side of "what belongs in the guidelines". The current system, which leaves it to convention, moderator edits, and user comments, works fine. Every detail we add to the guidelines has a cost—it dilutes the attention people pay to the other ones.

> Info about why titles are sometimes changed automatically (since this is often confusing to people).

This is another discretion-is-the-better-part-of-valor case, like downvotes—it's too emotional to be subject to rules or explanations (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Rather than add a rule that everyone breaks, thus weakening the entire ruleset, I'd rather leave it to work itself out in the threads.

> An explicit call out that bots and entirely (or almost entirely) generated comments are banned, with allowances for comments with substantial human contribution quoting eg ChatGPT output.

This is the one I'm closest to agreeing with, but the way you phrase it does a good job of bringing out its problems. How much generated content is ok? is it ok to just quote? and so on. I'm also not sure that it doesn't already follow from the existing guidelines, particularly the one about curious conversation.

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