Hacker News Reader

Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

I actually did a smaller thing for HN. I have client side JS that blocks results from a few domains that seemed to promote low quality discussions and/or irrelevant submissions.

    const boringDomains = [
        "newyorker.com",
        "nytimes.com",
        "economist.com",
        "wired.co.uk",
        "bbc.com",
        "aella.substack.com",
        "hecolumn.substack.com",
        "wsj.com",
        "kqed",
        "voanews.com",
        "wusa9.com",
        "noemamag.com",
        "arstechnica.com",
        "independent.co.uk",
        "axios.com"
    ]

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a"))
        .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain)))
        .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
        .flatMap(elem => [elem, elem.nextElementSibling, elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling])
        .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

View on HN

...BBC? Ars Technica? ...KQED and VOA? You're blocking discussion of some of the most reliably factual reporting on the planet.

shrugs I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list. If the resulting conversations suck, aren't relevant to me, and clog up the HN front page - in they go.

There's something uniquely social-media-y about a person posting a list of websites they don't enjoy the contents of or discussion around, and then posting that they've filtered them out in a way that only impacts them, and then that person getting questioned and challenged on their filtering.

> I don't really feel the need to defend the contents of that list.

You were quite willing to promote the specific and lengthy list of disliked-sites to strangers.

A sudden switch to fatigue and disinterest does not seem genuine to me.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The domains in question lead to guaranteed uninteresting and routine political bickering where each side is compelled to recite their talking points. It has nothing to do with the reporting and everything to do with how people comment on those topics. I'd be guilty of it too if I weren't busy flagging those posts.

The parent poster said

>... that seemed to promote low quality discussions

My guess is that these domains are responsible for hot button topics that result in 300+ comment threads.

Isn't VOA (and BBC for that matter) government owned & funded? That's enough right there for me to doubt their "reliably factual" reporting. It's hardly a political opinion- the owners of these services expect to get some return on their investment. Because they're not in it for the money (they can just create more money basically at will), then why are they in it? Likely to help craft a narrative that suits them.

At least for the bbc, the government isn't directly involved in the editorial. They have to resort to appointing their friends director general & threatening to abolish the licence fee to try to get what they want.

VOA and BBC are not alike at all in my opinion. Many countries in Western/Northern Europe have government funded sites run like the BBC and they are mostly in the top of unbiased and free journalism. They also create a lot of high quality documentaries and crime thrillers.

Nothing is perfect and of course there's a certain kind of culture on each of these workplaces that will mske it either more left or right up or down, but they aren't controlled by politicians, just like a hospital isn't told how to treat patients by politicians.

I'd rank BBC News above all US news outlets (and I'll just add I'm neither from the US nor UK).

I’m mean they’re not wrong that more general news topics (especially if touching on politics at all) tends to produce horrible discussions.

The point was they tended to have low quality discussion. Probably because it turned into partisan mud slinging.

Please tell me you're just memeing or being sarcastic.

Could this be modified to block comments from a list of usernames too? The last time I looked at HN’s DOM made me sad.

There are some prolific users who… while their comments are of normal quality, trigger a strong desire for me to respond. I’d rather simply not see their comments (and reply trees) at all.

Comments Owl for Hacker News [1] adds a mute control to comments and user profiles which lets you do this.

If you want to roll a quick version of your own, once you've identified rows containing comments you want to block, you need to hide all subsequent rows which have a higher indent. I see there's now an "indent" attribute in the DOM which would make this even easier.

[1] https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news#commen...

    const boringPeople = [/* omitted */]

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.hnuser'))
        .filter(elem => boringPeople.some(person => elem.textContent === person))
        .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
        .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

This worked to block the actual comment but not the whole thread.

Personally, I never reply. I only lurk. Because every time I reply I get sucked into the social media nightmare that is waiting for a response to my reply. So I opt out of that by never, ever replying, no matter how big the urge is to reply. I never do it. Almost never. 99.99% of the time, I skip replying. I think you might lack a discipline.

Dunno but at least on Glider client, you can block from the username menu.

By far the most surprising thing about this comment to me is that Aella's substack gets posted here often enough to make it on this list.

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