Hacker Smacker: Friend/foe individual writers on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Smacker: Friend/foe individual writers on Hacker News

github.com

66 pointsswyx60 comments

Won’t this reinforce filter bubbles? One of the nice things about hn is hearing people you disagree with make polite arguments, even when you aren’t in the mood to hear it

I maintain mental lists similar to this tool, and my mental "foes" list isn't people I tend to disagree with, it's people whose style of discourse is inflammatory and counterproductive. This style has tended to get more upvotes lately than it used to, and it creates whole subtrees that aren't worth reading because emotions are running hot.

Having this mental list helps me in exactly the way TFA describes: if I see one of the bad names I can immediately collapse the whole subtree and avoid the whole argument that ensues.

Edit: To be clear, I wouldn't use a tool like this, I think it's healthier for the list to remain in my head. It's less permanent that way, so if a user improves over time then their "foe" status will naturally fade. I'm just explaining how someone could use a tool like this for non-ideological reasons.

I think that the mental list has an advantage in that it is highly forgetful. Someone has to make a real impression on you (or at least be quite active) for you to form an opinion about them in one way or another. Otherwise all comments return to equal footing quite quickly. I find this a feature and not a bug, in that it prevents strong bubbles (bubbles always exist).

But then again, I recognize your name but I do not have strong opinions about you. Though I do lean positive.

Then why not run the comment through a classifier and label the comment instead of the person?

Like this one:

https://huggingface.co/alexgshaw/hyperpartisan-classifier

You're already ensconced in a filter bubble. The "one big silo" approach of HN guarantees homogeneity. Subcommunities cannot coalesce because anything too far outside the zeitgeist gets brigaded and downvoted out of existence.

To nurture wide diversity of opinion, freedom of association is required — not only the freedom to band together, but the freedom to exclude (using tools like hacker/smacker) those who are determined to shut you down.

I do think that is an interesting and worthwhile perspective, and broadly I agree with it. But I think a better way to do that is to spin up an HN clone, Mastodon instance, or Discord server. I don't think HN can really support that use case, because it goes against the culture and isn't supported by the platform itself.

HN itself can't but there are plenty of third party apps and plugins that do. I'm finding this forum increasingly difficult to use without a blocklist. There is only so much time in the day to give equal time in your head to every asshole that can use a keyboard.

This used to be commonly understood netiquette - you don't feed trolls, you killfile them and move on.

Bubbles always exist. They aren't necessarily bad. But there are bubbles within bubbles. Creating very small bubbles is where we run into problems as we approach the echo chamber. A region where we cannot hear opinions other than our own. Disagreement is essential, as all opinions are wrong to some degree. Some are just more wrong than others.

What does "brigaded" mean, in this instance?

A sufficient mass of (uncoordinated) HN users responding to a post (by downvoting, flagging and lodging innumerable uncivil replies) until it is removed from the stream of discourse.

Ok. How is that different than things being organically downvoted and flagged?

I thought the "brigade" concept typically means a coordinated effort.

Dissenting opinion is one thing. Corporate/nationalistic shills, another entirely.

Many people will use it for dissenting opinion anyway.

those that don't have an open mind to dissenting opinions are probably not worth talking to either.

It's always seemed like the style and design choices of HN heavily demoted the importance of authors, instead focusing on content. Color contrast and font size in the comments section are surely intentional. dang et al are extremely thoughtful with their moderation and if they wanted it to be different they would have changed it. Clearly they found a system they like.

With bubble maintenance techniques like this one, they tend to regress toward a sterile mean, like mixing all the Play-Dohs together to get that universal gray-brown-purple. I personally prefer the splashes of color (sometimes being one myself). On the other hand, such a system would incentivize being a splash of color in nonetheless palatable ways, which may be a good kind of social pressure.

The other day I reread the comments I'd favorited. I discovered several of them were from people I'd gotten into debates and arguments with.

I'll admit there are people here I don't like, but the day I call them my foes is the day I pack up and leave.

But on the other hand, if someone didn't want to hear from me and wanted to use this tool to filter me out of their feed, then I suppose I wouldn't want to impose on them.

Well put! I agree with all three of these paragraphs. I hope people won't use this tool, but I like how you put this about not wanting to impose on people.

This seems like a great feature for a forum for doing ideological battle, like Twitter on hot-button social or political issues. In such forums, it's important not to agree on any minor issues with someone with whom you disagree on a major issue, lest you give aid and comfort to the enemy.

But it seems wrong for HN.

HN already has an upvote system. This form of censorship is unnecessary unless people are willing to accept a possibly compromised view of a topic to save time. If you're that strapped for time though perhaps don't delve too deeply into HN comments anyway.

This isn't censorship.

Yeah, I'm very tired of seeing this cry of "censorship!" all the time. Private individuals and organizations voluntarily curating / moderating content is not censorship. You can still call things bad - and I think this tool is a bad idea - without calling them censorship.

One of those things that I'd like to have for myself, but don't want everyone else to have. (Magic power is another, fwiw.)

I want it because I want to improve the SNR of my HN time. I'm never going to read the vast majority of what's on HN, so some imperfect degree of separation of wheat from chaff sounds great.

I don't want it because it's a push in the direction of focusing on writers rather than content, and once that ball gets rolling downhill it won't stop until it smashes the previous community to bits.

For myself, I don't worry about missing out on an insightful post here and there because the author took a cheap shot at someone in the past. I would rather not miss such posts, but I'm already missing tons of equally valuable posts because of the number of hours in the day.

Besides, I intentionally pay attention to people who make cogent points that I disagree with but cannot easily refute. I mean, I am always Right, but sometimes it's helpful to have someone who is Wrong reveal to me that i don't know why I'm right in a particular case.

I would only ding people for bad basic logic, uncharitable interpretations, or otherwise wasting my time.

...but isn't that what we all think?

This seems to be over 9 years old, but it is the first time I hear of it.

For the reasons other mention, it seems like the idea isn't very popular.

It's kinda ironic that an example of "great HN comments to start a collection of friends" was written by someone who so thoroughly and publicly nuked their own career at Google that everyone who was at Google at that time would still remember the shenanigans.

I guess that's a lesson for something... what it is exactly, I'm not sure.

What were the shenanigans? I'm not familiar.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Michael-O-Church-well-known-at-...

Sounds like he's someone who's still a punching bag for some people even after more than a decade. I'll let you decide if that speaks more to his actions or the mindset of the people who still bring them up.

Ah, I had no idea, thanks. Most people on the link seem to say that he criticized a product and was ostracized for it.

Please don't turn HN into the usual social network; let people value the content first. The risk of this being turned into a digital ad-hominem machine is too high even for the mostly well educated people dwelling over here.

HN is not special. It's full of shit comments that is love to be able to hide. Tagging some 10s of people would probably make this an actually useful place.

I think HN is indeed special because it's noticeably less full of shit comments than many other forums. I might even go so far as to say shit comments typically make up a minority of the comments here instead of the majority.

That said, I wouldn't want to stop anyone who wants to use this tool from using it. I'm just not convinced it's necessary or helpful.

Never heard of this although it seems to be around for years.

The firefox xpi is not working on recent firefox with "The add-on could not be installed because it appears to be corrupted"

Also, Safari dropped support for the .safariextz format years ago.

Seems like an interesting concept, but both the firefox and chrome versions are corrupted in some capacity, and are not installable.

> Server: the Node.js

... aaand g'bye :)

I'm sure this is the kind of thing that would get me on the black list.

I worry about how this would impact my bubble tendency. I don't like Trumpian world views and might well tend to upmark views I can adhere to, about him and his behaviour. But, I might then miss interesting critique on the real world consequences of his government's foreign trade policy.

I am not sure it's possible to turn this kind of flagging into something I can use without over filtering. Some people say interesting things badly, annoyingly and I feel I need to see them and understand this difference between "you are annoying" and "what you said is annoyingly wrong headed" and "God, could you have said that more nicely but good on you for saying it"

I know my style of replying annoys others. I reflect on how many of them might filter me!

The real meat and potatoes here is, how can I find out who has added me to their foe list?

Make a second fake account and friend everyone, so that you can see everyone's foes?

The Slashdot-ization of HN. lolz

I did something similar on Metafilter - a Greasemonkey script to hide comments with a low number of favourites - and they were outraged.

(2011)

I hate it. The entire thing that makes HN special is the lack of ideological silos and relatively high level of discourse despite that. I want to have debates with strangers I disagree with. I want them to disagree with the things I say. I want stimulating conversation, not a bunch of golf claps from people who like me.

I get wanting to "filter bots and/or corporate shills" but a tool like this encourages all kinds of behaviors outside that scope.

It is no worse than the voting system being used to beat people down that don't subscribe to the dogmatic view of the world HN readers do. In fact, this is almost better, because at least people will continue to see a dissenting post. At worse it functions as a third party shadow ban. HN already shadow bans, so again, it's no worse. New users in particular are forced into making ideologically aligned posts in order to get enough karma to avoid the insta-shadowban new accounts can get. No different if you're trying to play the game with this stupid plugin.

I do not understand the idolization of HN as some bastion of spirited debate and nuance. It is objectively no better than Reddit and subject to the same hivemind mentality. If you want legitimate spirited debate and can learn to ignore trolls removing the voting system would bring HN closer to the fantasy it's readers seem to believe it is. Unfortunately taking away internet points from the terminally online is akin to making an addict go cold turkey. It wouldn't end well.

A month ago I responded to a similar comment of yours[1] pointing out that people were downvoting you for being insulting, not because they disagreed with you. Glancing at your comment history it seems like you are still regularly very aggressive and insulting to the people you engage with.

I think you're mistaking ideology for culture. Lots of people here are aligned with you ideologically. But the culture here is to discourage people from being rude and insulting through the use of downvotes and flags.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36982152

I'll second this. I downvoted the comment not because of a strong disagreement to its main thesis, but rather the aggressiveness and that it brings oversimplification to the matter rather than incorporating more nuance in the discussion. I just detest those that lump everything together as if we can compartmentalize things into neat little boxes rather than acknowledging the messiness and complexity that is the world we live in.

I often downvote people I agree with who similarly oversimplify. Interestingly this can sometimes lead to fights as any response is often taken as opposition. But I similarly often upvote points I disagree with, when I find the arguments are good and bring up points I was missing. These actually tend to turn into the best conversations and are a main part of what keeps me coming to this website.

People vote for many different reasons. A vote is an aggregate of many different metrics. It's likely unsurprising that this leads to misinterpretation of the metric.

> that it brings oversimplification to the matter rather than incorporating more nuance in the discussion

Do you then also downvote all the insipid claims of HN superiority that, at best, have similar oversimplification?

Frequently, yes, but I'm only one man. I'm not scrolling through every comment looking for these because I'm not hyper obsessed. And I can never downvote replies to my own comments even if they are attempting to make lazy "gotchas" checking for inconsistency that are so common of humans, realistically only looking to validate their own predisposition rather than recognizing that the expectation placed on the question is exceptionally high and nearly impossible unless properly contextualized. Those aren't really adding to conversations so much as they are masturbation. Frankly, I don't enjoy when people masturbate in public.

But yeah, when I see them, I do just downvote and move on. Sometimes comment. Depends on my mood ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The parent's comment certainly wasn't really insulting. Like is the HN community so fragile that it needs to downvote that mild criticism rather than engage with it?

> Unfortunately taking away internet points from the terminally online is akin to making an addict go cold turkey. It wouldn't end well.

I found the insinuation that the HN community are overly-online and addicted to upvotes to be pretty insulting yeah.

Could HN survive a comment like this? Certainly. Could HN survive if comments like this were left unchecked? Something would probably survive, but it wouldn't be the HN I'm willing to be a part of. I've been in my share of communities like that, and I'm done with them.

HN certainly isn't perfect and criticism is warranted. Sometimes I email dang to complain about eg comments not being deletable. But I don't think this criticism is on the mark; they're making a bunch of provocative and insulting comments and also stating that they don't see thoughtful conversation here, and my personal opinion is that these things are related.

> If you want legitimate spirited debate and can learn to ignore trolls removing the voting system would bring HN closer to the fantasy it's readers seem to believe it is.

You're free to turn on the "showdead" setting to read comments that have been heavily downvoted or flagged. I had it turned on for a while, and then turned it off after confirming to myself "yep, didn't miss a thing".

I'm now at -4 score on this post.

I find it funny that regularly you hear people specifically avoid calling this place a "social network" or "reddit-like". It's a wonderful ode to the dunning-kruger no-coder. There's an implication of pseudo-intellectual superiority in this community that can only be described as the merger of terminally online redditors and big tech. A meta-criticism of the fundamental scoring behavior of this website is met with downvotes and out of the 5 I've received I've gotten 2 comments. Neither explicitly countering my point, and none of them providing the "spirited debate" OP suggests exists here. The website is a hivemind. Period.

Absolutely hilarious. Sometimes points demonstrate themselves. At least slashdot required you to have modpoints. Power tripping terminally online crybullies dominate every website scored by points.

> downvotes and out of the 5 I've received I've gotten 2 comments.

You've certainly gotten more than 5.

> I do not understand the idolization of HN as some bastion of spirited debate and nuance.

HN is the closest thing there is to a news aggregator with civil, open discussions. If there’s one closer, I’d love to know.

Many well moderated technical forums like /r/AskHistorians are not only civil and open, but have a higher degree of technical and intellectual merit related to the subject at hand, by virtue of being more focused.

On HN you can expect at least median technical competence when the subject is web development, but beyond that (and definitely with non-tech related subjects) people tend to be "aggressively ignorant" to the point that you can tell who the few actually knowledgeable people are by how angry they are at everyone else.

> news aggregator

I'm talking about overall, by average, not subreddit

Reddit also has more high quality comments on average than Hacker News, simply due to its greater size and volume.

I’ve been there pretty frequently for a long time, I’d have to disagree.

With some tweaks this could functionally replace top down moderation with bottom up moderation, while improving the results for most people. A Bubble Construction Kit.

I think that this would replace top down moderation with: Judge each post based on person who wrote the post and how I felt about their first post I saw

I think that the goal of moderation should be to judge each post based on it's own individual content; I think this is the best way to propagate good ideas

There's already downvotes and flagging.

Downvotes are neutral at best, they aren't a replacement for moderation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com