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Comment by zfg | Hacker News Reader

As I've said, if the capabilities of a user's account are deliberately reduced then report that to the user on their account page. That's being upfront as opposed to being secretive and squirrelly and dodging responsibility.

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Ok but the limitations of this have also been explained many times and it's not like the way it works here is unique to HN, that's how almost all forums work. lobste.rs is an attempt to do things somewhat differently and it doesn't feel like much of an improvement.

There are no limitations to simply being upfront and Hacker News can aspire to be better. It doesn't matter how other forums work.

You have to convince other people that this is 'better' and it matters a lot that statistically nobody else believes it's better. It must have crossed your mind at some point that simply repeating 'my way is better' over and over is, at a minimum, not very persuasive.

I don't have to convince other people. dang says, "as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there".

dang is simply repeating "my way is better".

No, I'm sorry, this is plainly wrong. This isn't a dialogue between you and dang where you're having some difference of subjective opinion. You aren't debating whether pineapple on pizza is good or not. HN has been around for ages and in that particular aspect it works pretty much (or more transparently) the way just about every internet forum works. If dang and others are repeating something it's in response to you. You have to make some sort of case for your position being better - your position (which you've barely articulated to any degree of detail) is not somehow equivalent to the prevalent implementation because it doesn't have a prevalent implementation. The onus is on you to make the case for it. Like, that's how discourse (and the effecting of any kind of change, presumably) actually works.

You don't think transparency is better? Let's try it and see the result.

Will dang try it?

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