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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?

As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me.

Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.

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There was definitely competition for most post count and some forums had reputation.

I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums.

Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.

One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.

As a certified Swede - Which one is this?

Not sure I'd certify you if you're unable to recognize Flashback by description ;)

You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.

I'd forgotten how much I miss this. If you disagree with someone, you have to reply and explain why-- you can't just downvote and move on.

You're misinterpreting the role of the vote/downvote button I fear.

The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what you agree on" button.

Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on, you don't have to answer.

From HN's guidelines:

> Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

From Reddit's Reddiquette:

> If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.

Sure, but when everyone else uses the upvote/downvote button that way it doesn’t matter how you personally use it. The end result is anything that goes against the hivemind gets suppressed.

I’ve had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see that their preconceived notions were probably wrong. It’s no wonder politics has become more insular.

HN is better than most, thankfully.

> HN is better than most, thankfully.

Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.

Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.

With LLMs we are starting to get the technology where comments could be programmatically rated by more interesting scales than upvotes

Say something minimally negative about macOS in /r/macos. You'll be -1 in no time.

I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15 is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15 configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.

Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!

Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote == disagree/opinion I don't like.

I always thought slashdot had an interesting concept with meta moderators. Their job was to look at how someone moderated a comment and verify if it was moderated correctly. If it was that moderator was giving more moderation points (how many times they could up/down vote something). If it wasn’t they lost points.

You would be randomly asked to meta moderate random moderations.

I think something threaded similar to Reddit but without voting would be a nice middle ground. My biggest gripe with vBulletin style is how replies to earlier comments work and are so out of order.

I agree, these days I hate using forums that don't have a tree view. Unfortunately, I don't know of any software like that, except reddit.

We could score comments with sentiment analysis. AI, though not necessarily LLMs, can do it very well. Depending on how child comments reflect on the parent, the parent could be scored for relevance, agreement, helpfulness, or any other metric. This would also fuzz the metric itself (karma), and make it hard to game. The Goodhart's law problem in social media (karma farming, ratio-ing, etc) could be solved.

Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.

But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.

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