Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I think the better model is to just block everyone who isn't useful to communicate with. For instance the top of this HN page reads (for me): 68 comments | 11 hidden | 3 blocked

The hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because they don't understand them or because they're just re-litigating or whatever (which I cannot toggle). I think it would be cool if people all published their blocklists and I'd pull from those I trust. Sometimes I open HN on my phone through the browser and I'm baffled by all these responses I got which are useless.

I'm surprised by how much more high quality comment threads are now to me and I frequently find that I want to respond to everyone. It's like in old-school mailing lists or forums where you were having a conversation so the other people are worth talking to.

Attention is precious and I wouldn't want to waste it on boring things. And it goes both ways. I communicate incompletely and there are people out there who get what I'm saying and there are people who need me to be more explicit. I would prefer that the latter and people who find me boring just block me.

This goes back to my early days on the internet, but: I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort. Ignoring the problem is not a solution. In other ways I think it just makes the problem worse. If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it. Instead my feeling is that you should confront it by lobbying for their removal, or leave the community.

Sure, you may no longer see the noise, but that means that newcomers to your community do and have to deal with it. When you have a giant blocklist, you are ignoring your duty to police your own community.

Then there is the issue of people blocking people who are simply more tolerant than they are. Hiding speech that is challenging to your personal views is a different kind of disaster.

Haha, it's funny. I just disagree with you on about every point. I don't think that all the people I find noise are annoying to others. Some of them have 5000+ karma so others find them useful. And I don't want to leave the community so I'm not going to do that.

The community has some loose norms and I'm fine with that being the baseline. I don't want to police the community to strict norms. In fact, I would prefer if society were looser and we lived like in Too Like The Lightning. I can't have that there but I can here so I'm happy for it. The technology affords it.

As for blocking people who are more tolerant than me - that seems fine. Tolerance is not some unalloyed good. There are people who are tolerant of spam and all that and I don't really care for it. They're welcome to it and I'm welcome to mine.

The virtual world affords us a glorious opportunity: we don't have to worry about occupying the same space, and we don't have to worry about broadcast media like voice over air, we can silence and amplify as we see fit. To not use that is to take a skeuomorphic approach to a new parallel world, I think.

I like that I don't need everyone to agree with me that someone belongs or doesn't belong. I can simply edit my user-agent to behave correctly for me and others can do so likewise. Free agents controlling their own experience of the world without impinging on others is great!

> I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort

I block people every single day. I've blocked so many people on Twitter that all I see is a very nice timeline with mostly stuff I like, some boring, but none of the culture wars garbage. Some days the timeline is completely empty, I suspect because Twitter can't cope with having blocked so many nodes in the social graph :D

> If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it.

When you start banning people outright from the entire community you risk ending up like any far left group, with schisms and civil wars between factions for absolutely tiny differences. The right approach is to have a very high bar for banning, and it's perfectly fine if people decide not to speak to one another.

If there's one good thing that could possibly come out of this AI revolution, it would be the ability for people to automate this across all their feeds. I'd love it if I never had to waste time on toxicity, spam, or propaganda.

Although, recent history would suggest that we'd just end up with even more powerful echo chambers.

You would end up in a more powerful echo chamber for sure - whichever side was best at avoiding your autoblocker while tricking the other side into activating it.

Interesting notion.

One of the long term ideas is that people could earn some type of "Rhetoric Score" or something that would factor in to their ability to comment. Maybe there would be a comment system that would enable you to say "I don't want interact with anyone that has a <rhetoric score> less than XXXX".

Neat idea. I suspect that it will suffer just like comment karma does now. I think the practice of the matter for me is that dimension reduction to 1d didn't work. Other people have an opinion of text that is clearly radically different from mine. An example of something that I dislike reading is kvetching about how "corporations are ruining this and that". It's not that I disagree and don't want to see the opinion. I believe that the SNR on that is low. It's usually the 500th time I'm going to see that comment and there's rarely anything novel in it. But comments like that are popular amongst others.

So clearly opinions vary, and I'm a fan of that. The past version of social networks involved moderators who acted like the steering committee of the place and kept the culture going. But social networks like HN are very big now, and big social networks do have lots of advantages, but they come with the other side of things: I no longer have a way to select the people I want to listen to (especially on a flatspace like HN).

So I cannot rely on all other people, and I cannot rely on moderators. Realistically, an arbitrary person cannot also rely on me. But maybe some people can rely on me. And maybe there are some people I can rely on. So I'd rather treat my network as an overlay over a fundamental larger network. And I'll be missing in many people's overlay and others will be missing in mine and I like that.

But still, perhaps better 'karma' alternatives exist. If your score works, I'd be thrilled!

Sounds like a social credit system.

Slashdot has this, where you have friends/enemies, and friends/enemies-of-friends. I heavily used it, but interestingly have never made an enemy of enemies-of-friends.

How do you block users on HN? Are you using a different client?

Yes, a different client on iOS and a Chrome extension for my laptop. What I built for myself (and perhaps you if you want it simple) is here: https://overmod.org/

This kind of software is pretty cheap to write these days. The Chrome extension there is open-source and the backend is a generic CRUD app running on a SQLite that I backup periodically. You're welcome to use it, and you're welcome to use the CRUD backend without it. I had Claude write a separate iOS app but it was on an older model so not very good (sufficient for me but I doubt for anyone else). The 'protocol' between the backend and the frontend is trivial so you could probably rebuild the iOS app with just the extension as reference to Opus 4.6. I pay my $100 to Apple and then just use it as a 'tester' haha.

I made that directory public because I think this benefits from a single place people can go to subscribe to lists, but if you were to rewrite on true full decentralized ATProto/ActivityPub I'd probably switch over my lists to that and use it instead.

Userscript + iOS Safari extension, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/userscripts/id1463298887

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