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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Of course they're important, but they're also implicitly encoded into the culture. Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled. HN has countless rules that don't appear explicitly in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I think I'm going to put that one back, though, because it's not a hill I want to die on and I know what arguing with dozens of people simultaneously feels like when you only have 10 minutes.

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> Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled.

Understood, but I feel like I see people breaking these ones frequently, so removing the explicit guideline feels to me like a bad idea.

People break them whether they're in the list or not. But don't worry, we'll put that one back.

My experience with posted rules is that it's less about people following them preemptively than having an explicit reference to point to when they don't.

HN's long-standing policy has been to fewer explicit rules, and looser rather than stricter interpretation. This particular one comes up often enough though that it's helpful to retain IMO, thanks for restoring the cut.

I've long made a practice of linking to moderator comments regarding policies when calling out deviations, as I'm sure the mods are aware, others might find that helpful. I've found it generally reduces the personal-irritation element going both ways, helps avoid derailing threads, and serves as a refresher to me on what standards apply.

I seem to recall a rule about "don't downvote something because you disagree with it", but I can't find anything like that.

Not sure if that's really solvable with rules, though.

My experience with downvotes is that people mostly use it as a "I don't like this" button, which is proxy for "I couldn't think of a counterargument so I don't want to look at it."

(I noted recently that downvotes and counterarguments appear to be mutually exclusive, which I found somewhat amusing.)

Whereas I will often upvote things I personally disagree with, if they are interesting or well reasoned. (This seems objectively better to me, of course, but maybe it's personality thing.)

Oh that one is a classic case of people 'remembering' a rule that never existed - there's a name for this illusion but I forget what it is.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for history...

> 'remembering' a rule that never existed

Probably the Mandela effect!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect

This was (maybe still is) part of "reddiquette." Like the guidelines and case law here, it often found its way into subreddit rules and comments from moderators.

To me it's just like how, growing up in Canada, we all assumed we had Miranda rights because we watched American TV.

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