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Comment by shanelja | Hacker News Reader

There was really no need to respond so pointedly or awkwardly, the parent posted a genuine question and it really begged a slightly more polite response.

I understand that you are an extremely busy man and I don't mean to bag on the owner of the site, but at the risk of getting hell-banned or massively down voted your response came across as being unhelpful and rude, if it had been someone else making the comment they would likely have been down voted for it, or at the very least treat with indignation and ignored.

Perhaps you didn't meant to come across this way and perhaps I'm in completely the wrong mindset about it, but such a short answer does nearly nothing to help the parent, you simply stated they had set off a trigger and gave no details as to why, what they could do in the future to prevent this or any kind of statistics or advice to aid them.

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> I'm in completely the wrong mindset about it

My friend, I think this is probably the case ... you've mistaken terseness for rudeness.

He gave an answer when he was under no obligation to do so.

Anybody that is monitoring the effect of their submissions and is asking what went wrong is asking about potentially dangerous information. HN is a pretty fine balancing act, it would not take much to wreck it and the secret sauce serves us all well.

None of us are under any obligation to give a response or answer a question put to us on this site, but the fact of the matter is that we choose to.

The key point I've taken away from this is that everyone says that the websites monitoring software is secret and details can't be given, etc. but in this case it is people who are not privy to this knowledge in the same way that PG is.

Simply put, he saw the post, he responded, yet other people have had to give the tangible and useful responses when it could have easily been subverted by PG spending a little more time to explain his comment.

If he had the time to come on HN, look at the graph presented to him, come to a conclusion and comment upon it, he must have understood much more than he gave away and an expansion upon his first statement would have been useful, for instance: "Your submission set off the voting ring detector, it believed that ... and this caused it to trigger and lower your submissions ranking on the site." would have been an order of magnitude more effective. Even if it was only one short paragraph, it would have been better.

What strikes me as rude and presumptuous is when people complain about the HN site. There is no HN Pro with a support package. We're not paying to take part in this community. It reminds me of all the stories of freemium products where the free version users are more demanding than the paying customers.

Well, this is really promotional site for Y Combinator, in the same way as Joel's blog was a promotional blog for his company (Fog Creek). So by this token we (users of the site) serve a double function - consumers and producers of content and marketing audience, i.e. we are paying for use of the site by being marketing targets.

I should state that I wasn't complaining about the website, merely about a single persons comment - the fact that it happened to be PG is largely irrelevant to my complaint, it could have been about anyone.

Although, I believe this was covered further down the discussion but don't have time left this morning to find the link, I will try to locate it once I'm off the bus.

If pg gave "details as to why, what they could do in the future to prevent this or any kind of statistics or advice" he would be giving advice on how to get around the voting ring detection. I imagine he probably does not want to help people evade the process he worked to put in place to cut down on spammy/fraudulent submissions.

In this case it points to a flaw in the system itself - if having any details of it at all allows you to game it, it only takes one lucky person to stumble across some aspect of it accidentally and we will have multiple unknown exploiters using it.

In the case it was absolutely, imperatively impossible to give no details whatsoever, then stating this would probably have been helpful.

An inconvenient truth of HN seems to be that 95% of voter ring detections are legit, while the other 5% are not. This is understandable. As jQueryIsAwesome said, it's a tricky problem.

Another inconvenient truth is, the demigods of HN often see the 95% as the 100%. No matter what defenses fellow HN users can come up with, pg likely gave his response in the way he did because he assumed something about you. Knowing pg's writings, he may have apologized or at least explained the problem if he had identified one. To say that terseness is pg's typical mode is...wrong.

I'm glad you pointed this out. pg has done a lot for this community, so we can't criticize too lightly. But it is a shame that in this instance, he didn't take that extra step for a fellow hacker.

I should state that I'm not part of the original posters team or in any way affiliated with them to alleviate any confusion ("he assumed something about you") before I go on.

I don't wish to devolve in to bitchiness and have no reason to continue criticizing PG after my original post, but I agree that thus far PG has already done a lot to help the community and that he could have done more in this case.

I'm not saying your post was bitchy, I'm saying that I couldn't think of a response which wouldn't have come across as needlessly bitchy if I continued to criticise PG after my original statement

Totally. Sorry, when I said assumed something about you I meant the OP, I wrote that wrong

That's fine, it was a perfectly honest mistake to make. :)

Terse responses are pretty common among programmers, and are not generally interpreted as disrespectful.

I respectfully disagree. He pointed out the issue. Had I received that response I'd now know what to watch out for. He's not a support guy who is committed to helping all-comers to realise their HN-posting potential.

Try that with Google when you fall foul of their mystical ruleset. "you're not in the index and your business doesn't exist anymore. bye." And that's when you pay them - HN you don't pay and it's just one post, not your whole business model.

    "but at the risk of getting hell-banned or massively 
    down voted your response came across as being unhelpful
    and rude, if it had been someone else making the
    comment they would likely have been down voted for it,
    or at the very least treat with indignation and
    ignored"

What? When did it come to this?

Has HN become a Reddit-style circle-jerk, increasingly elbowing out all dissenting opinions even when they are sensibly argued and corroborated with plentiful facts?

When did karma war chests become purses for silencing or pariah-izing, differing or even polarizing thoughts?

I have always thought you had to reason your way to the proverbial top of the heap of consensus-seeking opinions.

Not carpet-bomb your way to it.

Legitimate big wig or a green horn. Same credo.

In fact "thought leaders" should invite criticism and discourage herdism.

This is a disquieting trend.

If you can't rationally present your case or think a curt one-liner will do since your tech peerage will add some pedigree to an otherwise lousy and hollow argument, you should go elsewhere.

This should be a default understanding among all civil discussion online.

Unfortunately we live in a hyper-partisan era where discord is detrimental. A prevailing view that directly contrasts yours is a dent in your sense of self-worth.

HN should strive to be exemplary in this regard.

I'm actually really sorry, but I didn't understand your comment, I'm not sure if it's too early or I lack the intelligence but I've been reading it again and again for the past 5 minutes and I can't seem to get my head around it, so I can't adequately comment on.

~ After seeing it has been rewritten slightly ~

Thanks for the response and I agree, one of the good things about this site is that everyone comes here equal, very rarely do I see any kind of elitism between the users, with the exception of the occasional PHP vs Ruby(oR) rant.

I wasn't putting down Paul for the sake of putting him down, it wasn't my intention to come across as pretentious or seeming to push morals on people and I acknowledge a comment above stating that Paul could simply have been terse in his response, I do however still assert my original comment, I believe that he could have brought a lot more to the table than he did when he posted, I nearly always think carefully about my comments before I make them.

HN is exemplary in this regard, it has quite possibly the best quality of commenting I have found so far and I hope it continues this way for a long time to come, I'm relatively new to this site, only having been on this account for 3 months now, but in that time I have been a daily user (probably reading 50+ articles per day and commenting upon several) and as such I feel it is my responsibility to help the quality of this site remain at the same level, if I feel a post does little to aid or engage with someone who requires help, it is my duty to mention it, regardless of if the persons name is green or if the persons name is PG.

Also, my karma is like a yo-yo after posting on this thread, I'm literally seeing it jump up or down after every page refresh.

He's actually defending you. He's saying you shouldn't have to write a paragraph long preamble to explain why you're second guessing PG.

Personally, I think you're way off-base. PG obviously can't elaborate on the voting ring detector or give further detail because to do so would lessen its effectiveness. I wasn't expecting the OP to even get a response.

Plus PG is always succinct.

Is not so off-base, it was kind of rude because he didn't say "The submission set off the voting ring detector", he literally said "You set off the voting ring detector" wish can be read as an accusation even if that was not what Mr. Graham had in mind.

I'm not defending his disapproval of PG's response.

Just alluding to the larger point he -- somewhat tangentially -- hit on, which is quite true.

The herdism part.

HNers incapable of presenting their own take -- worthy of some import -- often resolve to aligning with the closest agreeable opinion and / or down-voting opinions that are farther afar from them.

The problem with this is that often enough their own opinion -- if they actually took the time to properly form it -- is really not proximate to either of the viewpoints. Not even by a long shot.

They just want to express for the sake of expression.

And the least demanding form of expression is a vote, whether in favor or out of favor. PG agrees with this sentiment in one of his earlier posts concerning fine tuning the HN experience.

Herdism is bad. It gives you the Reddit quagmire.

Weak-willed people align with either of two equidistant opinions because they sense that some measure of expression of their will is more valuable than none at all.

Weak-willed people also have the established-majority bias. When given a choice of two clear 'candidates' whose strengths ( vote tallies ) are clear for everyone to see, they are easily lured into siding with the trouncing candidate irrespective of the degree of concurrence of their opinions.

If we are to have a vibrant community, this kind of behavior (as well as those agents) should be actively repelled.

Don't feed the trolls. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804437

> I'm not defending his disapproval of PG's response.

Whenever you see a sentence like this on an online forum, you know the conversation has gone off the rails.

This comment gave me a slight giggle, which is good as I'm just about to start my day.

It has largely gone off topic, which is also, largely my fault and it's a shame that the original topic has been overshadowed by this instead of actual useful responses for the original poster which wasn't in any way my intention.

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