Edit for clarity: Not knocking the cause, it is great. Just the design really, maybe im missing something.
I don't think jug6ernaut missed the point whatsoever, and I wouldn't characterize him as nit-picking either: The question of who is expected to understand the t-shirt and what its point is (as compared to an unbranded t-shirt) are perfectly reasonable. Personally I see nothing wrong with t-shirts which can only be understood by an "in" group, but that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with asking if that was the intention.
Your reply, on the other hand, strikes me as exactly the sort of knee-jerk defensiveness which often makes me wish that submitters couldn't comment on their own posts: Not only did you fail to answer the question, but you implied that jug6ernaut was being unreasonable to even ask it.
It's your site and you're entitled to encourage and discourage whichever types of posts you want -- but I think if your desire is to have a site where people engage in meaningful discussion, you made a poor choice here.
It's precisely because I want HN to be a site where people engage in meaningful discussion that I try to discourage people from upvoting the first dismissive comment they come across. Even discourage is probably too strong a word though. I feel like someone standing in the surf, trying to hold back a breaking wave with his hand.
(I didn't answer his question because other users already had: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5363492)
I guess that's where we disagree then: I didn't see that comment as being dismissive, but rather as raising a legitimate question.
I serve as an alumni representative on a number of committees at my alma mater, and it's very rare that a proposal comes to us and does not meet with any criticism. This isn't because we have lots of horrible proposals coming to us or because we're grouchy old academics; it's because even if we like the general idea behind something, the precise details are rarely perfect. It's very rare for us to actually vote against something, and even proposals being withdrawn are rare; but there are a great many ideas which are changed -- and hopefully improved -- as a result of the criticisms they receive.
If jug6ernaut had written "a Hacker News t-shirt? What a dumb idea... I get lots of free t-shirts and if I donate $13 directly then Watsi ends up with far more money" then I would have said that he was being dismissive and the comment was not useful. But he didn't; instead, he asked a question about the detail -- is this the best design for a HN t-shirt? Is it too minimalist? -- and implicitly suggested a potential improvement.
It's natural, having spent time working on something, to view any criticism as an attack to be defended against; but the more we can deny that impulse and give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their motives in raising questions, the more useful I think our discussions can be.
At the end of the day, this t-shirt design was selected because someone thought Hackernews people would like it, buy it, and in turn support a good cause. If Hackernews doesn't like it, then the effort has failed on all three counts, and the fact that anyone would reject this reality with a condescending wave of the hand leads me to believe that this project was never about contributing to the hacker community or helping humanity; It seems more like an exercise in ego inflation.
Congratulations! We have a winner.
You have just won first place in the crowd sourced competition for the front of V2.0 of the official Hacker News Tshirt.
Honorable mention:
Wear something people want.
Correlation != clothesation.
Fuck. That. Shirt.
Take off this shirt and get back to work.
Shirt early. Shirt often.
Made from 100% down (votes).
I clicked "threads" and got this shirt.
RSS (Real Soft Shirt)
Y Combed Cotton Unknown or expired link.Inside enough that you need to know about YC to recognize that slogan, but general enough that just about any HN regular should get it. (To anyone else, it would simply seem like an intentionally abstract or unintentionally opaque statement, almost like Engrish.)
Plus, that sequence of 4 words is very Google-able, for anyone curious enough to want to know more...
*Y Cottonator
This made me email myself a new password.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Who Would Pay Money For That?I think, however, that this was a genuine question, and one I'd like answered since I have the same question myself. Which is why I upvoted it. Maybe there's a meaning I don't get, maybe there's a clever trick I'm not seeing. If there is I'd love to know so I can appreciate it.
Edit: This might work best for voting ability in general, not just downvoting ability.
2- Why users with karma will have a better understanding of downvote than the passives old-regular-readers? Peoples who read HN every days love the high level of the comments here, let them have produce some feed back. Note that I just defend my interest: I'm not good at creating comment with value (so I do not comment a lot), but I feel confident to reconise good comments from bad comments.
This thread is an example of why the delay is implemented, and this comment is an example of low value comments.
They really should scrap the reply link entirely and move it next to the "flag" button e.g. | reply
Please continue to foster an environment that is positive and provide a good example, but if people feel like they are being manipulated, they are going to get pissed off. I used to get more pissed off than I do now, but I still get upset. I wish I didn't. I wish that everyone could live in peace and work together.
Maybe if HN we're self-policing via ability to flag comments and posts where enough flags means that it shows as username only with no post title/comment show unless "show" is clicked, no downvoting (a flagged and hidden post or comment could rank at the top), and without the user banning/ghosting stuff...
It's raising money for a great cause.
Buy it if you like it.
If not, spare us the semantic analysis - the only thing it does is add to the perception of a community disappearing up it's own arse.
He wasn't saying the original comment was unreasonable at all. The original comment is the exact kind of thing you would see as top comment on this kind of post, and that isn't a bad thing.
I'm pretty sure he was talking about the comment...
"Why are you using American Apparel for a multi-threaded shirt and not Erlang?"
http://teespring.com/althntees
(It even has a crude joke, there's 'More' below the waist)
I always had you mentally as pretty stoically philosophically detached from that sort of thing. But I've seen a couple of your comments where you seem genuinely bothered when people are catty or mean to others you care about. Would love to hear your take on how you mentally approach that sort of thing in general.
This particular case is very mild-- more confused than dismissive really. It just struck me as funny to see it get upvoted so much.
The upvoting often bothers me more than the comments. There are often individual stupid and/or mean comments languishing down on HN threads. They seem pretty harmless as long as no one upvotes them, like cranks shouting on streetcorners. But when large numbers of people upvote such comments, you start to have a mob. And to see a mob persecuting someone who tries to do something new is much worse than seeing an individual bully do it.
There are still a lot of things to be figured out about forums. I predict the world will evolve techniques and customs to protect against this sort of thing, and look back on our era with pity and horror because we didn't have them. But it will probably take a while. I know how hard the problem is, because this is the aspect of HN I most want to improve and spend most time thinking about, and I rarely make progress.
If I were to buy a tshirt for HN, which I might possibly do - I'd want it to show off a message rather than it looking like it could be for anything. This doesn't feel personal to the brand to me – I could buy this anywhere for a number of reasons.
And of all your description of what you want the community to be - do you want it full of snark like your response? Your response was far more 'schoolyard bullying.'
We're adults here, if we can't take critique without crying foul - the internet isn't for us.
(And this is not me attacking, or having a go.)
You're mistaken about the design though. It's both funny to make the design so minimalistic, and yet simultaneously a pretty bold assertion of brand power. And since we don't want HN to grow fast, we don't need to send any messages to anyone who doesn't already recognize the shirt.
Communication is hard.
Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" might be appropriate reading here. :)
I 'got' the design because of the description, but if I had seen it randomly on the street, I'm not sure I would have immediately associated it with HN.
Not sure that any of this matters, but the marketing/branding side of me finds the whole color scheme thing an interesting discussion.
Some people will like the shirt and buy it. Some people will not like the shirt, and will not buy and and not make any comment on it. Some people will offer some kind of critique, which is sort of fun but kind of futile (the shirt is made and being sold. It's too late for critique unless you're going to make and sell another batch in future.)
But what to do about the people who don't like the shirt and loudly tell everyone that they don't like the shirt in ways that are not interesting or useful? Do downvotes work for that?
Do you need to give a small group of carefully vetted people a super-downvote button? (This would be based on your knowledge and trust of those people, not on any karma scores). ((I've wanted to start a hoax about the HN secret pages for high karma users. I've resisted because that kind of meta drama can be pretty harmful, and there are other places where it'd be more fun.)
I've experimented quite a bit with it and have some theories about when it works and when it doesn't, but it's still not completely predictable to me.
In my experience when people ask for a critique of something completely new, they're asking (usually without knowing it) for the high-bit: Does this completely suck, or should I keep working on it? Unfortunately people too often respond with only the low-bits, forgetting to add "but these are nit-picks, the overall idea doesn't suck, and you should keep working on it". At best that's frustrating, because you only hear low-bits when you wanted the high-bit. At worst it's a disaster, if you misread low-bits as high-bits and give up on something promising.
I always think about saying it to someone as I talk to them.
The truth is that it's easier to critique in person than online. If you don't know someone's personality and can't read their nuances it makes it a lot harder.
But thats a very good critique advice.
HN is undergoing the transition that every community undergoes, from ultra-exclusive and underground to more populist. There's always gnashing of teeth from the entrenched userbase as a site becomes popular. That said, right now HN still has an interesting balance of technical and non-technical content for me, and an amazing group of commenters, I don't see it going anywhere soon.
Well yeah, and in my IMHO the teeth gnashers are right. Every community that undergoes this transition turns into a wasteland, at least by my elitist tastes. I'd hate to see Hacker News go the same way.
A full-time programmer could try to design new features to stave off the decline. For instance, maybe up-voting power could be adjusted based on karma, so that the mob has less power to up-vote the nasty comments to the top of every thread. Maybe a better flagging system could be put in place so commenters could be warned when they are breaking the guidelines, but warning a way that does not create a long thread discussing the flagging. There are many ideas, it would take a lot of time to figure out which ones actually worked.
There have often (OFTEN) been times when I've wanted to ask someone if they truly thought their comment contributed to the discussion, and if not, why did they post it? At the very least, ask them to reflect.
I almost never do, because then I'm just cluttering the forum with more posts of my own that aren't contributing to the conversation.
And really, it's not my place to do so, regardless of whether I think it would help or not.
I do try to ask myself that question, and have edited or deleted comments as a result. I'm not perfect about it, but I'm better than I was, and the only reason I started making the attempt was because pg (the owner of the board) has indicated he'd like to see that.
But it would be interesting if there were some sort of feedback mechanism from active moderators that did the same thing, but only to the poster, not in the discussion.
I honestly think if you had respected mods who did that sort of thing you'd see a notable improvement in the quality of this forum.
Most of the time my comments get a couple up votes and left in the middle of the thread. Sometimes the founder responds and we have a little conversation that is hopefully helpful to both of us.
The one time I've ever posted a comment that could come off as mean spirited (I pointed out a pretty glaring design flaw), it became the most up voted post I've had on HN. I felt bad because the founder responded with his reasoning and it seemed perfectly valid.
I wonder if it would be plausible to self down vote a post (that is weighted heavier than just a single down vote)? I know I didn't want that post to be the first thing someone looked at when they clicked on the comments; that was not my intention at all.
Just something to think about.
I think I might have unknowingly contributed to the problem by carelessly upvoting a negative post because I didn't realize it had so much support behind it already. It's a lot easier to see the danger of a mob and decide not to support it when you can count the number of people.
Side note: have you thought about more drastic approaches, like automatically upvoting or increasing the weight of comments with positive sentiment?
I only upvoted it because you said it would be funny if it was the top comment. "Righto," I thought "up vote for that then."
Thinking about it that's a pretty dumb upvote, but I doubt I'm the only person who voted for that reason.
I thought the design was pretentious minimalism. It's minimal for the sake of it, not minimal because it's distilling the essence of something. The essence of HN is not the orange and grey colors. It's really hard to connect the shirt to HN when I look at it. The essence of HN to me is karma, usernames, YC, up/downvotes, programming, America, internet companies, drama, PG love / hate. Just printing something like "100 points" on the grey background would have made it much more wearable.
Also, if what you want is an appropriately critical, non-cynical community, you need to embody those qualities yourself. There's not much lower you can go than taking passive aggressive swipes at random posters. If you're the leader of a community, and you don't like the community, it's your responsibility to do something about it.
Here's one idea: an official recommendation from you of upvotes for thoughtful replies (even in the case of disagreement), and downvotes for replies that don't add to the conversation.
My ideal shirt would be the warm grey background with an orange colored bar going around the chest area. Seeing as how much time most of us spend on HN, those two colors should be enough for your brain to trigger a relation from the shirt to HN.
I would have preferred this across the chest.
georgeorwell 20 minutes ago | link | parent | flagI cannot decide if that makes me sad or you a genius.
And now I'm the proud new owner of shirt #694 (or so).
You could even tie the contests schedule to the Y class schedule so each class can sport it's own unique design... and also generating more awareness of another application cycle opening soon. The shirts would remain open to the public however (perhaps a unique color given to only Y accepted users).
I'd also add a Hoodie to the choice.
I agree. It's missing a first post at the top saying 'this article is pointless' ;)
A lot better than most of the standard 'nerdy' shirts, like this one: http://cdn4.desizntech.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/55994...
I just wish I could see what the slate grey one looked like before ordering.
::starts swiping fingers on a printed page to zoom in the text:: Hey, what the heck is wrong with this thing?
That works if you haven't set a new topcolor. (Actually, even for people who have set a custom topcolor, many HN pages still display the default topcolor, so the point in the parent post is correct.)
Hell, from 20 yards you couldn't even see the graphic. When I saw the title, I thought, "Cool, a t-shirt with a large Y in a box on it." If you know the logo, you know. If not, it's easy to explain.
I'm still trying to figure out how I would explain this to someone.
@mayank same applies, inside joke to who? Those who where told it was a HN Tee or the HN community?(assuming its not recognizable to them).
I get some utility out of the thing, and I get to contribute to something that the community would like to see become successful. I don't normally donate at the drop of a hat, but pg has thus far very carefully tended this community without asking much directly from it. Its a no-brainer.
If HN becomes a Kickstarter for non-profits, eh, I become much less interested then.
Oh, and if someone happens to ask me what the shirt is about, I probably would say "Ah, its a novelty shirt I bought from this geeky website you probably wouldn't care much about." Because I tend to think the community benefits from being careful who gets involved in it. {sigh} I typed that, and its probably flame-war inducing, but I do feel that way.
To your post though i pretty much agree with you 100%.
I think so. The color scheme is unusual and distintive. OK, I've been here a long time and HN is permanently open in a browser tab so maybe I should get out more. The only flaw with the design I see is that folks like myself may have to suppress the instinct to mash the F5 button when they see someone wearing this...
There's nothing to miss or some hidden meaning. It's just a freaking t-shirt and that's all there is.