Comment by mikeurbanski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeurbanski | Hacker News Reader

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There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating.

Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum?

When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".

Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else.

There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

Wow I just took the time to look up hellban [0] because I always just assumed it's synonymous with permaban. For those too lazy to click the link, it's a ban where you're not informed that you're banned and the content you post is displayed only for you and no one else. That's actually a pretty shitty moderation tactic mainly because it doesn't teach the poster why they made a mistake and it does just waste their time when they could be getting back to being a better user.

Additionally, in the <year time that I've been reading and minimally contributing to HN, I've definitely been disappointed with a trend towards politicization that a lot of people have noted. I'm much happier seeing everyone's static site generators on github than everyone's opinion on Snowden or some other political issue that's related enough to tech to get posted. It strikes me as mission creep for HN to start getting so political. My favorite thing to see on the frontpage is a github repo, not a medium/svbtle article where someone spends two paragraphs telling an anecdote and then one paragraph jumping to a massive generalized conclusion based on that one experience and/or "Lorem Snowden" as you put it. /rant

[0]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

Hellbans aren't meant to teach people what mistake they made. Downvotes and comments are supposed to do that.

That's why it's a shame that downvoting is so disapproved of among a group of HN users, and it's a shame that people "drive-by downvote".

Hell banning is meant to save time of everyone in the community, and it does a pretty good job of that. There's much less meta commentary about whether banning a user is or isn't fair; and there's less to and fro about what should be a bannable offence. The algorithms do all that stuff.

I agree about the political stuff.

I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a "very positive" environment. Pernicious.

You can turn on show dead and see the hellbanned comments. Most of the time it's justified. The only occasions I've ever made the effort to contact someone and tell them they're hellbanned was after the girls in tech fiasco 6 months back, I thought the comment that banned him was just a bit stupid & misunderstood. And the rest of his comments really good.

So there are some of us keeping and eye on the 'shaping' and you can too if you want.

There's actually some amazing comments by a crazy guy who's written an OS dedicated to god, it's pretty insane and yet incredibly impressive at the same time.

That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for. And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.

That's true of moderation in general though - it's pernicious because it conceals from the community what exactly is being concealed from the community. I've seen this become a problem on sites as diverse as Groklaw, Jezebel, the Adafruit blog, and a number of other places.

HN is relatively transparent in that it has showdead. On most websites there's no way of telling what's missing.

You guessed the "maker" blog ;-)

It'd be interesting to see upvotes given only to users who've gotten X karma and downvotes being given to users who've gotten Y (Y>X) karma (the way downvotes are implemented now). it would likely encourage people to really browse the comments rather than just assume whatever's at the top is what they must agree with to survive. doubt this would ever work in practice but it's an interesting thought experiment at the least.

> There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

Sure, the starts of these things are always great because they have a tight focus. But then they expand, and people post shallowly & intensely interesting stuff, and other people upvote it, and then the community dies.

There's probably a secret HN somewhere, doing better than real HN.

You know, there's always been a very simple solution to "but then they expand"--just cap your userbase.

It's almost like HN is so exposed to web services going for exponential-hockey-stick-viral-growth, that they forget that you can intentionally avoid that curve if you like.

Like Malda said in the submission article: That doesn't make the graph go up and right.

It would be interesting to try that approach out, though. I would think a $5 fee would cap it for you — naturally raising the cap only when the industry your site focuses on grows as well.

The fee seems to have worked for Metafilter. That and active moderation.

This is how private torrent trackers try to keep their content quality high and, for the most part, it seems to work relatively well actually. Obviously it's not the same for a social news site necessarily.

> There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

These days I think Y Combinator is the one thing that keeps Hacker News from falling too far off track. Reddit is a good example of a website with a purely agnostic mission goal, and it's changed to a more mainstream audience over time. Since YC uses HN as a promotional platform, the audience here will typically remain rooted to a specific culture.

Plus one for mentioning the F/OSS "Planets"! They were/are great.

This place is an elitist microcosm of the networking hell that is silicon valley.

I come here because I'm part of the tech world. It's just that the tech world is a corrupt, greedy place--Y Combinator included.

Well, how are you working to change that?

We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched.

We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.

I've never quite understood the impulse to ask that critics be free from blame, as if one must have a solution in order to recognize a problem.

That said, I as a programmer do not work for a tech startup and have quit jobs I felt were complicit in greedy mania.

Another way of looking at it--why is it my problem that the technology sector is dominated by greed?

Deleted comment

Eh? I wasn't really talking about Malda's comments at all, just agreeing with your criticism of HN and adding a diagnosis :P

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