What's the point of HN? | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of HN?

16 pointspbhjpbhj21 comments

Is HN for discussion? If it is then why are dissenting opinions, that are well made and not troll-like, down-voted. Moreover if down-votes are intended to indicate only dissent (as I've been informed), not indicate low value remarks, then why is it considered beneficial to fade out such remarks.

Is HN supposed to be a sounding chamber or is the idea to foment useful discussion? Perhaps instead it's primarily just a link sharing tool?

The main stimulus to my question is how time and again good comments [that often I disagree with] are down-voted (presumably, vote numbers are hidden of course). Then the site admins deem that these comments need to be made difficult to read. This suggest that high-value discussion is not the point of the site; instead it serves to establish a narrow consensus and silence other voices.

So what is HN for?

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It's where hackers come to share and shoot the shit. It used to be somewhat more welcoming and friendly when it was small. But it's grown like 1000x since those days. YC is working on it.

Yes, there is a certain amount of hive-mind here and with certain topics you are best to not go against this groupthink if you value your karma. But since karma doesn't really have any value (beyond unlocking additional features) you should be able to speak your mind even if it is unpopular. Down-voting is not meant to be for well formed opinions you disagree with... but it does happen. More often, down-voting is for comments that are off point, personal attacks, general rudeness, and other things that are bad form.

It should be noted that there's a big difference between an unpopular opinion and a misinformed opinion, the latter of which typically causes downvotes depending on tone.

I rarely see super-gray posts for going against the grain.

Some topics are worse than others. Threads about Snowden or piracy are usually littered with grey posts that go against the ideas that Snowden is a god and piracy is just fine.

Another one I found is that advocating for privacy is a quick way for downvotes. Lots of users here run businesses that thrive on user-generated data so it makes sense they would prefer more control and liberty with the data in their service, to the dismay of some users/consumers.

Those topics are a fair counterpoint. :P

You make a mistake when you say downvotes are only for disagreement. Some people do not use them for disagreement and only ever use them to indicate unsuitable posts.

I would agree - I would be horrified to find people down voting because they disagreed with a statement of position or opinion.

Downvotes indicate the comment is not part of a constructive conversation. We all want to find places where we can be heard and part of that price is listening to others. If you can't do both, you can't be part of a conversation.

> I would be horrified to find people down voting because they disagreed with a statement of position or opinion.

Eh, I'm not bothered if people downvote to disagree. I'd rather they did that than bickered at me.

That's because karma points aren't important. What if the downvoted were written in the anti-union blacklist handed round the mine owners, or added to the security clearance files or ...

Open transparent discourse.

I actually got in a discussion about it wherein I was saying "downvotes are for low value comments" and was heavily corrected by a site regular. IIRC they quoted pg at me and unfortunately since then I've felt HN's ethos is "downvote disagreement".

Ah, found it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446824 [you're in that thread DanBC!].

I thought how I asked the question indicated I disproved, but this should make it clear.

It's a forum where people can post their hard work, and the rest of the community can poke holes in it and leave snarky comments.

Or a techy/nerdy link aggregator, maybe?

... and if people disagree with someone's well made snarky comments do you think that the site should try and make those comments hard to read?

The underlying point of HN has always been contribution.

Sure, that's a terribly bold assertion for me, a regular nobody, to make, but it's how I've always seen HN. Since this is the open Internet, I'm sure there's someone who will tell me that I'm wrong, or down-vote me because they disagree, but I'm fine with dissent. Dissent and disagreement are the price of admission when we voice our opinions.

My personal opinion is mostly useless outside of a rare few places where I happen to have some experience. The important thing I try to remember is HN is full of people with a great deal more experience than I have in particular fields. I try to learn from their contributions, so I really do appreciate their efforts. One of the possible ways they contribute is by down-voting me or stating their disagreement with me. Either way, I learn something new, so I still appreciate their efforts.

If pg replied to me and told me that I got it all wrong, and I got clobbered with a bazillion down-votes, then I'm the person who just learned something new, albeit the hard way. Everyone else also gets to learn from my rather public mistakes.

Those funny little up and down vote buttons exist for good reason, but how to use them has never formally been defined (to my knowledge) by any of the people running HN/YC. The complete lack of defining usage has always seemed to be entirely intentional; with every feature of HN, you are expected and trusted to use it wisely. You are being trusted with privileges of voting, flagging, submitting, and commenting. If you abuse the trust and the privileges, you'll lose them.

All people suffer from the same delusion; we believe our own interests are interesting to others. When you try to make a contribution of something interesting and useful, and you miserably "fail" by all noticeable metrics like points, then once again, you learn something new. I can honestly say that my interests are rarely interesting to others. If you don't believe me, go look at the "submissions" link in my profile to prove the point. Though you can't see the point counts on my comments, I'll openly admit that my comments fare no better than my submissions. If take a look, you'll see that I "fail" regularly, but I keep trying to contribute useful and interesting things.

An important number to look at is the "avg" in the user profile. It is the average score on comments you make. The default value for each comment is 1, an "avg" below one means your comments are a hindrance in the eyes of your fellow HN contributors, and an "avg" above one means your comments are successfully contributing to discussions. If your "avg" is about 2, then on average every time you comment, at least one person appreciated the effort of your contribution, and put in their effort to up-vote your comment.

Check out the avg for the HN user grellas [1]. Every time he puts in the effort to type one of his infamously fantastic comments, at least 53+ people appreciated it (and remembered to scroll back up and give him an up-vote ;-). Even if you disagree with him on something, you can still appreciate the effort he put into his contribution, and the experience and expertise behind his opinions...

Yes, you can disagree with someone, and still appreciate their effort enough to return the favor in kind with your up-vote. Since there are no rules or guidelines on voting, you're free to use your votes wisely.

I tend to lack useful experience and expertise on most subjects, so all I have is my generally uninformed opinions. Some people in my position will sit quietly and learn from others, but other people in my position will try to become informed enough to ask good questions. A good question is a contribution. I doubt the good questions get up-voted as much as the deserve since most of the attention goes to the person who shows up with a good answer.

I really really try to remember to up-vote the good questions, but I'm sure I forget more often than not. Just like everybody else, I'm regularly distracted by the good answers, and after reading the good answer, the good question always seems less useful. I'd bet there's some cognitive bias at work in all this, but sadly, I can't name it.

Sometimes good answers are opinions backed by experience and expertise, but other times good answers are backed by references. I'm just a sucker for up-voting answers with references, in fact, I scan for them.

Down-votes happen to everyone, so learn what you can divine form the experience, and let it go. It's just a fact of life that someone on the Internet will probably disagree vehemently. Also, mistakes happen in voting, and there's no way to correct your own voting mistakes.

The down-voting feature is a privilege you earn. I've always been strongly in the "up-vote-the-good-stuff" camp, so something needs to be fairly egregious for me to down-vote it. For me, vehemently disagreeing is never enough to warrant a down-vote. There needs to be some aspect of malice. The same is true and to a higher degree for flags. Just like everybody else on the planet, I've got a lot of practice being wrong and uninteresting, so I try to be tolerant with others.

The site moderators do not make the down-voted comments fade, the HN forum code [3] running on the server does this automatically. The mods get unfairly blamed for a lot of things they don't actually do, and most of the misplaced blame is due to users not understanding or studying the available forum code and docs. HN was originally written as a test of a new programming language called "arc" [4], but most users are unprepared to invest the time to learn a new language and understand the forum code base. I am fluent, well, was fluent, in a few related Lisp dialects, and I've only put in the time to barely scratch the surface of how the HN forum code really works. The only person I have to blame for not knowing all the details is myself.

A primary problem with all discussion forums and user supported link aggregation sites is the endless competition for both the attention and effort of others. Most of the HN Guidelines [2] can be written as a single guideline, "Don't be the jerk begging, baiting, or manipulating others for their attention and effort."

If you're like me and reliably "fail" at contributing useful and interesting comments and submissions according to the flawed metric of points, then you still ought to be happy. You tried to contribute, and you had the courage to put your own interests out there for others to judge, but far more importantly, the lack of points also implies the lack of using attention grabbing engagement tactics, so you just succeeded at staying out of the endless fray of countless attention seekers.

If linkbait outrage porn or regurgitation reporting is far more popular by the metric of up-votes over time, then I'm actually grateful that my interests are elsewhere. It just means I have a much better chance to contribute something different, unexpected, and hopefully interesting.

Lastly you get the references, but please realize they are not intended to support my personal opinions. Those are my own, and right or wrong, I hope they're useful and interesting for you and everyone else.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://github.com/HackerNews/HN

[4] http://arclanguage.org

I don't think anyone who takes issue with the fading-out of downvoted comments (like myself) thinks the mods are doing that directly. Rather, the effect makes no distinction between downvotes for mere disagreement (which are allowed anyway, but I think shouldn't be) and downvotes of rude/spam/obvious low quality posts, etc. In other words, there is as much a spectrum of quality for downvoting and upvoting as there is for commenting.

The effect takes what is, in essence, a purely subjective subset of user opinions and applies it against a user as a global censor. While the effect does appear to converge towards what is probably a correct result over time (in that correctness implies consensus opinion), the complete lack of context combined with stifling the visibility of discussion seems to be both heavy-handed and unfair.

Bear in mind, also, that text posts are faded by default, because pg assumed allowing users to post long form content would only lead to them using the forum as a blog. This suggests an almost antagonistic attitude towards user participation which is offputting to say the least.

We don't really know why text-based submissions are faded by default, or more accurately, I don't recall pg ever saying why it was done. On the other hand, we can obviously see the effect fading of reducing emphasis, and from the HN guidelines we know attempting to attract attention is discouraged.

A text-based submission puts the words of the author at the very top in a prominent and unfair position for attention. The very slight fading of the those unfair top-most words has always seemed to me to be an attempt to compensate for the prominent position they get by default. I could be wrong, but it just looks like a way to make the playing field a bit more fair while still allowing a discussion to be started with text alone.

As for favoring link-based submissions over text-based submissions, my guess for the reason has always been sitting in the title of the site; "News," whether the original name, "Startup News," or the new name, "Hacker News." The term "News" implies "new" and the time-based ranking techniques are an attempt to keep the "new" stuff where it will be seen. In other words, "new" gets more emphasis and prominence.

Calling the fade effects on comments "censorship" seems a bit unfairly rhetorical. If someone wanted to reverse the rhetoric to make the feature seem unfairly beneficial, they'd call it "curation" instead. Either way, the fading does reduce emphasis and prominence, but the same is true for all the ranking and other aspects of the site.

If a dissenting opinion is well written but was "unfairly" down-voted in your opinion, the fade effect gives you the needed feedback to take the "needed" corrective measure of up-voting it to compensate. It may not be a perfect system, but it's still much better than bias and competition issues caused by displaying per-comment points.

Though how to use up and down votes have never been formally defined, their use has never been "purely subjective" since the terms "up" and "down" and even "flag" still have general but vague meaning. Maybe I lack the needed imagination, but I simply can't imagine a regular person using an "up" vote to indicate disagreement, disapproval, opposition, annoyance, discouragement, or punishment.

FWIW here is pg personally stating the reason for text submissions being faded out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468231

I think it is censorship, but i'll concede it's weak censorship and that plenty of users seem to be ok with it, which is valid. You're right, that one person's censorship is another person's curation - though I would personally go a step further and say that curation is a subset of censorship, without the negative connotations. Whether it is or not depends on whether you agree with the net effect.

>A text-based submission puts the words of the author at the very top in a prominent and unfair position for attention.

I guess we would disagree here, since I don't believe it is unfair. The prominence of the author's post is the entire point of a text post - the author is asking a question or presenting a product or something, and the rest of the thread is a reaction to that (or reactions to reactions, etc.) It's implicit to the medium that the tree has a root.

Reducing legibility and reducing prominence are two different things, at least to me. I have no problem at all with upvotes or downvotes affecting where subthreads wind up in the sorting order - that's precisely what they should do. But why also make content more difficult to read as well?

If anything, that makes those elements more prominent, as it send a visual cue that "this is something you can easily ignore as it's not worth your time," which may not be the case.

Keeping comments and text posts legible forces people to actually read the content, consider it on its own merit and act accordingly (downvote, upvote, ignore, respond, whatever). It encourages conversation rather than the creating of filters to stifle it.

Great find on the pg link on the text-based submissions. We agree on how text-based posts need to put said text prominently at the top. It just wouldn't make sense otherwise. From the link, it seems the point of slight fading the text-based submissions slightly was to discourage the text-based submissions and also distinguish them from regular comments.

You also have a point regarding legibility. Since faded text is still readable to me, I hadn't thought of it in terms of legibility. Reduced legibility does result in requiring increased effort, and many people simply won't bother. The real trouble with "legibility" is it's highly subjective due to depending on both the type and configuration of the system hardware being used, and the eyesight of the person attempting to use it. Though most things try to be usable for people with "average" eyesight, there are actually countless combinations of human visual capacities, advantages, impairments, and preferences.

Since all we ever know is how our own eyes see things, we often forget how the exact same thing can be vastly different for others. I might be able to see the faded text a whole lot easier than you can, or vice versa, so faded text could be extremely annoying for one, but only be trivially inconvenient for the other. When I caught myself wondering if your system was configured "correctly," the supposedly "obvious" finally dawned on me; it's probably a whole lot easier for me to read the faded text than it is for you, so our difference of opinion could very well be due to being unable to literally see things the same way the other does.

If faded text is extremely annoying and difficult for you to read, then please contact me through email. I know great deal about accessibility issues and configuring systems/software to adjust for many different types of eyesight impairments and idiosyncrasies.

No, you don't understand - it's not a usability issue for me, I can see it fine. Actually better than fine because i wrote a userscript for myself which undoes the effect anyway, so even dead posts come up in black text. I apologize if I gave that impression.

It is actually kind of an ethical issue for me. It doesn't matter that the initial effort to read the faded text is minimal, but that the site is putting that extra friction there to begin with. Users should be able to judge the quality of posts and comments on equal terms, not have the site predispose them to dismiss certain posts based on what may be an irrational metric.

I understand that it's probably not a popular opinion and it seems like a minor and petty thing but it just bothers me. I'm not going to push it, though, i'm sure it already seems like i'm ranting.

It didn't seem like ranting to me. I think you did a great job of expressing your opinion clearly and fairly. In a mostly failed attempt to empathize, I brought up the vision/display issue as a possible reason why the fading might bother you more than me. Normally, I need to use a specialized browser to prevent headaches and it never renders the fade effect, so as saying goes, "Out of sight, out of mind." I can only withstand black text on a white background for a few hours, but then I'm pretty much toast and in dire need of some aspirin.

Oddly enough, over the last two days I've been once again working out the needed css to override handling of a few corner cases on HN, so for a change, I've actually been seeing the fade effect. The fade is annoying, but on the bright side, it did enable me notice a few unfairly down-voted comments, and prompted me to give a corrective up-vote.

The one unfairly down-voted comment sticking in my memory was some person saying they didn't like Debian distribution of Linux and cited the 2006 OpenSSL fiasco as their reasoning. Down-voting a general opinion, and particularly one with factual support, is simply abusive voting, but sadly, it happens quite often on HN. If you know how to stop fanatics from doing dumb and/or mean things with their votes, then I'd love to know the answer. The only solution I know is to up-vote against them (when I notice the down-votes).

You said you've already solved the issue for yourself with a "userscript" but whether that's through GreaseMonkey or through leveraging userChrome.js is uncertain. It's actually much easier and cleaner to fix the display with pure CSS, either through a plugin like "Stylish" (chrome/firefox), or through your userContent.css file.

For me, I'll probably use something like the code below since I want the down or dead comment to be displayed equally like all the other comments, but I also want some form of feedback to let me know the comment was down-voted.

  @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
    /* down-voted comments, reset font color to black */
    font[color="#5a5a5a"],
    font[color="#aeaeae"] {
      color: #000000 !important;
    }
    /* down-voted comments, add trailing indicator of down-votes */
    span font[color="#5a5a5a"]:last-child::after,
    span font[color="#aeaeae"]:last-child::after {
      color: #aeaeae !important;
      white-space:pre;
      display: inline !important;
      content: '\A\A [down?]' !important;
    }
    /* dead comment class, reset font color to black */
    .dead, .dead * { color: #000000 !important; }
    /* dead comment class, add trailing indicator of down-votes */
    .dead:last-child::after {
      color: #aeaeae !important;
      white-space:pre;
      display: inline !important;
      content: '\A [dead?]' !important;
    }
  }

The above sort of turns the tables (if you pardon the HTML tag pun) by changing the comment font color to black, and adding a subtle trailing text indicator of "[down?]" or "[dead?]" that's mostly faded out. It should level the playing field, but still give me some gentle feedback so I can make a corrective up-vote when needed. As always, it's not a perfect solution, but it seems like an improvement.

I believe that HN is an open forum that wants to be a closed forum. It appears to have been designed around the principle that a singular, consistent concept of "quality" exists, primarily due to the homogeneous nature of the original community, and the assumption that this community would likely find only a narrow subset of topics relevant.

Fading out remarks is one example of such a bias in effect - were there only one type of poster and, predictably, one set of qualifiable opinions on HN, then the effect of censorship from a single user downvoting another and rendering their comments more difficult to read could be construed as acting on behalf of the community's standards as a whole, rather than reinforcing the bias of a particular subset or group.

Although some faded comments are obvious trolls, rudeness or spam, disagreement for any reason (spoken or otherwise) leads to globally visual censorship. Arguably, the more faded a comment is, the more 'justifiable' that censorship can be, in terms of representing the community. However, this does suggest that barely faded comments are, themselves, more noise than signal. Also, more obvious examples of incorrect downvotes, i've found, tend to be corrected over time.

Also, there is a subset of downvotes which were meant to be upvotes but they just fat-fingered the wrong button.

There is also a principle at work behind several design aspects of the site, intended to stave off the "Eternal September" syndrome. Fading out unpopular comments, whatever the reason may be for that unpopularity, may be a way of discouraging participation of any kind with threads which could even remotely be considered of 'low quality'.

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