Ask HN: What are some unwritten rules of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some unwritten rules of HN?

6 pointsne0118 comments

Unwritten rules of HN that you have learned by experience. (for the sake of new users)

Thanks!

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FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But some of what you want to know about is in the unofficial FAQ compiled and maintained by jacquesm:

http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

The advice on search is now out-of-date.

Submitted in case anyone wants to discuss it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9601108

I hope it gets enough upvotes to get it to the front page so more people see it. It seems that a lot of people ask the same questions over and over again.

Before worrying about unwritten rules, new users should really read the rules that have been written down - see the "Guidelines" and "FAQ" links at the bottom of the page.

Following the guidelines about what's appropriate to post and being civil in your comments are probably the most important requirements for being a part of the HN community.

You get the privilege of changing the color of the top bar at a certain karma level.

Nice! Thanks for sharing!

Some people say HN has no sense of humor. It's not true! Original nerdy jokes are appreciated, even as one-liners.

You can downvote once you get a certain amount of karma.

If you share links to HN posts (like the comments section), and people upvote them, it will push you down the page.

I didn't know both of these facts! Thanks!

I had to go through the HN source code to find out how to max my avg score, then HN stopped caring about/displaying avg scores..

Let me guess, it was by making highly upvoted comments?

Generally, duh

Rigorously, only the last 50 but most recent 5 comments counted. Most upvoted comment did not count as well.

Oh, well, that's very interesting. I guess there was hope after all. I'm glad I tricked you into giving up the details :-)

Generally avoid meta-discussion and strive to write interesting and constructive and kind comments about something worth discussing.

If you have "showdead" turned on you get to see the comments of users who have been algorithmically killed.

Check their post history before telling them that their posts are dead.

Putting your email address in the "about" box is useful.

don't downvote posts that you disagree with. Feel free to downvote low quality posts, posts against the guidelines or other but far too often I am seeing posts get "ganged up on" from a group of people downvoting an opinion that isn't popular.

(I did not downvote you)

Downvote to disagree is embeded in HN culture. It is bound to happen - it happens everywhere that has post voting.

Better would be to upvote any post that you think is unfairly downvoted. (Most people have upvote privs. Few people have downvote privs.)

Telling people how to vote is a particularly useless form of meta-discussion.

isn't this thread in fact, meta?

Yes. That's why I flagged it...meta-discussions tend to produce useless posts as we are empirically demonstrating.

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