News.YC drifting to smartass comments? | Hacker News Reader

News.YC drifting to smartass comments?

9 pointseru22 comments

"Why is it that when I willingly share my hard earned skills and knowledge, I get downmodded, and when I post a smarta$$ remark, I earn 20 unexpected points?" (edw519 in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97316)

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You need to practice translating your hard-earned knowledge into smartass form. It's a winning combination.

And if you look at /bestcomments this appears to be the case.

Ah. I didn't know about /bestcomments.

I bow to the master.

I had also forgotten that edw519 was the author of one of the most sagacious smartass comments in software history.

Thank you, fish, I think.

May I use your comment quote in the promotional material for my next startup, SagaciousSmartassCommentGenerator.com?

Input: Whatever you want to say.

Output: Greatly compressed text (using our proprietary smartass algorithm) guaranteed to generate karma in even the harshest environments (Reddit, Digg, Slashdot)

My email blasts will probably have subject lines like, "Karma Enlargement: 12 Points Guaranteed"

> SagaciousSmartassCommentGenerator.com?

Sorry, Network Solutions already took that domain...

21 points needed to enter the list. Should be doable.

Ah, the Torvalds protocol.

Looks like karma, a mechanism designed to encourage people to post valuable comments, actually demotivates submitting everything more valuable, thus controversial. In other words, down-voting in comments, that was designed to punish exceptionally bad posts, actually punishes all exceptional comments.

Karma is designed to motivate submissions deemed valuable to the community. "Exceptional" is relative to the community and reflects its collective taste.

With this many headline spots, this many eyes, and this many submissions, it is unreasonable to expect a filtering mechanism that worked for population size x would work similarly for 10x. Your voice is diluted; what you used to consider {attribute} is now something completely orthogonal.

I know this may sound harsh, but someone who thinks of what they know as "hard-earned skills" may not have especially valuable insights. The good programmers I know don't think of themselves as having skills, and certainly not hard-earned ones; they just feel like there's some stuff they understand pretty well.

The value of my skills and knowledge may be debatable, but the effort expended in gaining them is not. I have the scars to prove it.

And I'm glad to share any or all of it here to save others from making the same mistakes. Just as others did for me.

(I'd also like to think of myself as one of the good programmers you HAVEN'T met yet. Who knows, maybe someday...)

The good news is that news.yc is still the least Godwin'd of any major social news site. Some numbers for comparison:

site:news.ycombinator.com hitler - 18

site:kuro5hin.org hitler - 1,380

site:slashdot.org hitler - 3,080

site:metafilter.com hitler - 6,260

site:dailykos.com hitler - 9,610

site:reddit.com hitler - 16,600

site:digg.com hitler - 34,300

site:4chan.org hitler ---

site:fark.com hitler ---

Presumably it's because this site already has a vegetarian who enjoys painting...

19 Now. Bastard.

Uhm... without dividing that by the total number of results, you're not getting anything very meaningful. If that other number is 180 for YC, and 1,000,000,000 for Slashdot, YC is worse than Slashdot.

I like the concept though... measuring a site's godwin factor.

No, Hitler is absolutly bad - not only relatively.

(Believe it or not: This was actually once a topic highly fought over by German historians in the 80ies.)

You win some, you lose some.

That said, I generally use the down-arrow sparingly on this site, specifically against abuse, trollery, or willful stupidity.

It would be sad if the down-arrow became a general "I disagree" button like it is on reddit.

I like smartass comments as long as they're funny and not at anyone's expense - not put downs.

karma / work - ratio:

hard earned skills and knowledge < smartass remarks < just citing stuff

(I call it: stealing with a receipt)

Idk, I post something smartass and end up at -8 generally. Maybe it's just me.

That was funny, so I downmodded you. This makes it funnier. Enjoy.

This is cruel.

Bravo, sirs. Bravo.

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