Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

I suspect Pao is right. Most people who use reddit won't care about this. It's very easy to get in a Silicon Valley bubble thinking this stuff matters.

EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.

View on HN

I think it's a question of "important" users. If enough content mods and creators leave, will there be enough to fill the role immediately?

If not - i imagine it will be pretty visible to people on the fence, which will only snowball more. Just as with Digg, this can happen quite fast, and i think a snowball is the only true way this would happen.

With that said, i think the most important part of the equation will be another "player". If voat.co (or others) are not able to handle the immediate traffic, then i think it's much less likely to succeed. Reddit had a lot of troubles handling Diggs load, but they managed overall. Voat has been taken down multiple times due to Reddit's against-user actions - so it doesn't seem likely that Voat will be able to handle the traffic when Reddit users need/want it most.

Personally i'm hoping someone can find a way to distribute this whole social content idea - but in a UX friendly, web based way. I don't think Voat, or anyone else, will be able to handle taking in the Reddit userbase without falling into the same pitfalls as Digg and Reddit. Something decentralized seems like the only solution.

Most likely the lurkers don't care, but if a majority of mods or content producers care it could be a serious issue.

Content producers are a tiny minority of the site and mods are a tiny minority of that.

My thoughts exactly. The vocal minority are those that produce content and keep the site going.

> EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.

Paul Graham has said he thinks it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement[1]

Also, you may want to familiarize yourself with HN's guidelines, which state Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

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

She's right that, as a lurker, I don't really care. But it seems like all of the moderators and content contributors do, and if they leave, what does it matter what the lurkers think?

by content contributes you mean the people who take 30 seconds posting a link, right? Or the ones who game the system for karma?

Very few people create content for reddit, they re-post shit the way they would on something like their facebook wall.

True. But there is a large overlap between those that do care and those that create content, vote, comment, and are mods.

Thus, you are alienating exactly the class of users that you don't want to.

Pao is right, if only because the majority of reddit users don't have an account. These people are simply annoyed by all the non and meta content. But who expects a tick to care about the health of deer?

I am a heavy reddit user and think Moderators acted immature.

Remember just like mods have an issue with administrators, Many subreddit users have issues with moderators :). I am surprised this didn't come up.

"EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature."

Downvoting for disagreement is officially sanctioned on this site. It's annoying, but that's how it is.

If HN wanted to reserve Downvotes for something else than the opposite of an upvote, they shouldn't be graphically represented and placed and summed with upvotes like they are now.

I've complained about the culture that results from using downvotes for disagreement a number of times. I get zero response from the mods and numerous downvotes for my troubles.

I'm done fighting it. I just downvote anything I even slightly disagree with and move on. It's what the mods apparently want.

It's interesting that you see no room for nuance in the mod system. Definitely doesn't need to work the way you're expressing it here. In particular, your petulant tone makes me think you wield downvotes vengefully.

Downvotes work best with an emotionally mature community. Fortunately HN seems mature enough that discussion never really go off the rails, individuals with your attitude notwithstanding.

Downvotes derail conversations here several times a day, your condescending tone notwithstanding.

Apparently everyone is fine with that. So I see no reason not to be myself.

It's something that gets frequently discussed on HN. You might want to look back over the gajillion threads about it.

IMHO an upvote shouldn't mean "agree". I downvote lots of uninteresting, poorly articulated, or middlebrow comments with which I nominally agree.

It used to be that one could vote towards the score you felt a comment deserved - that felt much healthier IMO and gave what seemed like a much better view of the community opinion.

I upvote everything greyed out that is well articulated or makes a point or expresses an opinion that is not well represented elsewhere in the thread.

PG did also say this about how downvotes for disagreement are sub-optimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347

Most people would not have cared about the original firing, but many more do care about the way it was handled.

She should also not underestimate how quickly Reddit latches on to these kind of memes even when people might not personally care so much. That she's already widely known around Reddit as Chairman Pao is not exactly a good sign.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com