
Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN - billme
Maybe I am biased, but increasingly feel HN is subject to number of dark patterns related to potentially meritless rep-mining, voting, flags, etc.<p>What are examples if any that users are seeing and how might they be better addressed?<p>Would HN consider being more open about their policies or allowing trusted 3rd party to audit the effectiveness of these policies?
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uberman
You seem to have asserted there is meritless rep-mining and provided no
details. Then you ask others to provide details about where they see meritless
rep-mining. I know you already know about this repository documenting HN

[https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
undocumented/blob/m...](https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
undocumented/blob/master/README.md)

So I'm really not sure what more you are after with respect to how things
work.

Why would HN be interested in having a 3rd party audit their policies? What
possible positive outcome would be in it for them?

~~~
billme
Right, I am a HN super user.

I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move onto a new account; no reason
other than by doing so I am never able to downvote regardless of the desire to
do so, let’s me easily benchmark perception of my comments & excluded
community’s bias to upvote known users, it’s a minor form of OpSec, etc.

Here are a few examples:

\- HN automates a lot of mod related tasks, but to my knowledge rarely prior
to establishing such automation defines a measurable outcome, then tests to
confirm the desired outcome holds true;

\- Recently discovered user that’s been shadowban 5 years will likely never
know they are ghosted unless I tell them;

\- Other examples which are likely considered “secrets” that might not be
appropriate openly disclose; I personally object to this;

\- as for the audits, it would allow HN to get an independent opinion in a way
that doesn’t result in data they normally withhold from being public.

Happy to address or clarify anything on request.

~~~
dang
> Right, I am a HN super user. I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move
> onto a new account

Please don't. For HN to be a community, users need some identity for other
users to relate to. If you change your identity routinely, you're interrupting
that functioning. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community,
and that would be a different kind of forum.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).
This is in the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If you don't want to be able to downvote, I'm sure we could figure out a way
to make that work.

~~~
billme
Okay, understand; unfortunately that means I will just stop posting on HN,
since I neither have the desire to have “an identity” on HN, nor do I intend
to disregard any guidelines. Thanks for all the work you do to keep HN
running, please don’t take this personally, understand and agree with your
position, just not good fit for me. Cheers!

