
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - qndev
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
======
merricksb
Big discussion 4 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822)
(437 points/188 comments)

------
ChrisSD
Comment collapsing is a useful feature. The problem with giving the largest
weight to the most upvoted comment is it also gives a large weight to all
replies (unless they're heavily downvoted). It's useful to be able to skip
those replies once they get less interesting.

However, this does lead to yo-yoing: reading comments downwards, going back up
to find the right collapse button then reading down again. It'd be useful to
have a more direct "fast forward" button. Though admittedly I haven't thought
this through in terms of UI design.

~~~
JFFalcon
The new Reddit desktop site has a good solution for that - each comment draws
a bar down the side of its children, which you can click on to collapse the
paarent. You collapse any level of parent comment without havign to scroll
back up.

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Crinus
> Downvoted comments (i.e. with a score < 1) reduce their placement on the
> comment thread and will appear desaturated to other users deemphasize them.

This desaturation is the most annoying misfeature of Hacker News IMO, it makes
reading comments very hard and negates the "bandwagoning prevention" that not
showing a visible score has (which is a good idea). I'd rather judge for
myself a comment's worth than have it faded out for me.

(yes there are workarounds, like using Stylus to override the CSS, but my
comment is against the misfeature not trying to find a workaround)

On a similar note, i see a lot of dead comments which i guess are marked as
dead by getting flagged too much - essentially using the flag as a super-
downvote and driving whoever is flagged out of discussion, not just because of
faded out text (which can be worked around) but because you cannot reply to
dead comments. The idea is only goon on a surface level (stomp out the bad
commenters) but in practice it often backfires since if someone is spreading
misinformation and their comment is killed, you cannot reply to it with the
correct information so all what people will see is the misinformation.

~~~
ComodoHacker
>I'd rather judge for myself a comment's worth than have it faded out for me.

It's not for you, it's a feedback for the commenter. And making your comment
unpleasant for others adds an emotional component into the feedback, which is
quite effective.

~~~
Crinus
But it also affects "me" and anyone who tries to follow a discussion by making
the text harder to read. The commenter already has a feedback on the visible-
to-them score. Why not make negative scores visible to everyone instead (even
make the score red or whatever to point out this is a negative comment)? After
all at the moment you introduce this visual change you do not care about the
bandwagoning aspect anymore.

~~~
dang
You can always read the comment by clicking on its timestamp to go to its
page. The comment shouldn't be faded when you do that.

------
kgwxd
"One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation on Hacker News is to
link to the Hacker News's /newest page of new submissions (instead of a direct
link which would otherwise make voting manipulation obvious), and asking
friends to upvote the submission from that page. This trick doesn't actually
work."

I use /newest to find and upvote new stuff all the time, are my votes being
silently ignored?

~~~
dang
No. I looked at your upvotes from /newest and they have a very high rate of
being counted.

Thanks for upvoting from /newest!

------
mkl
[https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors](https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)
is kind of fascinating (and ridiculous - why does it exist?).

Let me add some plots to the situation:
[https://imgur.com/a/KRzcQcU](https://imgur.com/a/KRzcQcU)

Quite a range (I've always been happy with orange).

~~~
dang
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97573)
for why the topcolor option exists.

See also
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080115223854/http://ycombinato...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080115223854/http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html?12jan08).

------
jsjolen
Does anyone know if 50 was the original karma limit for downvoting? I'm asking
because I've always thought it was 50 and was surprised I was wrong by a
factor of 10 :-).

~~~
dang
To judge by the version at
[http://arclanguage.org/install](http://arclanguage.org/install), the original
was 200.

------
cjfd
'If the comment desaturation makes Hacker News difficult to read, you can
click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page where the comment will no
longer be faded, or you can install the CSS extension discussed here.'

Actually, it is also possible to just select the text. This will make it
readable again, at least in my firefox.

------
krapp
Also there's
[https://news.ycombinator.com/whoami](https://news.ycombinator.com/whoami)
which will let you see your cookie values.

------
Down_n_Out
It's a great list, I've kept the link from the last time [0] it was posted.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973)

~~~
dang
That was the first time! Last time was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822).

------
busymom0
Are you the person behind that list? If so, thank you! I referenced this list
quite extensively last month when I was developing my iOS app HACK as it
supports pretty much every endpoint referenced there!

~~~
mkl
No, it's minimaxir:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=minimaxir](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=minimaxir)

~~~
qndev
Thank you __mkl __for answering me!

