
What's the point of HN? - pbhjpbhj
Is HN for discussion? If it is then why are dissenting opinions, that are well made and not troll-like, down-voted. Moreover if down-votes are intended to indicate only dissent (as I&#x27;ve been informed), not indicate low value remarks, then why is it considered beneficial to fade out such remarks.<p>Is HN supposed to be a sounding chamber or is the idea to foment useful discussion? Perhaps instead it&#x27;s primarily just a link sharing tool?<p>The main stimulus to my question is how time and again good comments [that often I disagree with] are down-voted (presumably, vote numbers are hidden of course). Then the site admins deem that these comments need to be made difficult to read. This suggest that high-value discussion is <i>not</i> the point of the site; instead it serves to establish a narrow consensus and silence other voices.<p>So what is HN for?
======
staunch
It's where hackers come to share and shoot the shit. It used to be somewhat
more welcoming and friendly when it was small. But it's grown like 1000x since
those days. YC is working on it.

------
jack-r-abbit
Yes, there is a certain amount of hive-mind here and with certain topics you
are best to not go against this groupthink if you value your karma. But since
karma doesn't really have any value (beyond unlocking additional features) you
should be able to speak your mind even if it is unpopular. Down-voting is not
meant to be for well formed opinions you disagree with... but it does happen.
More often, down-voting is for comments that are off point, personal attacks,
general rudeness, and other things that are bad form.

~~~
minimaxir
It should be noted that there's a big difference between an unpopular opinion
and a _misinformed_ opinion, the latter of which typically causes downvotes
depending on tone.

I rarely see super-gray posts for going against the grain.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Some topics are worse than others. Threads about Snowden or piracy are usually
littered with grey posts that go against the ideas that Snowden is a god and
piracy is just fine.

~~~
mkal_tsr
Another one I found is that advocating for privacy is a quick way for
downvotes. Lots of users here run businesses that thrive on user-generated
data so it makes sense they would prefer more control and liberty with the
data in their service, to the dismay of some users/consumers.

------
DanBC
You make a mistake when you say downvotes are only for disagreement. Some
people do not use them for disagreement and only ever use them to indicate
unsuitable posts.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I would agree - I would be horrified to find people down voting because they
disagreed with a statement of position or opinion.

Downvotes indicate the comment is not part of a constructive conversation. We
all want to find places where we can be heard and part of that price is
listening to others. If you can't do both, you can't be part of a
conversation.

~~~
DanBC
> I would be horrified to find people down voting because they disagreed with
> a statement of position or opinion.

Eh, I'm not bothered if people downvote to disagree. I'd rather they did that
than bickered at me.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
That's because karma points aren't important. What if the downvoted were
written in the anti-union blacklist handed round the mine owners, or added to
the security clearance files or ...

Open transparent discourse.

------
deedubaya
It's a forum where people can post their hard work, and the rest of the
community can poke holes in it and leave snarky comments.

Or a techy/nerdy link aggregator, maybe?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
... and if people disagree with someone's well made snarky comments do you
think that the site should try and make those comments hard to read?

------
jcr
The underlying point of HN has always been contribution.

Sure, that's a terribly bold assertion for me, a regular nobody, to make, but
it's how I've always seen HN. Since this is the open Internet, I'm sure
there's someone who will tell me that I'm wrong, or down-vote me because they
disagree, but I'm fine with dissent. Dissent and disagreement are the price of
admission when we voice our opinions.

My personal opinion is mostly useless outside of a rare few places where I
happen to have some experience. The important thing I try to remember is HN is
full of people with a great deal more experience than I have in particular
fields. I try to learn from their contributions, so I really do appreciate
their efforts. One of the possible ways they contribute is by down-voting me
or stating their disagreement with me. Either way, I learn something new, so I
still appreciate their efforts.

If pg replied to me and told me that I got it all wrong, and I got clobbered
with a bazillion down-votes, then I'm the person who just learned something
new, albeit the hard way. Everyone else also gets to learn from my rather
public mistakes.

Those funny little up and down vote buttons exist for good reason, but how to
use them has never formally been defined (to my knowledge) by any of the
people running HN/YC. The complete lack of defining usage has always seemed to
be entirely intentional; with every feature of HN, you are expected and
trusted to use it wisely. You are being trusted with privileges of voting,
flagging, submitting, and commenting. If you abuse the trust and the
privileges, you'll lose them.

All people suffer from the same delusion; we believe our own interests are
interesting to others. When you try to make a contribution of something
interesting and useful, and you miserably "fail" by all noticeable metrics
like points, then once again, you learn something new. I can honestly say that
_my_ interests are rarely interesting to others. If you don't believe me, go
look at the "submissions" link in my profile to prove the point. Though you
can't see the point counts on my comments, I'll openly admit that my comments
fare no better than my submissions. If take a look, you'll see that I "fail"
regularly, but I keep trying to contribute useful and interesting things.

An important number to look at is the "avg" in the user profile. It is the
average score on comments you make. The default value for each comment is 1,
an "avg" below one means your comments are a hindrance in the eyes of your
fellow HN contributors, and an "avg" above one means your comments are
successfully contributing to discussions. If your "avg" is about 2, then on
average every time you comment, at least one person appreciated the effort of
your contribution, and put in their effort to up-vote your comment.

Check out the avg for the HN user grellas [1]. Every time he puts in the
effort to type one of his infamously fantastic comments, at least 53+ people
appreciated it (and remembered to scroll back up and give him an up-vote ;-).
Even if you disagree with him on something, you can still appreciate the
effort he put into his contribution, and the experience and expertise behind
his opinions...

Yes, you can disagree with someone, and still appreciate their effort enough
to return the favor in kind with your up-vote. Since there are no rules or
guidelines on voting, you're free to use your votes wisely.

I tend to lack useful experience and expertise on most subjects, so all I have
is my generally uninformed opinions. Some people in my position will sit
quietly and learn from others, but other people in my position will try to
become informed enough to ask good questions. A good question is a
contribution. I doubt the good questions get up-voted as much as the deserve
since most of the attention goes to the person who shows up with a good
answer.

I _really really try_ to remember to up-vote the good questions, but I'm sure
I forget more often than not. Just like everybody else, I'm regularly
distracted by the good answers, and after reading the good answer, the good
question always seems less useful. I'd bet there's some cognitive bias at work
in all this, but sadly, I can't name it.

Sometimes good answers are opinions backed by experience and expertise, but
other times good answers are backed by references. I'm just a sucker for up-
voting answers with references, in fact, I scan for them.

Down-votes happen to everyone, so learn what you can divine form the
experience, and let it go. It's just a fact of life that _someone_ on the
Internet will probably disagree vehemently. Also, mistakes happen in voting,
and there's no way to correct your own voting mistakes.

The down-voting feature is a privilege you earn. I've always been strongly in
the "up-vote-the-good-stuff" camp, so something needs to be fairly egregious
for me to down-vote it. For me, vehemently disagreeing is never enough to
warrant a down-vote. There needs to be some aspect of malice. The same is true
and to a higher degree for flags. Just like everybody else on the planet, I've
got a lot of practice being wrong and uninteresting, so I try to be tolerant
with others.

The site moderators do not make the down-voted comments fade, the HN forum
code [3] running on the server does this automatically. The mods get unfairly
blamed for a lot of things they don't actually do, and most of the misplaced
blame is due to users not understanding or studying the available forum code
and docs. HN was originally written as a test of a new programming language
called "arc" [4], but most users are unprepared to invest the time to learn a
new language and understand the forum code base. I am fluent, well, was
fluent, in a few related Lisp dialects, and I've only put in the time to
barely scratch the surface of how the HN forum code really works. The only
person I have to blame for not knowing all the details is myself.

A primary problem with all discussion forums and user supported link
aggregation sites is the endless competition for both the attention and effort
of others. Most of the HN Guidelines [2] can be written as a single guideline,
"Don't be the jerk begging, baiting, or manipulating others for their
attention and effort."

If you're like me and reliably "fail" at contributing useful and interesting
comments and submissions according to the flawed metric of points, then you
still ought to be happy. You tried to contribute, and you had the courage to
put your own interests out there for others to judge, but far more
importantly, the lack of points also implies the lack of using attention
grabbing engagement tactics, so you just succeeded at staying out of the
endless fray of countless attention seekers.

If linkbait outrage porn or regurgitation reporting is far more popular by the
metric of up-votes over time, then I'm actually grateful that my interests are
elsewhere. It just means I have a much better chance to contribute something
different, unexpected, and hopefully interesting.

Lastly you get the references, but please realize they are not intended to
support my personal opinions. Those are my own, and right or wrong, I hope
they're useful and interesting for you and everyone else.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas)

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

[3] [https://github.com/HackerNews/HN](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN)

[4] [http://arclanguage.org](http://arclanguage.org)

~~~
krapp
I don't think anyone who takes issue with the fading-out of downvoted comments
(like myself) thinks the mods are doing that directly. Rather, the effect
makes no distinction between downvotes for mere disagreement (which are
allowed anyway, but I think shouldn't be) and downvotes of rude/spam/obvious
low quality posts, etc. In other words, there is as much a spectrum of quality
for downvoting and upvoting as there is for commenting.

The effect takes what is, in essence, a purely subjective subset of user
opinions and applies it against a user as a global censor. While the effect
does appear to converge towards what is probably a correct result over time
(in that correctness implies consensus opinion), the complete lack of context
combined with stifling the visibility of discussion seems to be both heavy-
handed and unfair.

Bear in mind, also, that text posts are faded by default, because pg assumed
allowing users to post long form content would only lead to them using the
forum as a blog. This suggests an almost antagonistic attitude towards user
participation which is offputting to say the least.

~~~
jcr
We don't really know why text-based submissions are faded by default, or more
accurately, I don't recall pg ever saying why it was done. On the other hand,
we can obviously see the effect fading of reducing emphasis, and from the HN
guidelines we know attempting to attract attention is discouraged.

A text-based submission puts the words of the author at the very top in a
prominent and unfair position for attention. The very slight fading of the
those unfair top-most words has always seemed to me to be an attempt to
compensate for the prominent position they get by default. I could be wrong,
but it just looks like a way to make the playing field a bit more fair while
still allowing a discussion to be started with text alone.

As for favoring link-based submissions over text-based submissions, my guess
for the reason has always been sitting in the title of the site; "News,"
whether the original name, "Startup News," or the new name, "Hacker News." The
term "News" implies "new" and the time-based ranking techniques are an attempt
to keep the "new" stuff where it will be seen. In other words, "new" gets more
emphasis and prominence.

Calling the fade effects on comments "censorship" seems a bit unfairly
rhetorical. If someone wanted to reverse the rhetoric to make the feature seem
unfairly beneficial, they'd call it "curation" instead. Either way, the fading
does reduce emphasis and prominence, but the same is true for all the ranking
and other aspects of the site.

If a dissenting opinion is well written but was "unfairly" down-voted in your
opinion, the fade effect gives you the needed feedback to take the "needed"
corrective measure of up-voting it to compensate. It may not be a perfect
system, but it's still much better than bias and competition issues caused by
displaying per-comment points.

Though how to use up and down votes have never been formally defined, their
use has never been "purely subjective" since the terms "up" and "down" and
even "flag" still have general but vague meaning. Maybe I lack the needed
imagination, but I simply can't imagine a regular person using an "up" vote to
indicate disagreement, disapproval, opposition, annoyance, discouragement, or
punishment.

~~~
krapp
FWIW here is pg personally stating the reason for text submissions being faded
out:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468231)

I think it is censorship, but i'll concede it's weak censorship and that
plenty of users seem to be ok with it, which is valid. You're right, that one
person's censorship is another person's curation - though I would personally
go a step further and say that curation is a subset of censorship, without the
negative connotations. Whether it is or not depends on whether you agree with
the net effect.

>A text-based submission puts the words of the author at the very top in a
prominent and unfair position for attention.

I guess we would disagree here, since I don't believe it is unfair. The
prominence of the author's post is the entire point of a text post - the
author is asking a question or presenting a product or something, and the rest
of the thread is a reaction to that (or reactions to reactions, etc.) It's
implicit to the medium that the tree has a root.

Reducing legibility and reducing prominence are two different things, at least
to me. I have no problem at all with upvotes or downvotes affecting where
subthreads wind up in the sorting order - that's precisely what they should
do. But why also make content more difficult to read as well?

If anything, that makes those elements more prominent, as it send a visual cue
that "this is something you can easily ignore as it's not worth your time,"
which may not be the case.

Keeping comments and text posts legible forces people to actually read the
content, consider it on its own merit and act accordingly (downvote, upvote,
ignore, respond, whatever). It encourages conversation rather than the
creating of filters to stifle it.

~~~
jcr
Great find on the pg link on the text-based submissions. We agree on how text-
based posts need to put said text prominently at the top. It just wouldn't
make sense otherwise. From the link, it seems the point of slight fading the
text-based submissions slightly was to discourage the text-based submissions
and also distinguish them from regular comments.

You also have a point regarding legibility. Since faded text is still readable
to me, I hadn't thought of it in terms of legibility. Reduced legibility does
result in requiring increased effort, and many people simply won't bother. The
real trouble with "legibility" is it's highly subjective due to depending on
both the type and configuration of the system hardware being used, and the
eyesight of the person attempting to use it. Though most things try to be
usable for people with "average" eyesight, there are actually countless
combinations of human visual capacities, advantages, impairments, and
preferences.

Since all we ever know is how our own eyes see things, we often forget how the
exact same thing can be vastly different for others. I might be able to see
the faded text a whole lot easier than you can, or vice versa, so faded text
could be extremely annoying for one, but only be trivially inconvenient for
the other. When I caught myself wondering if your system was configured
"correctly," the supposedly "obvious" finally dawned on me; it's probably a
whole lot easier for me to read the faded text than it is for you, so our
difference of opinion could very well be due to being unable to literally see
things the same way the other does.

If faded text is extremely annoying and difficult for you to read, then please
contact me through email. I know great deal about accessibility issues and
configuring systems/software to adjust for many different types of eyesight
impairments and idiosyncrasies.

~~~
krapp
No, you don't understand - it's not a usability issue for me, I can see it
fine. Actually better than fine because i wrote a userscript for myself which
undoes the effect anyway, so even dead posts come up in black text. I
apologize if I gave that impression.

It is actually kind of an ethical issue for me. It doesn't matter that the
initial effort to read the faded text is minimal, but that the site is putting
that extra friction there to begin with. Users should be able to judge the
quality of posts and comments on equal terms, not have the site predispose
them to dismiss certain posts based on what may be an irrational metric.

I understand that it's probably not a popular opinion and it seems like a
minor and petty thing but it just bothers me. I'm not going to push it,
though, i'm sure it already seems like i'm ranting.

~~~
jcr
It didn't seem like ranting to me. I think you did a great job of expressing
your opinion clearly and fairly. In a mostly failed attempt to empathize, I
brought up the vision/display issue as a possible reason why the fading might
bother you more than me. Normally, I need to use a specialized browser to
prevent headaches and it never renders the fade effect, so as saying goes,
"Out of sight, out of mind." I can only withstand black text on a white
background for a few hours, but then I'm pretty much toast and in dire need of
some aspirin.

Oddly enough, over the last two days I've been once again working out the
needed css to override handling of a few corner cases on HN, so for a change,
I've actually been seeing the fade effect. The fade _is_ annoying, but on the
bright side, it did enable me notice a few unfairly down-voted comments, and
prompted me to give a corrective up-vote.

The one unfairly down-voted comment sticking in my memory was some person
saying they didn't like Debian distribution of Linux and cited the 2006
OpenSSL fiasco as their reasoning. Down-voting a general opinion, and
particularly one with factual support, is simply abusive voting, but sadly, it
happens quite often on HN. If you know how to stop fanatics from doing dumb
and/or mean things with their votes, then I'd love to know the answer. The
only solution I know is to up-vote against them (when I notice the down-
votes).

You said you've already solved the issue for yourself with a "userscript" but
whether that's through GreaseMonkey or through leveraging userChrome.js is
uncertain. It's actually much easier and cleaner to fix the display with pure
CSS, either through a plugin like "Stylish" (chrome/firefox), or through your
userContent.css file.

For me, I'll probably use something like the code below since I want the down
or dead comment to be displayed equally like all the other comments, but I
also want some form of feedback to let me know the comment was down-voted.

    
    
      @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
        /* down-voted comments, reset font color to black */
        font[color="#5a5a5a"],
        font[color="#aeaeae"] {
          color: #000000 !important;
        }
        /* down-voted comments, add trailing indicator of down-votes */
        span font[color="#5a5a5a"]:last-child::after,
        span font[color="#aeaeae"]:last-child::after {
          color: #aeaeae !important;
          white-space:pre;
          display: inline !important;
          content: '\A\A [down?]' !important;
        }
        /* dead comment class, reset font color to black */
        .dead, .dead * { color: #000000 !important; }
        /* dead comment class, add trailing indicator of down-votes */
        .dead:last-child::after {
          color: #aeaeae !important;
          white-space:pre;
          display: inline !important;
          content: '\A [dead?]' !important;
        }
      }
    

The above sort of turns the tables (if you pardon the HTML tag pun) by
changing the comment font color to black, and adding a subtle trailing text
indicator of "[down?]" or "[dead?]" that's mostly faded out. It should level
the playing field, but still give me some gentle feedback so I can make a
corrective up-vote when needed. As always, it's not a perfect solution, but it
seems like an improvement.

------
krapp
I believe that HN is an open forum that wants to be a closed forum. It appears
to have been designed around the principle that a singular, consistent concept
of "quality" exists, primarily due to the homogeneous nature of the original
community, and the assumption that this community would likely find only a
narrow subset of topics relevant.

Fading out remarks is one example of such a bias in effect - were there only
one type of poster and, predictably, one set of qualifiable opinions on HN,
then the effect of censorship from a single user downvoting another and
rendering their comments more difficult to read could be construed as acting
on behalf of the community's standards as a whole, rather than reinforcing the
bias of a particular subset or group.

Although some faded comments are obvious trolls, rudeness or spam,
disagreement for any reason (spoken or otherwise) leads to globally visual
censorship. Arguably, the more faded a comment is, the more 'justifiable' that
censorship can be, in terms of representing the community. However, this does
suggest that barely faded comments are, themselves, more noise than signal.
Also, more obvious examples of incorrect downvotes, i've found, tend to be
corrected over time.

Also, there is a subset of downvotes which were meant to be upvotes but they
just fat-fingered the wrong button.

There is also a principle at work behind several design aspects of the site,
intended to stave off the "Eternal September" syndrome. Fading out unpopular
comments, whatever the reason may be for that unpopularity, may be a way of
discouraging participation of any kind with threads which could even remotely
be considered of 'low quality'.

