
Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - minimaxir
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
======
rweba
More and more websites are getting rid of user comments on their websites.
Just in the last couple of months the National Review and The Atlantic have
got rid of comments.

In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not
able or willing to invest in enough moderators.

So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment
sections on the internet. What I like about HN is that the comments VERY
RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen
almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial
topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments
is kept pretty low.

So, keep it up, dang and sctb!

~~~
dkoubsky
The amount of civility on HN is almost unbelievable. The behavior of the users
is one of the HN's biggest strengths.

~~~
mygo
I once said something slightly political and my comment was downvoted into
oblivion.

So that helps.

~~~
c3534l
My political comments are some of my most popular ones I've made. I think it's
more about saying something that's actually constructive or different. I think
also the fact that hackernews is not ideologically segmented has to do with
it, too. We're here for programming and decent, thought-provoking reading, not
having people tell us we're right. You can get away with being political if
you're genuinely trying to contribute to the conversation.

~~~
chii
> actually constructive or different. > not ideologically segmented

i dont think that's really the case. HN is full of middle/upper middle class
programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a
segment on the political spectrum. This is why you don't see many trump voters
here, or bigots or the very conservative. Anyone who attempts to bring
discourse with such an undertone will get downvoted.

I'd say HN has more groupthink than the people here would care to admit.

~~~
dragonwriter
> HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-
> developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum.

No, it's not. While class and profession have some loose correlation to
ideology, the class/profession combination you describe includes people from
all over the political spectrum, including all of the ones you say are
excluded from HN for this reason (whuch, contrary to your description, seem to
be well represented; well, not overt bigots but HN moderation is aimed pretty
directly against that, and perhaps merely Trump _apologists_ , who may or may
not be Trump _voters_.)

~~~
bayonetz
Sounds like an empirical question to me. I'd ante a moderate sum though that
@chil's assessment is closer to the truth in terms of homogeneity of political
leanings on HN and, if you could somehow measure it, that there is "...more
groupthink than the people here would care to admit" on HN.

------
colanderman
A few more of interest:

• You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed. (There is no time
limit for upvotes.)

• You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own. (There is
no restriction to downvote further descendants.)

• You cannot unvote/undown a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.

• You cannot reply to a reply to one of your comments for a certain number of
minutes, which increases based on some relation with nesting depth. However,
the reply link appears sooner on the permalink of such comments than it does
from the story page.

• You cannot edit a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.

~~~
dkarl
_You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed._

This is a nice feature. One reason I stopped using certain subreddits was that
people would look up your comment history and downvote all your comments that
weren't archived. I think those downvotes would eventually disappear, but it
annoyed me enough that I stopped reading the subreddits where it happened.

~~~
mmirate
Then people on HN are just being lazy, by not writing software to auto-
downvote all _future_ comments by people they dislike.

~~~
dorgo
nice idea for a saas.

~~~
mmirate
AFAIK, HN has no OAuth2 or similar, so a SAAS would not work for this task;
the users would have to host such software themselves on someplace that they
trust with their HN password.

~~~
thaumasiotes
If you tell me your password and I downvote everyone you hate, why is that
less of a service than it would be if, instead of telling me your password,
you gave me a special password with fewer permissions?

~~~
mmirate
The first service comes at the cost of losing one's entire account. The second
one does not. Therefore the second one is far more valuable.

------
b0rsuk
I would love to see something like this:

    
    
      (Steve Jobs Died) (14 articles, newest on 11th of fyftember)
    

Articles on the same _event_ within short timespan would be compressed into a
single line you can expand by clicking.

One implementation could be some kind of special purpose tagging
functionality, similar to flagging, but with a keyword argument. Maybe the tag
should even have a limited lifespan - until you can no longer assign it.
Submissions under the same tag would be compressed into an expandable list,
similar to threaded comments. Please make the chat flood stop!

~~~
z1mm32m4n
This doesn't directly solve your problem, but if you click through to the
comments section of an article and click the "web" link (between "past" and
"favorite"), it'll search Google with the text of the post submission.

So if you're looking for multiple viewpoints, this is a ~frictionless way to
start reading multiple perspectives.

~~~
b0rsuk
My problem - hinted by the term "chat flood" \- is that some of the events
don't interest me at all. I want to hide redundant submissions!

It's times like those when I'm reminded how US-centric HN is. I understand
Steve Jobs is an American hero, but many people outside US only want to know
that he died.

Some major security vulnerabilities fall into this category too. Usually some
people with deeper understanding need to take care of it and push the changes
upstream. I only need to know to watch out for X or Y hardware or service Z.

"Vote on net neutrality" type political submissions - you need to be an US
citizen to vote.

------
weinzierl
> There is no upper limit on the score of a comment, but the minimum score is
> -4 points.

According to the _The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ_ [1] this is only partly
correct, but I don‘t feel like testing it.

[1]

> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?

> HN is ‘subtle’ in that not everything always is what it seems. Votes are not
> always counted and those votes that are counted are not always displayed. So
> even though your vote count for that comment shows as -4, in actual fact it
> may be much lower. Take your lumps, analyze why you got those downvotes and
> if you feel they were justified then try to do better in the future. A side
> effect of the votes still being counted past -4 seems to be that people tend
> to delete their comments with a much higher frequency than in the past to
> cap the damage to their karma.

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-
faq#badcomment](https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq#badcomment)

~~~
thaumasiotes
I can confirm that the minimum display score is -4 points regardless of the
amount of karma lost on a comment.

~~~
grzm
I think what your parent is getting at is that you'll lose at most 4 karma
regardless of how many downvotes a comment may eventually accumulate. At least
in my experience I haven't seen my karma fall more than 4 points due to a
single comment, as far as I can remember. Have you a different experience?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Yes, of course. Downvotes are not shown (past the 5th), but karma losses are.
Just as described in my parent comment:

>> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?

~~~
grzm
Wow. How recently? IIRC, that faq (though helpful) is out of date in sections.
I assumed that that was one of them.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Not all that recently, but I see no reason to assume the behavior has changed.

~~~
grzm
And you're probably as willing as I to test its current status :). Cheers for
clarifying this for me.

------
gus_massa
A nitpick about notation:

For me, "Shadowbanning" or "hellbanning" means that the post of the user/site
are [dead] but the systems lies to the user and to nim/her show the post as
alive. And the only way to notice is to logout or get another computer and
check the post from there.

Killing the post form an user or site automatically, and showing to the user
that the posts are [dead] is not shadowbanning. I call it "autokilling" but
I'm not sure that it is he official name.

Almost all the recent case/discussions of similar cases were simply
autokilling. In the initial times of HN it was more common to have hellbanned
users, but it's very rare now. Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he
said that they were considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use
autokilling. I'm not sure if they finally made that change.

~~~
Kenji
> Moreover, I remember a comment of dang where he said that they were
> considering to remove all the hellbanning and only use autokilling. I'm not
> sure if they finally made that change.

Nope, that change has not been made. I'm hellbanned.

~~~
DanBC
Not really. Hell banning is a silent action. You don't tell the user they were
banned.

You got several warnings, and then you were told you were banned.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938232)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14960370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14960370)

EDIT: just for clarity: I'm not a mod.

~~~
gus_massa
@Kenji : You have a sibling comment that now is [dead]. Do you see it marked
as [dead] or it looks to you like a normal comment? How do you know that you
are banned?

[EDIT: Someone vouched your comment, so I see it now as a normal comment. I
was going to vouch it after the experiment :( .]

Just to be 100% sure that we are using the same definitions: Can you post a
screenshot in imgur of your sibling comment, so we can see how it looks to
you?

For comparison: I see [https://imgur.com/a/1Z3dF](https://imgur.com/a/1Z3dF)

PS: Please don't downvote the GP comment, so we can have a nice conversation.
Try to keep it black, or at least dark grey.

~~~
Kenji
I'm too lazy to make a picture, but I see them solid black like a normal
comment, there are no markings like [dead] or anything. Even for that sibling
comment. For me it all looks normal except that my comments are always at the
bottom.

------
aleyan
> Both are very responsive when contacted at hn@ycombinator.com

True in my experience when I asked for my comment to be deleted.

> Complaining about being downvoted is discouraged and usually results in even
> more downvotes.

It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up
and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life.
After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising
rapidly and is now resting at +22.

> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are
> marked as a [dupe] and will be killed without the ability to vouch.

An addendum is that from my experience, it is unclear which story the mods
will consider the dupe, sometimes the earlier posted story will be called the
dupe.

> Relatedly, moderators can also invite users via email to resubmit a post
> which didn't get much traction.

This happened to my "All the goodness gone from tea (1688)" [2] submission. I
am amazed that a moderator read a submission that was only +2 in its original
form and also had difficult ergonomics because it was on google books.

> One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation ... This trick
> doesn't actually work.

So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't
exist? I have trouble believing this. This seems more like a call to not even
try claiming that it won't work, because it just might work. I wish some
charitable soul with gray morals would step up with their story of voter
manipulation that wasn't detected. Tooling could be developed to curb its use
by other individuals. They can do this privately to the mods.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994458)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324547)

~~~
T-hawk
> It works sometimes however.

Tone counts for everything when complaining about downvotes. Asking politely
where you think you went wrong often does work. If it's hostile like "wake up
sheeple", you're digging your hole deeper.

~~~
madez
Indeed. Asking politely for what went wrong or for counter arguments usually
helps. But it does not always.

Two points I got downvoted for without much substantial dicussion was when I
said that security through obscurity does work (to some degree) and that
tinkering with crypto is okay for everybody, and with certain preparation, can
even be used in production in some cases. I stand by these points and are open
to debate, but for the big majority I just get silently downvoted or
arrogantly spoken to as if I didn't knew what I'm talking about.

I think this is a pity because tinkering with stuff is an essential part of
being a hacker.

------
laken
My favorite little-known HN feature (not even mentioned on this link!) is the
noprocrast mode. You can set in your profile to be locked out of HN for a set
amount of time, after another set amount of time on HN. Prevents
procrastination :)

~~~
minimaxir
noprocrast is in the FAQ, which is why I didn't add it.

~~~
DougWebb
Maybe you should add "There's an FAQ" as an often-unrecognized feature.

~~~
minimaxir
It's linked in the intro paragraph.

------
gkya
Also, IDK if this is mentioned anywhere, but HN comments have a maximum
character limit. Once I made a veeery long comment [1], had to split them up
in three pieces (which when I downloaded them using the API, take up 7.5kb,
6.5kb and 5.9kb respectively. I guess 7.5kb is a good approximation, but I did
not try to make an accurate measurement.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373653)
This was about the decline of schools in my country, so I guess I'm going to
be excused for this much of logorrhea :)

~~~
vignesh_m
Wow that is _long_

~~~
gkya
:D I can talk about this topic for days, only stopping to hydrate and eating
every twelve hours. It's my pet peeve.

------
postit
"after users reach 500 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another
comment"

Ahh that's why I don't see a downvote button :) - I thought it was a feature
reserved to super privileged users

~~~
postit
But not it made me wonder, how a positive enforcing behavior is only allowing
down vote until you reach a threshold. It makes you engage and understand the
community better before making your judgment.

~~~
BossHogg
In my opinion, it creates an echo chamber where in order to be a "full member"
of the community you have to already espouse views the community supports. It
is a big reason why I don't participate much.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I espouse a lot of views that the community does not support. I am also the
first woman to make the leaderboard (under a different handle -- my retired
handle has 25k karma).

I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.

~~~
ryanx435
How do you know you were the first woman to do so? This is a psuedo anonymous
internet forum where people aren't required to state their gender or even
their real names.

~~~
DoreenMichele
[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-do-i-
kno...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-do-i-know-im-
number-one.html)

I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to
the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber.
But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I
am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the
contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my
actual point.

My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way
whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.

~~~
ryanx435
> I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to
> the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo
> chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on,

If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you
bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't
really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.

> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion,
> because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked
> this) somehow invalidates my actual point.

I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was
someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But
go ahead, be mad about it.

Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.

------
ixtli
This is a great resources, but i'm forced to laugh at this bit:

> However, as of recently, the line between technology and politics has become
> extremely blurred.

> as of recently

We really, really need to require CS majors to take ethics classes. Everything
you do as an engineer has an impact on the world around you. Everything. This
is actually really good, because most of us are good people! But you can only
escape "politics" by escaping people and you simply will never do that.

~~~
dang
Right on both counts, that it can't be separated and that it isn't recent. The
OP needs to amend "The Guidelines state that political discussion is off-
topic". The actual guidelines say _most_ and _probably_ , precisely to
indicate _not all_.

Political articles that are on topic are those that contain material of
intellectual interest, aren't just garden-variety politics or ideology, and
contain substantive new information. Those are comparatively rare, but better
able to support substantive discussion. Sometimes they get more upvotes than
flags, or we may turn off the flags. There are plenty of examples of this—so
many that we hear the complaint "HN has been taken over by politics" at least
as often as its inverse.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426)

~~~
ixtli
I think the greatest possible contribution to all of science that hacker news
(the piece of software + the community) could provide would be to extend its
general self-reinforcing conversational tone to include issues of conscience
and the ethical, moral, and political implications of the subjects discussed
here. We simply can't treat the two groups as separate.

~~~
dang
That sounds great, but isn't doable. It only seems doable, because of the
dynamic described here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438476).
What would actually happen is that it would make the community nastier and
dumber until it died. Whom the gods would destroy, &c.

The fundamental tradeoff: the better HN gets, the more people want to use it
for things that worsen it. This puts a cap on how good HN can ever get. All we
can do is find ways to wriggle out of that tradeoff here and there.

~~~
ixtli
Well that's depressing XD

------
ChrisSD
Missing from that list is everyone's favourite feature:

    
    
      Using code blocks as block quotes so as to make them almost unreadable on mobile. Especially when the post is already indented a few levels.

~~~
Y_Y

        Using code blocks as block c
    

What's wrong with that?

~~~
Jtsummers
The default styling results in it having too narrow a view so it requires a
lot of side scrolling on mobile devices. It gets really annoying for block
quoted text past 80-90 characters.

~~~
Y_Y
I'm on android Firefox at the moment and I can confirm that it becomes
problematic after about thirty characters. That's what I meant by my previous
post.

~~~
kbenson
Unofficial HN community guide: Short comments meant to be viewed as sarcasm
end up being interpreted incorrectly often when used in a serious forum. A
short clarifying rider sentence explaining your real opinion often helps. That
may ruin the joke, but if your comment was just to make a joke, it probably
wasn't strong enough reason to comment anyway (for additional info on jokes,
see the section entitled How to make a joke and not get downvoted).

Addendum: Poe's law is alive and well.

(The above is of course my take, and other people will follow their own best
practices)

~~~
MaulingMonkey
Sarcasm marks (e.g. "/s") are another option, although I was able to get it
without the annotation.

------
oldcynic
I was _hoping_ to find all the unlisted URLs some of which I can never
remember, like /leaders etc.

Interesting nonetheless.

There does seem to be some attempts to game HN lately that I don't remember in
the past - like a recent tendency of some new accounts to ask dozens upon
dozens of questions. I can only assume there's some karma gaming behind that.

~~~
lainon
> I was hoping to find all the unlisted URLs some of which I can never
> remember, like /leaders etc.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

~~~
fao_
Interestingly enough this doesn't include Hacker News Classic, one of my
favourite frontends:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/classic](https://news.ycombinator.com/classic)

~~~
jedberg
I don't understand the difference between this and the regular front page. I
can see it has different content, but why? Does it use a larger time factor?
It seems like everything there is older, but maybe that's just because it
calculates less frequently?

~~~
fao_
From what I can remember, it uses an older ranking system which is less
correlated with upvotes/popularity.

~~~
dang
It uses the same ranking system, but only counts votes from very early users.
To me the interesting thing is how little it differs from the regular front
page, although I think the explanation is disappointingly boring: the main
predictor of upvotes—for all users, early or not—is already being on the front
page.

~~~
jedberg
It sounds like you guys basically left it in as a cross-check to make sure the
community isn't deviating too far from the original premise. Very cool.

Thanks for the explanation!

------
misnome
Question on “hidden” features: Sometimes sub-level comments (not even
particularly deep) don’t have a ‘reply’ button - is this turned off for
particularly controversial (in voting) comments?

> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are
> marked as a [dupe] and will be killed[...]

The addition to this is that after a while this isn’t enforced - which is why
you’ll see the same articles coming up reasonably regularly.

~~~
DougWebb
I've noticed the missing reply button; my impression is that it won't appear
right away after a post is submitted, which is probably intended to reduce
flamewars.

~~~
Karunamon
It's still possible to reply directly, but you have to click the permalink
above the specific comment (the one with the time in it - "X minutes ago")
before the reply button/box are visible.

------
keithnz
Not sure if this fits with the purpose of your page, but there are "easter
eggs", like in the "Ask HN: What has HN given you?" thread( which is an
awesome read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768)
)

I noticed a MailGun cofounder mentioning the "HN Cofounder wanted spreadsheet"
at [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sygd1fhGYRS-
ZvRP0IVV...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sygd1fhGYRS-
ZvRP0IVV6rf3OUyED9_b6Da4tVWdS08/edit?toomany=true#gid=9) which is how he ended
up involved with MailGun

EDIT:

this probablly isn't suitable for this page. I've started a page to track
these things for myself at
[https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity/](https://github.com/keithn/HackerNewsCommunity/)

If anyone has any other gems that are worth tracking I'd love to know about
them.

~~~
foobaw
sorry if I'm being ignorant but how is that an easter egg?

~~~
keithnz
It's not in the sense it's not built into HNs website, but it's an easter egg
of the community in that you wouldn't know about it and nothing really
documents things like this specifically related to the HN community.

It's like your page you are making, it's another easter egg of the community.
Just disappears from view except for those who track it.

------
throwaway4u098
I've noticed when using a VPN, my posts would be shown in my own account but
not anyone else's. Thought this was a strange behavior.

Wasn't certain whether this is a consistency issue or whether posting through
a VPN isn't possible.

Anyone know why? May be good to add it to the document.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
To be clear, are you saying if you're on VPN you're shadow-banned,
effectively, but the same account works fine when not on VPN?

~~~
grzm
I seem to recall 'dang mentioning this can happen, and that they can whitelist
accounts. If you see it happening to yourself, you can contact them and
they'll look into it.

------
cs702
It's also a good idea to review the guidelines every once in a while:

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

------
genieyclo
Something I noticed this week for the first time is the date on profiles
changed from x days ago to the specific date a user's account was created.
It's also now a link to the frontpage on that day.

~~~
dang
We just did that. It seems like a neat way to tell people about
[https://news.ycombinator.com/front](https://news.ycombinator.com/front), plus
it's amusing to look at how HN was on someone's 'birthday'.

We also made older timestamps say "May 4, 2009" instead of "3124 days ago".

~~~
genieyclo
I do miss the x days ago, cracking the 3k club was nice.

~~~
dang
I'm not entirely sure about that change either.

------
NoGravitas
One thing I think it should have mentioned is that although comment scores are
not shown to anyone but the user, it is easy enough to infer them, at least
approximately. Obviously, negative scores are shown by desaturation. And
positive scores are shown by sort order.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I hate the desaturation, I should add a user.css entry for it or something.
Effectively silencing non-mainstream views seems so contrary to hacker culture
to me.

~~~
Larrikin
Contrarian views aren't usually down voted here, low quality posts are. Troll
posts that may have some semblance of an actual point should be rephrased to
actually be part of a discussion.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I disagree - the are at least 2 top level comments on this story now that are
greyed out. I consider them to be well-made, definitely not flames or spam,
clearly written but contrary to the apparent majority view.

Even uncontroversial statements of fact get down-voted.

Take this:

>"Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything
beyond warm fuzzies." //

assuming the commenter didn't lie then it is a fact, they started their
thought. Now the down-voters may know vouching revives comments, but that's no
reason to downvote, that's reason to respond with a source.

Even if they are mistaken, it's harsh to downvote a view that can't be easily
corrected because of hidden information.

Meh.

~~~
ryandrake
Yea, I just finished a comment about this very topic before I read yours.
People here will downvote anything. There’s a big voting audience, and chances
are there will be at least some people who disagree with you on any topic.
Best to just roll with it.

------
patwalls
What about
[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best) ?

~~~
DeanWormer
And [https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active)

~~~
chillingeffect
It's scary to think I've been here long enough to know things others don't..
Or maybe "those that would know won't tell." Either way:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

~~~
colanderman
All the above are accessible from the "Lists" link at the bottom of most
pages.

------
krapp
I'd like to see the second chance pool made public, if only as another entry
under /lists.

~~~
jacquesm
That's already there, it's the new pages beyond the first one.

------
reichardt
One question that's not answered: what do green usernames represent? Would
honestly love to know!

~~~
grinsekatze
As far as I know, new users are green for a certain time period.

edit: under 2 weeks old

~~~
yeukhon
I thought earning enough karma would adjust the color to default, I guesd I am
wrong.

------
sbuccini
I didn't realize you could see all topbar colors that have been set on the
site. Would be a really interesting way to implement message passing.

------
asterius
@minimaxir for your list: \- Not possible to downvote some posters, as the
authors have extreme karma (e.g. >10,000, though I don't know the exact
number), even if you have >>500 karma.

It is notable that HN does not support blocking particular users, or indeed
annotating that you like them. Though plenty of fans will upvote well known
authors, it is not possible for you to keep a list of people who you think
have written well in the past. I'd love it if I could, e.g., mark favourite
author names in green.

HN is also notable from my perspective for having some people with good
technical sense and clear writing, but very extreme views on other matters, to
the extent that they would be pariahs in RL situations.

~~~
tedmiston
I've wanted a feature to "follow" certain users as well. Presumably it could
be built as a separate app or into a browser extension.

------
russellbeattie
How does one contribute to the code running HN? I read the site almost
exclusively on my tablet, and I would love a "open links in new window"
settings option and would be quite happy to help write the code to make it
happen.

~~~
johannes1234321
This shouldn't be the default ever. I the user, have the control of I want a
new window/tab or use the current one. Sites opening links in new windows/tabs
try tomorrow me on their site, for their reasons, not mine. When building a
web application: Make sure to not play with links in a way that Ctrl+click,
context menu or, on mobile, long touch don't work, but allow me to open new
tabs, and keep the state if I go away and then use the back button to come
back. Even for non-powerusers this is a good habit. Non-powerusers are often
surprised bu new windows popping up.

~~~
russellbeattie
Never said it should be the default, just an option (like it is in Reddit).
Also, one would hope even the below average HN reader wouldn't be surprised by
a new window.

------
camtarn
Has anybody analysed how karma works for submissions that make the front page?
It feels like there's either a rate limit on how much karma you can earn from
a submission, or the amount of karma earned per upvote is inversely
proportional to the number of upvotes, or something.

I've noticed that I earned 1 karma for 1 upvote for the first few upvotes, and
also 1 karma for 1 upvote when the article's been off the front page for days
but people are still reading and occasionally upvoting it. But in between it's
definitely not a 1:1 - maybe more like 10:1 or even less.

It feels like there are probably some really interesting rules involved :)

~~~
minimaxir
To my knowledge, upvotes which are suspected to be inauthentic do not count
toward the overall karma gained (I have no citations, which is why I did not
include it in the list)

~~~
kbenson
Do you ever notice that you'll lose two points on a comment at the same time,
then later they'll come back? I see that relatively often (once every couple
weeks), and on completely uncontroversial comments, which is how I started
noticing it. I wondered if it was some vote manipulation detection, where
they've linked two accounts voting similarly and nullified their upvotes, but
later clear them so they votes are reapplied. In any case, it's always two
together (which is why I don't think it's an accidental downvote), and seems
to be close to the same time if not the exact same time.

------
erikj
"Discussions about race/gender" is also political discussion, it's very
strange that the author doesn't understand this unless he has some implicit
intentions here and separates these topics on purpose.

~~~
minimaxir
A good example of the Hacker News reaction to gender topics (and no relation
to partisan politics whatsoever) is what happened when a YC engineer launched
a online community for women:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159808)

------
nodesocket
> 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.

How does this not work? I am failing to see how legit people visiting new can
be distinguished between people who are told to go to new and search for
{{$title}} and upvote.

~~~
mountaineer
I noticed that too. The voting ring detector may only use the landing page
component as a part of the overall algorithm? Other factors likely include the
time since posting and common shared upvotes?

------
chopin
One thing which is not clear to me: I just recently had a submission which had
more than twice of upvotes than had been added to my Karma. As far as I
understand voting rings may be responsible for that. I am however much too
lazy for engaging that way (I also have no social media accounts), I spent my
time rather on HN ;-). Does someone has an explanation for this? Do others
engage in those rings to get favorable submissions onto the fron page?

~~~
dang
It gets complicated, but
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440811)
has the basics.

~~~
chopin
Better view the parent of that post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438849)

------
adrian_mrd
Great list minimaxir, thanks for that effort.

I’d love to know what the user activity is (over time zones) over a 24 hour
period?

Obviously, YC is biased towards USA West Coast time (due to their location),
so would be interesting to know how much user submissions vary by UTC time?

Also, I assumed that usernames in green type meant that those users had
engaged/replied to one of your posts/submissions. But ‘green’ users - as in
new - makes a lot of sense (once you know the ‘rule’).

~~~
tedmiston
I've wondered about the distribution across timezones for posts, comments, and
votes as well. The HN data set on BigQuery might be helpful here.

[https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-
news](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502)

------
dsfyu404ed
>Implicit Downranking of Politics

The free pass given to certain genres of political content show which
demographic lines HN is mostly homogeneous on.

------
desireco42
I feel like this is not enforced enough

Implicit Downranking of Politics

The Guidelines state that political discussion is off-topic. However, as of
recently, the line between technology and politics has become extremely
blurred. Most tech related submissions with a hint of political partisanship
will quickly be flagged to death by users (or die a slow death due to the
inevitable flame war).

~~~
dang
The guidelines don't state that, as you can see by reading the second
paragraph of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and, to quote pg from long ago, noting those words 'most' and 'probably'.
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426))

------
another-dave
Think it would be interesting to include something on what the community
expect from "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts — thought I'd double-check the
guidelines/FAQ before posting one before & realised they're not mentioned
there at all.

Also, would be good to call out what flavour of formatting is supported by
comments.

------
ender89
Well now I want more karma so I can customize the top bar.

------
ggm
Please don't over feature-ize it. This is about as good as it gets, for a
simple text-predominant mechanism. I could wish for some things, but I could
also expect pushback for their consequences.

So ... well done I guess. You gots it about right.

------
kaffeemitsahne
> _and moderators can set a comment to automatically be collapsed if necessary
> (e.g. meta-discussion)._

I'd like to be able to turn this off in my profile. Or maybe it can be linked
to "showdead".

~~~
mintplant
You could send an email to hn@ycombinator.com requesting this feature. They're
very responsive.

------
d--b
Something I frequently use is search HN on algolia.

~~~
bpicolo
That's builtin (bottom bar of hn)

------
digi_owl
They also have a "fun" half way house before shadowbanning, limiting your
comments to X pr Y hours...

------
book_mentioned
My latest campaign has been to find a way to add the tiniest bit of
accountability for downvotes. I believe at a minimum the total number of
downvotes given should be shown publicly on user profiles.

As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.

~~~
pvg
Why do any votes need 'accountability'? Their purpose is to identify comments
worth reading. Almost everything people write about voting itself is not worth
reading and the less of it, the better.

~~~
book_mentioned
My intention is to ensure contributing to publicly censoring/censuring costs
something (intentionally tiny, but greater than zero/nothing) each time,
beyond the one-time minimum karma requirement. "Downvote to disagree" seems
unlikely to scale indefinitely, particularly as mobile means less willingness
to contribute beyond clicking up/down (specifically now that there are apps
catching on that remove all "fat-fingered web UI" friction!).

It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!

[Edited]

~~~
pvg
I know it's perfectly fine, I'm trying to follow this (very common) line of
thought and adherents never seem to explain it in a way I can understand.

For one thing you're not really 'censoring' anything but even if we say, for
the sake of argument, that you are why should it have some cost different than
the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote? The mods' argument that
meta is bad for actual conversation is also quite compelling. What's the
counter to that other than stuff that mostly seems to boil down to some
version of 'getting downvotes kind of feels bad' (of which calling downvotes
'censoring' seems like a particularly overwrought variant).

~~~
book_mentioned
Thanks for taking the time to bring up these counterpoints!

> _why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting'
> something when you upvote_

If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of
friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing
site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add
"censuring" as a better word.

> _mods ' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation_

Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta
gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter
abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I
can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is
behind-the-scenes for now.

[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the
time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing
-- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.

------
esnard
To anyone interested in reading Hacker News source code, it is available here:
[https://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar](https://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar)

~~~
mintplant
It should be noted that that's an old, old snapshot of the code. The
currently-live HN codebase is closed source.

------
gadders
There is also the "Slow down, you're posting too fast" feature that kicks in,
likely to calm down flame wars, Unfortunately it seems to block everything,
not just the thread in question.

~~~
dang
That usually means your account is rate-limited. Various explanations at
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rate%20limit&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rate%20limit&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

We're always happy to take the rate limit off if people give us reason to
believe that they want to use HN as intended and will abide by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
in the future.

------
amyjess
I'll add that I've also seen the [flagged] tag appear on submissions that
aren't dead. I assume it means that it's been flagged heavily enough to
downrank it but not to kill it.

------
giarc
>All comments start with a score of 1 point (but in order to prevent
bandwagoning, the comment score is not visible to users other than the
author).

How great would this be for news stories on Facebook?

------
guru4consulting
To me, the quality of discussions across various forums is:

HackerNews > Quora > Medium(comments) > Reddit > Facebook > Twitter >
everything else

And these days, I use only the first 3 :)

------
LethargicStud
Great article, I learned a lot. I've wondered for a while why some usernames
appear green, it would be nice to include that too.

~~~
linuxguy2
New accounts are green. Seems that two weeks is the threshold for showing up
normal.

~~~
kbenson
I think moderators can bypass that as well. I'm fairly sure I've seen accounts
go from green to normal within hours when it was the author of some paper or
project that someone submitted finding out they are on HN and making an
account to answer questions. I suspect moderators authenticated the user
separately, or used the comments to do so if it was completely obvious.

------
libria
Slight nitpick: I believe downvoting is available >= 501 karma, i.e., above
500.

------
0x7f800000
It would be nice if 5x duplicates didn't show up in the RSS feed.

------
tzury
Thank you Max! Well done.

------
Karunamon
One more - flagging and vouching have an invisible weight to them, and I'm
about 90% sure that weight is based on how well your flags and vouches line up
with what everyone else does.

I've been here for years, and it used to be that when I flagged things, they
went dead instantly. After a particularly controversial thread or two, not so
much.

Vouch is the same way - one time I vouched a comment that was pretty plainly
insulting, but had something that I thought was valuable for discussion in it.
I vouched it, it went alive instantly, I replied, and it was apparently later
flagged again. My vouches no longer appear to do anything.

I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff, to be honest. I've more than once
stopped myself clicking "flag" because I know that I'll be penalized if I get
it wrong (read: enough people disagree with me). And all that stuff above?
It's pure speculation, because it's all the UI gives me.

Worse, barring the occasional bit of moderator invention to unkill a post, all
of these mechanics serve to enforce a hivemind, whether or not that's the
intent. Quality doesn't matter as much as consensus, because the consensus is
enforced transparently, the quality with intervention.

~~~
Tomte
I‘ve had the same experience.

I thought about not flagging anymore, but so what. I‘m offering my ratings,
and if HN doesn‘t want to use them, so be it. And it feels good to flag
shitposts.

------
parliament32
This is pretty neat, thanks!

------
NoGravitas
Also, I don't think vouching for [dead] comments actually does anything beyond
warm fuzzies.

~~~
jlgaddis
I think it does.

I have, in the past, seen [dead] comments that (IMO) shouldn't have been,
clicked on "vouch", and when the page refreshes they are no longer [dead].

Or maybe HN just shows it that way to me and it is, in fact, still [dead]
(kinda like hellbans).

~~~
blattimwind
I've noticed that sometimes [dead] comments don't seem to be revived by -
presumably - just me clicking vouch. Perhaps vouches and flags and other
criteria are balanced against each other or something like that.

~~~
IntronExon
The OP article explains that vouch only works once, and if there are more
flags it stays dead.

------
bookofjoe
This is a FANTASTIC resource! Bookmarked! Thank you!

------
codingdave
Just a side note, but... why are people using github as a content publishing
platform? It just isn't a good UX for that, and there is no lack of workable
CMS systems out there.

~~~
malnourish
It could be multi-fold:

* It's free

* People are already signed up for it

* It brings exposure to your github profile

~~~
blattimwind
* github profiles are rarely deleted and content put up once will stay there for many years

Seriously, dead links to github.{com, io} are super-rare IME.

~~~
tgb
Aren't they deleted if they're inactive for N years?

~~~
mintplant
I don't believe this is the case. They may become eligible for reclamation if
someone else wants the name, per the Name Squatting Policy [0].

[0] [https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-
policy/](https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy/)

------
nukeop
I've always been amazed that a proprietary engine with unclear rules and
unavailable source code is the dominant source of news for the hacker
community. Although it is designed better than reddit, unpopular opinions are
still punished, which can stifle discussion and results in users self-
moderating themselves and preventing themselves, even subconsciously, from
expressing certain opinions from fear of downvoting.

Many of those undocumented behaviours are described with speculation - why
don't we have a clear image of the capabilities and inner workings of Hacker
News available anywhere? Security by obscurity?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Back when we had scores shown most people would seem to vote towards their
ideal score for that post -- that was the consensus in voting discussions I
was party to (IIRC). I'd vote down highly voted comments that I agreed with
because the comment wasn't _that_ good; also upvote any comment that was
negative that seemed to have value.

But then I learnt pg said basically 'downvote if you disagree', which IMO
makes the site much worse. Also then votes were hidden and so I spend most
votes on things I disagree with because they made a good point and I believe
others should at least be able to see the text of the comment.

I also dislike hidden censorship, hidden rules, and hidden
moderators/moderation (eg covert post promotion for Ycombinator companies).

~~~
DanBC
pg said different things about downvoting. The last comment I link to seems to
agree that some downvoting is a problem.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683)

> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes
> have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative
> score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it
> already has a sufficiently negative score.

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

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement.
> Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems
> reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot
> of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum
> karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against
> that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716)

> [...] Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting.
> It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to
> express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they
> believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points,
> people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out
> that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would
> in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that
> there are so many.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057338)

------
IntronExon
This is a great write up, and answered a question I had about comments which
are automatically collapsed. I understand the frustration around the lack of
politics/diversity discussions, but I agree with the way it’s handled here.
Those discussions need to be had, but do they need to be had _here_? They are
divisive, and often leave lasting wounds which lead to the creation of
factions.

Mostly though, the internet is short on places like HN, and long on places to
endlessly discuss politics, usually in a very predictable circle. I don’t
believe that much good comes from anonymous text exchanges online where
politics are concerned.

~~~
Y_Y
People like discussing things on hn because the quality of discourse tends to
be (relatively) very high. Naturally people would especially want to discuss
politics or anything else that's almost universally a shitshow in a place
where they thing commenters are thoughtful and fair and level-headed. Of
course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here
_because_ debating politics is discouraged.

~~~
tptacek
There's another phenomenon at play with political stories, I think. Much of
what occupies the front page is sort of implicitly siloed. Rust programmers
are the active writers in Rust threads. Data science programmers are active in
ML or word vector threads. People interested in math are active in math
threads. There's a story on the front page about Google's "TPUv2's". I don't
even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal with my
comments on that thread.

Not so political threads! Everybody is on equal footing in them. There's no
"people with expertise relating their experience" and "people asking
questions" and the rest of us reading with interest. Rather, everyone's
broadcasting.

That's not inherently bad, I don't think; there are lots of other kinds of
threads that are like that and they seem to be fine (for the most part) for
HN's culture.

But politics is a particularly toxic combination of broad-spectrum and
polarizing. There are never voices of reason or experience, the most active
participants are often on a hair trigger, and participation is amplified
because everyone's got an opinion.

~~~
gok
> I don't even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal
> with my comments on that thread.

Damn there goes our shot to hear what serious crypto people are _really_
saying about Google TPUs.

:P

------
olfactory
It will be interesting to see how we look back on the moderators' decision to
stifle political discussion on HN. In my opinion it is a horrible abdication
of responsibility among technologists to simply hide any content that pertains
to politics.

But it is fitting that the political monoculture of the valley would give rise
to an HN moderation regime that includes aggressive censorship.

I love HN and have learned a great deal from the articles and comments, but
censoring political discussion is a form of sides-taking and HN mods are
unabashedly responsible for it. It's a truly shameful dark cloud in what is
otherwise a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem of ideas.

~~~
dang
> _to simply hide any content that pertains to politics_

That's so inaccurate a description that I wonder how anyone could arrive at
it.

~~~
olfactory
If political discussions that evoke partisan loyalties end up being classified
as “flame wars” due to the definition in the article, then if those involved
in the so-called flame wars are censured (throttled etc) then effectively the
topic has been discouraged simply because the votes averaged lower than the
number of comments. Over time users learn to ignore such topics.

The big goof up is in the idea that all discussions with widespread
disagreement are harmful. It’s an absurd view of manners akin to saying that
discussion about the ethics of slavery is simply rude to participate in
regardless of one’s views and regardless of whether any of the comments are
actually rude or disrespectful (or are even, themselves, partisan. The votes
may be where partisanship gets introduced).

Slavery is a bad example because it seems morally obvious and thus the
enlightened side seems obvious. But many issues today lack moral clarity which
is why intelligent discussion of them is deeply important.

Politics can be messy but in many ways political topics represent the conflict
between values as some values gain or lose prominence.

~~~
dang
That's an argument about how HN should be. I'm stating a fact about how it is.
More at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442668)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443186).

