SPA is one of the worst things to happen to the web. There are a small number of instances where it makes sense but it just ruins sites like Reddit, especially on a mobile device.
I've had this conversation a lot lately with a friend of mine who is a React developer. And I recall a thread on HN where someone broke it into a dichotomy.
There are those who believe strongly in the web as interactive documents. I fall largely into this camp. I want small pages with a minuscule amount of JS.
On the other hand, there are those now using the web as a distribution platform. My favorite example is Figma. Figma is my favorite vector graphics program of all time. Compare it to something like Illustrator, but with file syncing, collaboration and updates abstracted. I don't have to expose myself to the horror of Adobe bloat.
So I must disagree. SPA and the rise of JS frameworks is not one of the worst things to happen to the web. Look at what Facebook has become. It's an application, not a website of interactive documents. Or see what GitHub is doing. They are soon to integrate a whole IDE into the browser with Codespaces. I'm bullish on WASM as well. I envision a future where all software could be distributed via the browser.
The problem I think is that too many companies have become overly ambitious and bought into a lot of unnecessary tech. Reddit is a great example, and they are also guilty of pushing their native app incessantly.
The problem isn't the technology. It's the misuse of the technology.
To be completely fair, Reddit is an absolutely terrible SPA to begin with. The infinite scrolling is very poorly implemented (if you click a link and hit the back button, you end up at the top of the infinite scroll page and have to wait for it to load everything below again), the memory usage is higher than any other app on my computer, and collapsing comment threads takes forever.
The Apollo app solves every technical problem with Reddit, so I just recommend that people use that instead of dealing with the official web app. Luckily, they haven't gotten rid of old.reddit.com.
SPAs are the best we can do for... applications. Online spreadsheet? SPA. Document editor? SPA. Image editor? SPA. Visual programming environment? SPA. IDE? SPA. Facebook makes sense as an SPA too - it's basically a rich widget "dashboard" app with some content creation applications inside of it. Building applications for the web is still not the greatest experience because you're fundamentally building an application over hacks built to expand an abstraction built for hypertext content (the DOM). But, honestly modern JavaScript frameworks, TypeScript, and transpiled environments like Elm all do an admirable job working with what they have.
On the flip side, SPAs are terrible for hypertext content, because existing web technology was literally built for that. Why should a blog be an application? The content creation side, sure, maybe, but viewing a blog? That's literally what HTML was made for. A table of contents full of links like the HN or Reddit homepage? That's pretty much hypertext 101.
i.reddit.com is way more basic than old.reddit.com. It's intended for ancient cell phones or the slowest of slow connections. It's actually pretty impressive that it works at all these days.
Fundamentally all reddit is is some comments and upvotes in a database combined with a ranking algorithm of some kind. Other than scale, the actual core functionality is exceedingly basic, so I hope they maintain these old versions (mainly old.reddit) for a long, long time.
Seconding the Compact version - at one point the site upgrade / redesign reached the point where it was unusable in my browser. Compact saved the day, and makes the experience much smoother to a fellow app-refuser.
The thing that keeps me feeling warm and fuzzy is that they dont redirect any links. It's amazing how special I feel when copy/pasting hyperlinks works like it did back in the '90s.
They are brilliant at managing change, which is why people keep saying "it doesn't change." No, they don't do redesigns for the sake of redesigning, but (two examples off the top of my head) they added a "past" section and they added a character count for titles when you are submitting.
Their motto is "move slow and preserve things." They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it. It is the norm to take for granted the things that are going right, then act all surprised when changes result in throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It's enormously hard to make thoughtful tweaks of the sort the happen here, that get researched and thought through over very long periods of time and go largely unnoticed by the collective subconscious of the site. It's the sort of the thing the world needs more of, but also the world needs more commentary on "Well, we did make this, that and the other tweaks, while leaving most stuff intact." because it does tend to go unnoticed and it does tend to get characterized as "never changing."
> They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it.
I do wish there were one exception to this: as a way to nicely format quotes of other comments, the way Reddit does when you prefix a line with > (or multiple > for nested quotes). I actually think totally unformatted quotes are fine or even preferable:
> To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
But so many people abuse the code formatting for these
To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
I probably see it more often than I see actual code, and it's infuriating to read on mobile. People posting this way don't see the problem themselves (presumably they're posting from desktop), so it's just going to carry on persisting regardless of how "wrong" they are.
At the very least, an instant preview or enforced separate preview-before-posting page would help a lot, especially if either it was narrow enough to represent mobile, or had a warning below not to abuse code snippets that way if there's a detected code snippet. (A preview would help anyway because the reply edit box is monospace, which is really hard to read. I often end up posting an initial draft immediately and using the edit page to fix it up.)
I do wish it had some styling changes on mobile though - hitting vote buttons, reply links, etc. is rather difficult because of how small everything is.
Its funny, because it almost makes the few of them even more enticing. I didn’t realize that you could change the colour of the top bar past a certain karma, but now that I do there is literally nothing I want more than to get there
You're joking, right? On tech topics, every third comment is somebody pointing to their company. Sometimes they mention it and sometimes not but it's still advertisement.
Not even talking about people spamming their site.
Often there is too much censoring going on but at least they appear to be a bit more transparent about it now. The one feature that I would like to see is to be able to collapse all comments by default (and read only top level comments).
And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened
That doesn't sound like us, though of course it's always possible that we made a mistake. I've made hundreds of thousands of moderation decisions and tens of thousands of posts. No doubt thousands of those, at least, were wrong.
If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. When such complaints show up linklessly, it's usually because there's more to the story that the complaint is omitting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's rare for people to actually supply a link in response to such a reply, so kudos to you!
The description ("The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it") was false though. 'lovetrump' was a trollish username, and we don't allow those on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to, which is bad.
To be specific: to your knowledge dan has never allowed any troll bait political nicks of any kind.
Additionally: you have a feeling he might allow democratic troll nicks. the strength of that feeling ranges from not surprised if to hard to believe not depending on the day.
Your evidence: claim that the forum is very democratic
I don't believe you would choose a username like that (and to a lesser extent, your current one) for any other purpose than to explicitly provoke heated arguments. There are plenty of places on the web where you can go for those, I am happy that dang et al are making an effort to minimize them.
I’ll add one to this list, I’m sorry if it comes off as complaining, but at least it’s topical.
There is more than one karma tracking algorithm that can be activated for a given account. That is to say, a downvote is not always a downvote, and an upvote is not always an upvote, and the point score of a comment is not always exactly equal to the number of up and downvotes.
Accounts that are flagged for posting flame-baiting or ideological comments can be switched to an alternate voting mode where votes are not counted the same way. This may mean that any manual downvotes are given greater weight, or upvotes are underweighted, or downvoting is automatically applied after some time providing a type of downward gravity which must be overcome.
I don’t know the precise algorithm. It’s complicated by the fact that I’ve been getting auto-downvoted by bots. But due to some overly combative COVID related posts my account is in this current state. I’ve found that even researched technical comments of mine will inevitably end up at -1 karma, or struggle to stay above 0.
After reaching out to dang about bot-downvoting Daniel was nice enough to look into it and confirmed my account was getting bot-downvoted but also explained that my account had been flagged and made some suggestions on posts that crossed the line. I’ve had a long and mostly enjoyable relationship with HN so hopefully I’ll be out of purgatory soon.
To be clear I have no interest in debating whether the feature was misapplied in my own personal case, but rather just it’s abstract technical merits make for great meta-discussion of moderation techniques for social media boards.
I was going to mention the same thing. This happens on Reddit too.
If your posts are unpopular for any reason you're automatically penalized. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, you're penalized for posting anything that people disagree with or don't want to hear.
That's why sites like Reddit and HN will always be echo chambers. Dissenting voices are automatically silenced. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that most will probably never waste their time posting.
I find that Reddit is generally much worse about this kind of thing; perhaps it is the culture or maybe it is the fact that votes are public. If you say something people don’t like, they’ll quickly pile on you. For some reason people there really like going with the flow, and you can’t even reply to clarify without them coming after you. I have found it much less likely that this happens on Hacker News, and people are generally more willing to listen to a comment regardless of how others felt about it.
I don't think it's just reddit, I believe these systems are prone to triggering some primitive human instincts towards group interaction. I can think of a few plausible explanations for a discrepancy in outcomes across HN and reddit. Perhaps hidden scores or the per-comment floor HN uses suppresses it. Perhaps HN attracts a particular sort of personality while reddit attracts a more representative slice of humanity. Maybe reddit is harder to moderate, has worse moderator tools, worse mods, or just too many people. I'm not sure what the answer is, but one way or the other I consider these sort of systems to be failed experiments.
> Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions".[4] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[5] The control group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it had been already given a fake positive score".[5] Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[4] The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects".[4]
> “That is a significant change”, Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. “We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.”[5]
Why would it have to be a bot? If you annoyed someone badly enough, there’s nothing stopping them from camping your comments page and manually downvoting your comments as they appear.
It's called being shadow banned. All your comments are basically auto-flagged. People can see there is a comment there but they have to go into your profile to read it. It's happened to me before, but that's because I would make a bunch of shitposts and thankfully they don't put up with that stuff here. Reading your post makes it seem like you know exactly why you were shadow banned (being overtly combative on HN) no matter the content. Make a new account and act civilized and all will be well. You can also ask nicely to be un-shadow banned.
This is generally referred to as shadow banning. When the user is unaware their account is being restricted due to content rules or bot like activities.
technically, aren't you breaking the rules by talking the voting system meta? It's so weird, they ask you not to talk about voting, but then have a feature where you get auto downvoted. How are you not supposed to talk about that?! It makes you feel insane, like someone is following you around.
Imagine someone was following you around IRL delegitimizing your experience. Telling people not to believe you. That your opinions are worth less than others. Only the other people can't see that person, they absolutely believe that person, and people think you're crazy for thinking that it's happening.
I think there are some "features" missing from this list. I seem to recall that Hacker News will transparently remove some characters from titles (such as emoji and exclamation points), which seems like a bad feature to me, and one that people should be aware of.
OTOH domino or mahjong tiles (🁓, 🀕), playing cards (🃅) or musical symbols (𝅗𝅥) are allowed. So are arrows (↸) including supplementals (⤪), number forms (ↈ), superscripts and subscripts (⁴₂), "miscelllaneous technical" (⎋, ⏱) or geometric symbols (◉), however misc symbols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols) is a no.
So yeah, pretty arbitrary. I guess pg likes playing domino but hates chess.
Also funny note: we have access to musical symbols but not notes, because the notes are in the misc. symbols block. Unless you want to use byzantine (𝀶) or ancient greek (𝈙) musical notation then it's OK.
>So are arrows (↸) including supplementals (⤪), number forms (ↈ), superscripts and subscripts (⁴₂), "miscelllaneous technical" (⎋, ⏱) or geometric symbols (◉), however misc symbols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols) is a no. //
But not the others, they're just get boxes; except the boxes which are missing completely (ironic).
IIRC, we had access to UTF font formats (using bold, outlaid, double, open, etc., letter forms) and to Zalgo, Z̸̠̽a̷͍̟̱͔͛͘̚ĺ̸͎̌̄̌g̷͓͈̗̓͌̏̉o̴̢̺̹̕ ?
Interesting! It looks like the box drawing are allowed but the block elements are not, and I just used the box elements in my test assuming they'd behave the same!
That’s a shame, because I could see legit and serious reasons why someone would want emoji in comments. For instance, what if someone was trying to illustrate a point by “drawing” a diagram of a network, using different emoji to represent different types of nodes.
Agree. It's almost as if using vocabulary is wrong. I've been watching how our conversations deteriorate by gratuitous use of emoji.
It seems that some seem to think that emoji can cut through all language barriers, because they're universally understood. Unfortunately, the effect I see is newspeak to the detriment of all, as we lose the nuances of language itself, and indeed we become more 'visual only' in our language.
One that comes to mind is the "thrangrycat" vulnerability. I say "thrangrycat" but the researches insist on calling it . I've taken liberty of shortening the excerpt to the more reasonable reasons, as the answer got more nonsensical as it went on.
>How do you describe the meaning of this vulnerability name?
>We chose to communicate through a visual representation of symbols, rather than “words.” Naming vulnerabilities using emoji sequences instead of other pronounceable natural languages have several advantages. First, emoji sequences are universally understood across nearly all natural languages. Choosing instead of a name rooted in any one language ensures that the technical contents of our research can be discussed democratically and without latent cultural or linguistic bias...
Another thing that's undocumented is that comments can be "detached" from a post. The comment isn't deleted, but is removed from view, so the participants can continue having a conversation but that thread is no longer discoverable from the post that spawned the discussion.
Is it no longer visible, or just moved to the top level? I've seen plenty of top-level comment threads that start with something missing context, and then is followed by a reply from dang, of the form "We've detached this thread from $url because $reasons".
In my opinion, they should implement this by removing the feature that combines two lines without a newline. Most people type entire paragraphs out on a single line (since web browsers word wrap inside <textarea> tags), so I don't really see the point in having this feature anymore.
/invited is basically the second-chance queue for things that have been personally stamped to be interesting by the moderators, so it's generally pretty good.
It's only a small part of it, the ones that were too old to put in the queue directly, so we emailed repost invites for them instead. It's on my list to publish a more complete page. The types of stories are much the same on the larger list though.
Hacker News has so many strange, undocumented things that even such a list is incomplete. I’ve run into entirely new things I didn’t know existed just by using it more, or by happening upon one of ‘dang’s comments…
One thing I've been wanting to do is write a better mobile UI experience for HN using their api. I visit mostly on my phone and I have such a hard time tapping any of the action buttons (upvoting, minimizing a comment thread, etc). I tried a CSS-only mod using Stylish (I primarily use Firefox on Android) but I wanted to do some stuff that the current HTML structure made difficult.
While I appreciate that they finally added some mobile styling, it was very minimal and ignored accessibility best practices for touch target size.
If you use their Firebase API on iOS or Android then you'll need to make a request for each object, whether it's a news post or comment. If you want to present a comment thread, then you need to request each comment individually, so imagine making 400 requests to present a 400 comment thread.
Their Github docs say to use the Firebase SDK, but the mobile SDKs require that you actually have your own Firebase account and you own the Firebase db, you can't enter an arbitrary Firebase URL and have it "just work."
Also needs a section on muting. If too many of your consecutive comments get downvotes you start encountering "you are posting too fast" messages, even if it there was over an hour between comments and several hours since your most recent.
IMO, a lot of open-source enthusiasts just don't understand the level of hostile/manipulative attention that get directed at sites with lots of high-value traffic, such as HN. There are quite a few users and companies actively trying to get their pages on the front page by any means necessary. It's dangerous to assume that they're not technically sophisticated.
Sites of this size generally need fairly sophisticated rules to withstand these attempts and keep to the original purpose of the site. And they need to be hidden, because if they are known, they will be successfully gamed. There is much more brainpower aimed at manipulating the site than there is in support of keeping it dedicated to its original purpose.
Security by obscurity gets knocked by some people, but it is a valid part of a defense in depth strategy. For example, I run SSH on a weird port, but I still secure SSH just the same as I would if it were on port 22. Running it on a weird port just decreases the amount of spam I have to filter through in the log files.
So-called "security by obscurity" is critically important.
I must disagree emphatically with open-source enthusiasts who believe that "security by obscurity is bad" advice applies to everything. In my opinion, it only applies to a small subset of certain types of software - packages that are meant to be used on extremely large scale, such as web servers, encryption algorithms, and the like. Attempts to apply it to other areas are foolish.
Obscurity is the only possible mechanism for keeping a highly popular link-aggregating site's story ranking reflective of what the community of genuine readers wants to see when under attack by "content promoter" types.
Sure, valid opinion, but I sure ain’t staking my security reputation on the quality of this forum, doubly so since it operates on many hidden and user-hostile rules to get to this debatable quality that I can’t audit.
Frankly I just don’t think they give a damn about the value of open source, at least relative to immediate things, and I respect that.
The original version of HN, or something close to it, has been open source for many years. It's part of the Arc distribution: http://arclanguage.org/.
There have been many changes to both the HN code and the Arc implementation since then, and those are not open source. We've of course thought about open-sourcing them someday, but the problem is that it would be a lot of work to do that, and then a lot of ongoing work to maintain it and respond to requests. Our dev resources are so limited that this is not in the cards for the time being.
> it would be a lot of work to do that, and then a lot of ongoing work to maintain it and respond to requests
You could open source the code, say in a public repository that was read-only, without accepting pull requests or doing any maintenance beyond pushing to the repo whenever it seemed advisable.
Not sure that’s always been true, or at least for sure PG was open about subsets if the code. Generally, there’s reason to open source code, and open sourcing it would likely result in more overhead not less; generally HN goal is to very, very slowly change the code, interface, etc.
Honestly, cloning HN really would not be that hard, cloning dang, that’s another story.
EDIT:
Here’s a recent comment from dang on open source HN:
There is an open source fork but it runs on Racket[0], so the Arc documentation isn't always correct, and of course that forum and this one differ in terms of features.
HN is a very lean operation and there is significant ongoing overhead cost to open sourcing software that often isn't fully appreciated, it isn't free. They may simply be directing limited resources to higher priorities.
I know many cases of software that was not made open source solely because it would require a substantial resource investment as a practical matter.
There are many apps that release their source without supporting it. A simple link to a zip file is a fine distribution model. Git or any other SCM is a common distribution tool for open source, but it isn’t a requirement.
In theory you can open source software by throwing code over the wall with total disregard for anyone else that may be looking at or using that code. Zero overhead, right?
In practice that doesn't actually work because some users will not respect the boundaries you lay out. No matter what you do or say, some significant subset of users will assert or assume the act of open sourcing code places a litany of obligations on the people releasing the code. Furthermore, some of these people will go to great lengths to try to get you to comply with these obligations. At which point you are either doing a lot of extra work you were not planning on doing to make these people happy or you are dealing with a lot of extra and unnecessary personal drama. Either way, it costs you time and energy that you have to account for.
The only way I have ever seen anyone explicitly avoid this overhead was when no one was using their code.
For me I find it funny that HN doesn’t scale. Whenever there’s an unusually active topic, the mods have to scramble to make countermeasures to keep the site up.
That's not true. I wonder where you got that idea.
It is true that the app server runs on a single core and we don't have a lot of performance to spare. But it handles the current levels of active threads reasonably well. The main concern is that if average load goes up significantly we'll be in trouble at some point.
We've got an ongoing major project that will hopefully flatten that curve, but unfortunately it's hard to find time to work on it.
Maybe it's just growth? The more active users HN has, the more votes a popular comment will get. So active commenters, even if they stay in the same relative ranking, accrue karma faster and faster. The corollary being, if you stop commenting, you lose your position in the ranking with speed proportional to time since your last comment.
I agree with most of those policies, but "downranking of tutorials" seems kinda dumb. I could see it making sense for "how to React" drivel that people use for self-promotion, but I've learned a lot from 1-off tutorials I saw on HN first.
Reasoning is HN’s goal, per dang, is to promote substantially new information — unless the tutorial fits this meaning, it’s less of a priority to feature than those posts that do meet it.
Worth noting there’s nothing stopping you from building custom HN searches like this to find tutorials posts, though this would not solve the likelihood of the community posting related comments:
I'd love if I could choose on my user page not to see my HN points total always there next to my name in the top bar. Seeing that often turns me into someone I don't like.
We might implement that as a profile option. One question is where such a feature should fall between minimal (don't show karma next to usernames in top bar) vs. maximal (don't show any point totals or karma about anything). I feel like it might be better to go the whole hog and just have the maximal option. 'nokarma'.
Oh great. Yes, I guess not seeing the voting on one's own comments would be good too. (Looking at the score on my comments is a very small percentage of my HN time, but my HN total score is there every time I return to the main page. Have to learn to ignore it I guess.)
As long as it doesn't mess with the voting system too much! Maybe there'd be many more bad comments if people couldn't see their points total/comment scores.
I agree with a more comprehensive 'nokarma' approach. If I don't want to see my point total, I probably also don't care to see up/down vote options, or any other related features.
>> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors users have set.
Happy to see that the most #bada55 colour of all is in that list.
Would be nice to see a sorted list and the count for each color. Could even bucket very similar colors so we get a sense for the general HN taste for colors, though I don't know the first thing about bucketing colors.
Yes, there’s a lot more upside to comments as a result.
Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote, downvote — allowing more downvote would most like have more negative than positive impact on the community.
It's always been -4 for me. At times it's felt like more when I've doubled down on my unpopular comments with more downvoted comments (and because usually every down vote hurts).
I think the limit probably discourages long winded "all these downvotes are a badge of honor" comments. People who crave downvotes only get four. People hurt by downvotes only get four, too.
I've wondered why we can't comment on YC jobs postings on HN. I imagine commenting would be beneficial for questions/answers about the company or position.
I asked this a while back. Answer was roughly that job ads aren't substantive and offer little in terms of actual conversation, and repetitive threads that lack substance primarily attract people with previous grievances. This would lead to the same thread happening every time the company posted an ad.
It makes sense that you wouldn't want to encourage ads becoming actual threads.
The ads are job ads, not product ads. All of your criticisms don't really apply here. I say this as a person who doesn't like them and rather wishes they weren't here.
Nothing stopping any user from creating posts related to an aspect of the content on any of those ADs, but it’s obvious allowing comments for ADs would potentially cause unneeded overhead for the advertiser; clearly if any YC advertisers want to post on HN, they’re free to do so within the guidelines on HN.
HN doesn’t block negative posts about YC companies.
I'd assume its to avoid meta discussions about the companies. In the "whoishiring" threads you often get people complaining about the companies, which the mods then remove.
While we're on the topic of HN syntax, I really wish they
would add proper blockquotes. Quotes in monospace look ugly,
especially on mobile, and quotes that simply start with a “>”
aren't visually distinct enough, imo. Just indenting a
paragraph when it starts with a “>” would probably be enough.
Not allowing quotes drives users to limit their quoting to a relevant part. I observed other places that users have a hard time to limit themselves and context is always there.
Nope, like wiki style citations to external links. Maybe it's just some superscript trickery, but I've seen it from multiple people, so I assumed it's a hidden feature.
No, you can set any CSS color if you have the minimum karma required. The linked page is just a list of colors that users have actually set.
I really wish any user could set a custom topcolor. I found the default orange hard on my eyes, and I was glad when I could change it.
Mine is #d0c8b5, which is simply a darker version of the page background color. Plain and unobtrusive, and the bit of orange in the "Y" logo sits nicely in the corner.
And you can always use user.css to adjust per site CSS to your preference. I use it for a few sites; there are addons that facilitate it, but I've never bothered.
Not mentioned, but you can be "rate limited", where you can post up to ~ 3 comments per hour (?not sure), else you get a "posting too fast, please slow down" message. It's keeping us trolls at bay
Cool fact! I always assumed this applied to everyone. I've seen this message on and off for at least a few years. Now I'm wondering why/when this was applied to my account. Interesting!
"Posts without URLs get penalized." That's strange. Does that include "Ask HN" posts? I would have thought that submissions with no link would be good discussion starters.
A blog post fills the same purpose for starting discussions except it requires a higher level of commitment by the author. Hacker News is not really a micro-blogging platform in the traditional sense, and because other alternatives exist, the higher bar appears to have some logical rationale. It creates a space somewhere between StackOverflow and Reddit for "I want to talk about X" threads. People who really want to talk about X can write a blog and submit it to HN if Reddit isn't good enough.
My experience is the post without URLs, but say 10 upvotes are generally of lower quality than URL related posts with 10 upvotes. Not sure why this is, but I was forced to speculate, URL post intend tend to be by an expert on a topic and while non-URL post tend to be seeking experts; again, just speculation, might be wrong.
“Tell HN” and “Show HN” are a thing, too. I was recommended to use “Propose HN” once, I think. It’s just text. I assume the ask/show links check title prefix.
That's the 'visited link' color, which indicates that you've visited a given post's link. Posts do not change color based on votes. For posts without a link, reading the post requires still visiting the post's link, so it works out as expected from there.
No, the actual colour of the text on text-only posts is super light. I read somewhere a while back that it was supposed to discourage people from using it too much.
I think the minimalistic design is appropriate and efficient mostly.
…with a couple caveats regarding accessibility: the default font is way, way too small, and some colours don't have enough contrast (eg, the “visited link”). Also, a tiny bit more of formatting would make comments more readable while keeping them sober and focused (eg, blockquotes, monospaced inlines, true hyperlinks).
I was always kind of surprised that there's a relatively high karma threshold for downvoting, but seemingly not for upvoting. Seems like it would invite voting rings. I guess there's already other software to detect that though.
Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise ratio for negative votes beyond pushing them below the “new comment” boost is of little positive impact in filtering content, in my opinion.
And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.
Thanks for posting this. I've been an avid reader of HN for years (with a few modest/minor submissions). I had no idea about a substantial amount of this... I wonder how much is commonly known in the community?
If you set the delay profile value to X it’ll let you edit and save a comment for up to X minutes before other users can see it. I use it extensively on mobile and have mine set to 7.
It took YEARS before they added collapsible threads despite its obvious usefulness and easy implementation. Some people added extensions to do that but HN was entirely unresponsive. I wouldn’t hold my breath for any new features.
I suspect that it's more about optics than practicality. Not all diversity topics are political, but most diversity topics are probably outside of what the mods believe to be within the purview of HN.
Making it a separate category bin bypasses all of the hemming and hawing over particulars.
Stating the obvious, Reddit was in the first YC batch; YC is HN’s parent company. Further, HN was created in part because Reddit’s intend is more general than HN; HN’s intend is to focus on substantially new information that triggers both curiosity & notable dialogues.
I don't think intent is a verb. It is either a noun or adjective. In the sentence "She is intent on winning the election" the verb would be "is" and "intent" is an adjective that describes her.
Compare:
His program focused on dinosaurs. (verb)
His program is focused on dinosaurs. (adjective describing his program).
You would never say "his program intented on dinosuars" because it's not a verb.
“Moderators will sometimes rescue a post which didn't receive a lot of upvotes and reset the submission time on the post.”
This sounds more like manipulation of content based upon moderator viewpoints or interests. HN has a wide enough audience to hit a good post the first time around.
I see where billme is coming from. I don't do it here (because I don't comment much, because I mostly use https://hackerweb.app for reading), but I do it on reddit.
Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a good chance of identifying you based on the intersection of your (relatively uncommon) interests, various bits and pieces of the personal info that you tend to drop in comments etc.
I don't know who you are but please stay! You seem to have a lot to offer and in a very positive way.
EDIT:
When I wrote this reply your comment was at the top. 2 minutes later it was at the bottom of the comment section.
Looks like it was manually moved to the bottom of the comments by a moderator :(
Lobsters requires an invite though. They have a good rationale for it, but it seems like a non-negligible barrier to entry, especially for people that are less connected.
“Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and increase accountability. If you know a current user of the site [1], ask them for an invitation or request one in chat [2].”
lobste.rs is almost entirely content marketing spam, and it actually has heavier censorship of non-spam than HN does; you can see this pretty easily by checking their mod log.
I just looked at their mod log. The last article removed by a moderator was deleted because it was "not about computing". I read the same article on HN, and it gave rise to some interesting discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437529
Some of the most interesting discussions on HN are not directly related to computing, and they're one of the main reasons why I stick around HN (and would not be interested in moving to lobste.rs).
Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!