[HN Gopher] A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Be...
___________________________________________________________________
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
(2018-20)
Author : rdpintqogeogsaa
Score : 209 points
Date : 2021-04-19 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| Was the period removed? I remember a few months ago, there would
| be a `.` after the post age if it was the user's most recent
| post. Looks like it's not there anymore though.
| dang wrote:
| A lot of people didn't like it so I made it moderator-only. I'm
| not sure it's really that useful in the end.
| eps wrote:
| Why not make it a user preference, like showdead & co? Just
| make it off by default.
| dang wrote:
| There are only so many slots available for user preferences
| before things become much too complicated, and I don't
| think that one clears the bar. It's much harder to remove
| these things than to add them. Better not to get on the bad
| side of that Maxwell demon.
| theknocker wrote:
| >There's a mod who curates comments based on what's politically
| expedient according to leftist valley dweebs
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I landed on HN from within the tech world (at the time, I'm
| largely no longer), though critical of the VC element of it.
| Circa 2011. The site then and now resembles (in both good and
| bad elements) Usenet and Slashdot of yore.
|
| My sense then was a strong pro-Valley bias, though with some
| criticism. That criticism has been increasing here, as it has
| in the media generally ("techlash", "tech backlash", general
| antitrust / antimonopoly viewpoints, privacy / surveillance
| concerns, and the like).
|
| I remain somewhat disappointed that there seem to be topics HN
| is unwilling (in the collective hivemind sense) to discuss,
| though that's more a case of _unable_ to sensibly discuss than
| a specific moderator-led political bias. I 've shared these
| frustrations with the mod team (mostly dang, though there are
| and have been others) over the years, sometimes agreeing,
| sometimes differing strongly.
|
| Given the state of discourse _elsewhere_ , in the press, in the
| US, in the rest of the world, and if I may suggest, in other
| online venues, _Hacker News does not do badly_. It may not be
| the best venue, but it is very, very, very far from the worst.
| Viewpoints do get heard (many of which I disagree with, or
| simply find based on ideological mantras or a failure to grasp
| fundamental facts). I try to express my disagreement as
| respectfully and clearly (and concisely) as possible. For the
| most part, that seems to be received reasonably well.
|
| Accusations that HN is _entirely_ of the Left, Right, techbro,
| woke, or other communities strike me as quite false. The
| culture quite likely skews US, educated, male, and wealthier,
| though other voices are heard. (I 'd like to see more, I
| suspect HN would as well.)
|
| I generally don't try to win given arguments at all costs,
| though I'll do my bit to nudge discussion in what I see as more
| interesting areas, both in terms of topics and insights on
| those. This includes comments, voting and flagging,
| submissions, and (where it seems advised) pinging the mods
| (hn@ycombinator.com) for egregious issues (mostly spam, titles,
| link disambiguation, and the like, though occasionally
| behaviour against guidelines).
| dang wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
| theknocker wrote:
| Don't insult my intelligence. Discourse here is confined to
| the limits of acceptability according to the neoliberal
| mainstream. This is abundantly obvious to literally
| everybody. Of course the liberal mainstream endeavors to
| enforce that.
|
| I won't be treated like a moron by a moron.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I wish there was a feature that doesn't grey out the comments for
| a couple of hours until everybody has gotten a chance to vote. As
| it stands currently, a _single_ person downvoting a new comment
| from +1 to 0 leads to a slightly grey comment. People here
| usually see this and form an implicit bias. I 've seen comments
| that are perfectly reasonable, has no opinion, it is on topic,
| and follows guidelines and yet it gets downvoted. I am
| conjecturing that it is because of this bandwagoning effect.
|
| Look into this please. Greying out comments is fine. Just let
| some time pass, even 30 mins would be a huge improvement.
| Alternatively, allow minimum 2-3 people to vote before greying
| out comments.
| samatman wrote:
| I've mentioned this before, and this seems like as good a place
| as any to say it again: I think HN is a bit too profligate with
| downvotes, and I've seen it get incrementally worse over time.
|
| My solution to this would be, at 501 karma, a user gets 5
| downvotes per 24-hour period, use them or lose them. 1 more
| downvote per 100 points.
|
| This would gently teach users to downvote a bit more sparingly.
| Karma isn't that hard to come by, and even when I'm in a really
| bad mood (or there's some awful thread) I'd be surprised if I
| hit 30 downvotes in a day. By the time a user had as much
| downvote ability as they're likely to use, a habit of being
| less thoughtless about it would be well-established.
|
| Human psychology being what it is, there is a subset of high-
| karma accounts which never ever downvote, and another subset
| who basically just come on here and slam the dislike button
| until their spleen is vented. I don't consider these approaches
| to be equally beneficial.
| dang wrote:
| As Jtsummers points out, people can and do give corrective
| upvotes in such cases. I do that all the time, and I hope
| people understand that it's part of being a good citizen here.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| jfengel wrote:
| It's actually kinda useful as an indicator of something that
| could use a corrective upvote.
|
| I could see putting a time delay on the second or third or
| later upvotes, but the slight graying seems like the perfect
| indicator for both "maybe skip it if you're not in that mood"
| and "maybe take a look if you're in a generous vein".
|
| (Minus the accessibility issues, but they're fixable with
| CSS.)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| At the same time, I try to make it a point to vouch/upvote
| reasonable posts. If I had no indication it'd been downvoted,
| I'd never upvote it to compensate. I'd read the comments now
| and if I came back tomorrow to see if there were more
| discussion I'd be very confused to see many comments grayed out
| (The great comment massacre?). Based on how other comments move
| to gray and back I suspect I'm not alone.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Does this outweigh the bandwagoning effect though?
|
| What about HN run an A/B test. Half of all new posts have
| delayed greying for a few hours. See which category accrues
| the most downvotes (or most net votes).
| wruza wrote:
| The effect of such timeout may be quite opposite.
| kokanator wrote:
| I have had comments that bounce back and forth.
|
| It seems down votes are far too easy to make. A down vote can
| be spent freely and carries no expense.
|
| Expecting humans to be judicious is probably a little too
| optimistic ( otherwise we wouldn't need laws and governments ).
| Especially on the anonymous internet.
|
| I am thankful for the upvote people who provide a helping hand
| when needed.
|
| Since downvotes seem to collect quickly and possibly silence
| someone early in a conversation does anyone have design
| thoughts on ways to 'moderate' the down vote?
| rainonmoon wrote:
| There was a massive conversation last week [0] about down
| votes (not for the first time) if you're interested.
| Personally I think HN largely gets moderating right in
| general; I don't think it's about moderating the down vote
| specifically, but firmly encouraging a culture of good faith
| debate in which the down vote plays the role of hiding bad
| faith/low quality content. Like GP (and anyone who uses this
| site at least somewhat frequently) I've seen down voted
| comments that seem innocuous or even thoughtful but I get the
| sense they're a vast exception compared to the weaponised
| down voting of e.g. Reddit.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810972
| kokanator wrote:
| Thank you for the link.
| kodah wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that when people are new one of the
| first things they complain about is the voting system. I've
| seen _a lot_ of green names recently, so there probably needs
| to be some concerted effort to educate users on _what_ they
| 're voting for rather than redefining the system.
| kokanator wrote:
| I would tend to agree. Learning to be part of a community
| should be the a goal of a new user. But the community
| should feel some obligation here too.
|
| My initial experience here was I made a couple of comments
| which I thought were helpful and instantly had a -7 karma.
| Ten minutes into my experience and I was an outsider. That
| is a bit discouraging for a someone who has been coming to
| HN for years and finally decided to make an account.
|
| Perhaps this is why people complain about the voting
| system. This does give the sense that you need to conform
| in order to be accepted.
| seumars wrote:
| Not sure why downvoting would require a minimum point score other
| than to discourage lurkers (like me) to lazily engage in
| discussions (even though I believe voting is in fact engaging).
| This added to the fact that the HN crowd is notorious for
| downvoting unpopular or even slightly pessimistic comments sounds
| to me like forced positivity.
| brokenkebab wrote:
| I suppose it's more to prevent digital mobbing then to force
| positivity.
| seumars wrote:
| Greyed out comments leads to serious downvoting bandwagoning
| too.
| yamrzou wrote:
| One of the unintended consequences of domain shadowbanning is
| that sometimes quality content gets buried. Which is an
| unfortunate trade-off, given the amout of spam content from such
| domains.
|
| For example, here are some recent articles from https://dev.to
| that were submitted multiple times by different users, but were
| dead because the domain is shadowbanned:
|
| https://dev.to/kprotty/understanding-atomics-and-memory-orde...
|
| https://dev.to/yyx990803/announcing-vite-2-0-2f0a
|
| https://dev.to/jaredcwhite/why-tailwind-isn-t-for-me-5c90
|
| https://dev.to/lazerwalker/using-game-design-to-make-virtual...
|
| https://dev.to/nwtgck/the-power-of-pure-http-screen-share-re...
|
| https://dev.to/bkolobara/writing-rust-the-elixir-way-2lm8
| joshmanders wrote:
| I'm curious why dev.to is shadow banned, of all domains I'd
| expect this one to not be on such a list.
| yamrzou wrote:
| I guess because it's mostly tutorials, which are downranked:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented#downra...
| joshmanders wrote:
| Oh that's a good point, thank you!
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dev.to
| yamrzou wrote:
| Do you have 'showdead' enabled? All the recent ones are
| marked as [dead].
| ro_bit wrote:
| I never knew that there was a second moderator! (sctb)
|
| Their comment history only has some comments from 2019, and is
| much shorter than dangs. Did they only have a short stint as a
| moderator on HN, or do they now work from another account/behind
| the scenes?
| Shoop wrote:
| Scott stopped working on HN about 18 months ago.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055115
| minimaxir wrote:
| Scott did leave: looks like I forgot to update it. Will do now.
| Nacdor wrote:
| Edited: Nevermind, I guess HN users prefer to remain unaware of
| certain undocumented behavior.
|
| To dang: I disagree with the no-delete policy (our comments are
| ours and we should have the ability to delete them), but more
| importantly I refuse to leave a comment up when my ability to
| reply has been disabled.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't delete-edit your posts like that. It leaves the
| thread incoherent and isn't fair to the reader or to the
| commenters who replied.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| Isn't this the land of the free? Why can't they delete edit
| their comments if they want?
| viklove wrote:
| HN is an extremely authoritarian web forum, maintained this way
| solely to prop up the reputation of YC as an organization.
| You're not allowed to have certain opinions because it will
| make the platform look bad, but of course censorship goes
| against the core beliefs of the western world so they can't
| exactly be transparent about it.
|
| The more experience I have with this site, the more I've found
| myself hating it. And the smugness of the users here who
| believe HN is the one-true-forum is the turd on top of the
| shitcake for me.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Authoritarian is a bit harsh. That implies the moderators
| delete and ban anything that goes against a particular set of
| narratives. I have not seen that to be the case. There are
| topics and opinions that the user-base will downvote and some
| topics that are likely to start flame wars. In the case of
| down-voting, it helps to know your audience. In such cases
| one could just create their own forum that caters to topics
| that don't resonate here. I've done that for several topics
| and kept it entirely separated from HN. It would be unfair of
| me to assume I can change the acceptable use policies of a
| site or the reaction of its audience based on my preferences.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Oh boy - I have been here for 12 years or so, and I don't
| really agree with this take at all. Maybe I am biased, but I
| think the conversations here are more open and more frank
| than most (or any) other places on the internet.
| seumars wrote:
| The parent comment is already greyed out, so yes, maybe
| you're biased.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| The parent comment made some bold assertions with no
| facts (anecdotal or otherwise) to back them up. I'm not
| surprised that some people feel that the argument is in
| bad faith.
| viklove wrote:
| Yes, it appears that way because of the way the moderation
| works. Comments that HN wants to be hidden just get sent to
| the bottom of the comment stack, then grayed out, then
| hidden. You probably believe that only comments that users
| downvote get sent to the bottom, but no, there is a secret
| rating system controlled by the mods that causes certain
| comments to behave as if they were already downvoted. It's
| an opaque system that is selectively applied so as to
| conceal its nature.
|
| If the system were honest and fair, the mods would have no
| reason to hide their behavior.
|
| Now I have to be careful, I've posted 3 comments in the
| last hour and I'm running up against my rate limit since
| the mods have highlighted me as a troublemaker. Can't say
| too much exposing the secret system of moderation here,
| they don't like that.
| hu3 wrote:
| If I may, allow me give you one unsolicited advice I've been
| slowly learning through the years:
|
| Most things in life have their downsides and shortcomings. We
| should strive to minimize the impact of those and instead
| capitalize on their strengths. Take what good you can from HN
| and run with it. HN is great in many ways.
| viklove wrote:
| I disagree. I think HN is good in some ways, but awful in
| many other ways so much so that it overshadows the good.
| Unfortunately the good can trick honest people like
| yourself into thinking the platform as a whole is good, but
| hey, you're entitled to your opinion.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Neither dang nor hu3 went over to your place, pointed a
| gun at your head, and forced to to hang out on a website
| you hate. If you think HN is awful in so many ways, vote
| with your feet. Go somewhere you like better. Why hang
| out here to complain about here?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2018) maybe
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822
|
| and discussion less than a year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437
| momothereal wrote:
| (2020) I guess because that's the last time it was updated
| coolreader18 wrote:
| I mean git projects aren't generally given a (YYYY) marker,
| since they're expected to be continuously updated - no reason
| it couldn't be updated tomorrow if someone finds something
| new, and it's not like the url is pinned to the specific
| current commit. I think it should probably just not have a
| (YYYY), even though it is prose.
| elorant wrote:
| Here's a thing I don't like and it's not mentioned in the list.
| If I submit a story I can't downvote on any of the top level
| comments. Why is that?
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Probably the same reason you cannot downvote any direct replies
| to your comments, such as this one.
| elorant wrote:
| I can understand why downvoting replies is prohibited, it
| could harm conversations. But prohibiting downvoting in
| submitted stories assumes some kind of self interest, which I
| doubt is the norm.
| samatman wrote:
| It could be as simple as: coding this would be an
| exception, and no one has done so.
|
| `(if (not (eq parent.user user)) (set! allow_downvotes
| true))` (probably not valid Arc!) is easy to code up, an
| exception would be more convoluted.
| detaro wrote:
| I think it's generally "the submitter shouldn't be able to
| shape the discussion too much". I.e. also why you aren't
| supposed to put your own spin on a headline, text
| submissions are separate and not supposed to be used for
| links (with a few exceptions).
| mellosouls wrote:
| Presumably the same reason you can't downvote immediate replies
| to your comments which is probably there to discourage toxic
| back-and-forth downvoting.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's so close, why isn't the required karma 256?
| jlg23 wrote:
| So that I can again drop the link that busts the "8 bits per
| byte"-myth ;)
| http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_by_b...
| samatman wrote:
| I've been around long enough to have had to roll my eyes and
| say "fine, _octet_ " in conversation.
|
| But I'm grateful that it's mostly stopped happening, let's
| not revive it!
| blumomo wrote:
| if user.karma > 250: css.topbar.bgcolor = (
| user.prefs.topbar.bgcolor or "#ff6600" )
| xqyf wrote:
| CSS only: [bgcolor="#ff6600"] {
| background-color: transparent; }
| tchanglington wrote:
| Error correcting karma
| wingsingweoij wrote:
| frankly it's ridiculous that there's a karma limit on a client-
| side cosmetic feature. I understand one can write a custom CSS
| rule for this, but if it's already built into the website....
| pessimizer wrote:
| Ridiculous that it's so low.
| leephillips wrote:
| Unless you have to earn it, you won't appreciate it.
| Oddskar wrote:
| It's added flavour, I think. Not every website has to be
| intuitive or hand people things on a silver platter.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I've always wondered why this feature exists and I'm still not
| sure, nonetheless I've set a custom color (currently a fetching
| shade of purple - 8185E2), and change it about once a year,
| previously 00FF91 and FFF200.
|
| If nothing else, I can tell at a glance if I'm logged in or
| not.
| ishjoh wrote:
| I tried 8185E2 and liked it.
|
| I used a color palette generator with the black text and
| orange logo and it spit out: CFDBD5, which gives the site a
| bit of a high desert brush look.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| apropos undocumented:
|
| Can I limit HNs search functionality to only include my
| favorites?
|
| I often know I favoured something but for the life of me cannot
| find it via normal search and going through my hundreds of
| favorites by hand is impractical.
| dang wrote:
| Alas no. It's something Algolia could build, though, if they
| wanted--in fact there could be an operator for searching
| through anyone's favorites ("fave:splittingTimes" similar to
| "by:splittingTimes"), as they're public.
| yamrzou wrote:
| I also have a similar need but for upvoted content. Sometimes
| I keep scrolling through pages of upvotes to find a specific
| item. The problem is that favourites and upvotes are not
| exposed via the API and require scraping, otherwise it would
| be easier to build a search tool for them.
| JulianRaphael wrote:
| dang - are there any features for making HN more accessible? A
| vision-impaired colleague of mine wanted to check out HN today
| and made me aware that the contrasts on HN make it really hard
| for people with impaired vision to read on HN (webaim.org
| confirms this:
| https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=919191&...).
| Using his screen reader (NVDA) didn't help much as the front page
| doesn't seem to take into account screen reading software. Has
| someone built a more accessible version of HN? Also, does the HN
| team plan to make HN more accessible in the future?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm co-owner of a small Google Group for blind developers
| started on HN. The other co-owner is a blind developer.
|
| Presumably, he's able to navigate HN since that's how we met.
|
| I'm visually impaired but not blind. I have no problems
| navigating HN.
|
| You are welcome to join the group and ask how other members
| navigate HN. Most of them joined via links found on HN.
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/blind-dev-works
| dang wrote:
| It's a problem and yes we plan to fix it. I'm sorry it hasn't
| been fixed yet; we're just slow at things. Hopefully HN will be
| around for long enough to justify how slow we are.
| JulianRaphael wrote:
| That's great news and thanks for the swift reply. Have you
| considered asking the HN community for help with this issue?
| I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers.
| dang wrote:
| I will when we actually get to work on it. Before that, it
| would be counterproductive--just having to process the
| inputs would cause further delay.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Markdown? Markdown-ish? Something better than the foot-gun of
| markup currently supported?
| function_seven wrote:
| My wish list is not full Markdown support, but a little
| more than is currently implemented:
|
| 1. Ordered lists
|
| - Unordered lists
|
| Inline `code snippets`
|
| Super^script
|
| That's it. I totally get why HN wouldn't want tables, bold
| headers, etc. There's a danger of comments getting visually
| "noisy" with these. But for referencing code or
| mathematical concepts, or just listing things, the 4 things
| above would be really handy.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Yup... Lists, `inline`, and ```code``` would be
| fantastic. It's so annoying for n.yc to be literally the
| only place on the internet where you can type into a
| textbox but that textbox isn't some variation of
| markdown. (even facebook messages [on web] supports
| triple-ticks for code!)
| [deleted]
| lights0123 wrote:
| > literally the only place on the internet
|
| Haven't worked with forum software other than Discourse,
| have you? They all still use BBCode.
| ramses0 wrote:
| True, but it's such a mismatch in expectations where the
| entire tech industry has embraced markdown, but n.yc
| (tech mecca / water cooler) is most decidedly (and
| surprisingly) uses NotMarkdown(tm).
| seumars wrote:
| (Greyed out comments are not a bug but a feature)
| greggturkington wrote:
| I've written an accessible skin for HN that's about 90%
| complete. It targets WCAG 2.0. I will post it here when it's
| released.
|
| The text is mostly illegible, but there are LOTS of other
| issues too, tap target sizing for example.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| > I've written an accessible skin for HN... The text is
| mostly illegible...
|
| I guess everyone has to start somewhere? :P
| dang wrote:
| Please email hn@ycombinator.com when you do post it!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#implic...
|
| Disagree with this section, especially since it is basically
| presenting an opinion as fact in the same class as other
| verifiable facts on this post.
|
| My own anecdote, but I find that diversity and inclusion posts
| that have a tendency to get downvoted are ones where you can see
| the flame war coming from a mile away: the post offers little in
| actual new data, so then you have 2 "sides" arguing and talking
| past each other, primarily because both sides are unwilling to
| acknowledge that it is possible that both of these can
| simultaneously be true: (a) women and minorities experience
| discrimination in tech, both overt and subconscious, and (b)
| other factors besides sex or race discrimination can account for
| different rates of participation in tech.
|
| On the contrary, in my experience, posts that offer detailed new
| information around diversity in tech tend to be highly upvoted
| (the original Susan Fowler post about Uber was one such example).
| deanCommie wrote:
| In my experience, by and large the posts that get traction are
| the ones that contradict the perceived cultural trends.
|
| So a post defending RMS will get much more traction than one
| explaining why it's important to hold him accountable.
|
| A post dismissing Github's default branch name change as empty
| pandering will get much more traction than one
| explaining/defending why language and terminology matters, in
| all contexts.
|
| ^ These are feelings, I don't have data on them. So I think
| minimaxir did a really good job of presenting this problem in a
| more detached data driven way. D&I posts ARE more likely to be
| downvoted. Doesn't mean that ALL D&I posts are treated equal,
| though. The Susan Fowler post is a notable exception.
|
| I wrote about this in my own comment at the same time as you:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867142
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| Admittedly it's merely another anecdote but this post on GitHub
| changing master -> main comes to mind.
|
| Inflammatory title, subject matter related to diversity, and
| yet huge karma and plenty of substantive conversation.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854
| xqyf wrote:
| > If the comment desaturation makes Hacker News difficult to read
|
| ...then make it accessible. Sighted users do not have to click a
| timestamp or install extensions to have legible text. Why should
| the visually impaired?
|
| The extension linked to does nothing to improve the legibility of
| "X points by Y 30 minutes ago..." or "help" etc either.
| janvdberg wrote:
| I never understood how the vote counts works (the number that is
| added to your profile). It's certainly not lineair with the
| submission upvotes and it even seems to slow down over time (i.e.
| you need more votes to add 100 points to your profile)?
| jgwil2 wrote:
| It's 1:1 with comment upvotes, less with submission upvotes
| (how much less I'm not sure but my observation would peg it
| around 3:1). Personally I think it should be the other way
| around as a submission can add a lot more value than a comment.
| dang wrote:
| It's not 1-1 with either comment or submission upvotes. It's
| more complicated than that, largely for anti-abuse reasons.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Hah well my two downvotes here and two corresponding lost
| points say otherwise. But I'll take your word for it.
| grawprog wrote:
| I think some sites are weighted differently. More commonly
| posted sites require multiple votes for one point added. Less
| commonly posted sites require less upvotes for a point added.
|
| Or something like that anyway.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I think the one point default per comment isn't added? It's
| only _additional_ points? At least, that 's what I've noticed
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| There is something more than that. I noticed that the few
| highly-voted submissions I have didn't add the whole amount
| to my karma.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I have the impression that _submission_ votes only count
| half of what _comment_ votes count, or something along
| those lines.
| Tomte wrote:
| It's certainly not just a factor. The first twenty
| upvotes count more than, say, the 501st through 520th
| upvote.
| dang wrote:
| Earlier upvotes are more impactful in getting a post on
| the front page and in affecting its rank (because the
| rank algorithm uses time decay), but they don't count any
| differently towards karma.
| eslaught wrote:
| Is there really no delay, or anything else going on? I'm
| sure I've seen my upvote count be out of sync with the
| changes I see on my scores for recent comments.
| dang wrote:
| Does https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868069 answer
| your question?
| modeless wrote:
| I could be wrong but I think it used to be 1:1 with submission
| upvotes. It may still be linear but less than 1:1, I'm not
| sure. It is still 1:1 with comment upvotes I believe.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| That makes sense to me, a user submitting a press release or
| news article about a current event being the "lucky winner"
| where their submission gets traction doesn't automatically
| equate to them being a good community member in general.
| theturn wrote:
| > Accounts which are less than 2 weeks old will appear with a
| green username.
|
| I thought they were "approved" users.
| detaro wrote:
| (although the "undocumented" bit about this is just the time
| span, what green users are is documented in the FAQ)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I thought they were the poster or parent comment user. Green
| probably isnt the best choice for new users.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| It's also not a good idea to use only color.
|
| I assume this is about the users colored with #3c963c. A
| quick search tells me that's "dark moderate lime green",
| which I assume to most people is just "green". I have no clue
| if it is though, and I'm often wrong about color things. I
| should make a list of the different colors names can be
| tagged with and make a little tampermonkey script to call
| them out.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I never understood it - can't we just have something like
| "fred_bloggs [new poster]"?
| jetpackjoe wrote:
| "Green" does mean "new" though. I think a bigger issue is
| that other admins/OPs/etc don't have colors.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| "To be green" is an idiom that means "to be immature in age
| or judgment; untrained; inexperienced."
|
| So it's not completely misplaced.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I can certainly think of some reasons why it makes sense.
| But I can think of plenty of reasons why it doesnt as well.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| It is frequently used on other forums and sites to show
| users as being mods or admins. Why not show account age if
| the signal is important?
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| From a web UX perspective it's true, but green is a common
| metaphor for new in English.
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-word-green-become-
| synonymo...
| teddyh wrote:
| This does not seem to cover HN's silent rate-limits, apparently
| for selected "troublemakers":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997593
|
| This is what seems to cause "You're posting too fast. Please slow
| down. Thanks." to appear for up to _two hours_. Fittingly, I had
| to wait two hours to post this comment.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
| dang wrote:
| Also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true
| &que...
| [deleted]
| koheripbal wrote:
| Anti-spam/Anti-malicious-posters algorithms will, by necessity,
| never be transparent, nor even consistent or remain the same
| over time.
|
| Fighting spam and bad-faith commenters is a cat-and-mouse game.
| seumars wrote:
| You're twisting the issue by calling it "bad-faith
| commenters" though. Just take a look at this thread, where
| even the most polite, yet critical comments are downvoted and
| quite fittingly really hard to read.
| mey wrote:
| It makes me unreasonably happy that FFOOFF is far up the top
| color list. Apparently it seems to be hard to Google, but for
| those who don't know, prior to wide spread support for alpha
| channels, FF00FF was one of the colors commonly used for bitmap
| transparency. Not exactly a commonly used color and exceptionally
| obvious when working with a sprite sheet.
|
| Edit: You can probably guess what my banner is set to.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I believe that explicit banning is also now indicated. I'd
| requested something like this for long-since-shadowbanned users
| whose ban event was hidden in the distant mists of time (or who
| are sockpuppets of banned profiles). This is rare, but does
| occur.
|
| Also can apply to spammers -- this is usually relevant on
| submissions / new queue.
|
| The YC-company bias can also apply to _negative_ reporting on YC
| companies, which is _less_ moderated as something of a counter to
| charges of favouratism. See:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| Including from this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868116
| shubik22 wrote:
| This is a really useful list, thanks for putting this together.
|
| I was briefly shadow-banned a month or two ago, due to a few
| submissions of posts on my personal blog from this account (and
| not much else).
|
| What was odd was that when I looked at the "newest" page while
| logged in, I saw my post on HN but when I looked when not logged
| in, the post didn't show up. I didn't know shadowbanning existed
| and thought there was some kind of issue with HN, so I emailed
| hn@ycombinator.com. dang@ sent back an incredibly thorough and
| thoughtful reply literally 3 minutes later (this was at 7:15 p.m.
| on a week night).
|
| So while I find it a little odd to 1) shadowban someone without
| telling them why and 2) intentionally obfuscate the fact that
| they've been banned by making it seem to them like their
| submission was successfully submitted, I was really amazed by the
| care and efficiency of dang's response. So thanks dang!
| b1gtech wrote:
| Meanwhile million dollar corporations buy accounts and
| astroturf with no penalty.
|
| The little guy is silenced from sharing opinions/links that God
| Mods don't like, but the big corp can write off a marketing
| expense that looks like a mature organic account to God Mods.
| dang wrote:
| You have no evidence of that, and neither do we (right now).
|
| When we do get evidence of that, we crack down hard. We've
| done that in the past in two different $BigCo cases--but this
| is very rare. What's not rare is internet users making up
| stories about it based on their feelings. That's so common
| that the site guidelines ask HN users not to do it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| leephillips wrote:
| But that's what shadowbanning means. Otherwise, it's just
| banning.
| dcminter wrote:
| If you were a low-effort spammer (Edit: I'm _not_ suggesting
| you _are_ a spammer btw) you 'd never notice and keep on
| posting spam into the void. Whereas if you were notified you
| might create new accounts ad infinitum increasing the
| administrative burden of HN.
|
| I once implemented a similar feature for the comments on my
| blog along with an embarassingly simple filter to identify the
| spammers initially. The volume of spam on a no-name nerd's blog
| and the degree to which this approach resolved it were both
| surprising to me.
|
| On a later incarnation of the blog I just removed the
| commenting feature, but I guess that wouldn't be a sensible
| strategy for HN :)
| shoto_io wrote:
| This is super neat. Not only for beginners/intermediate to catch
| up with documented and undocumented features. But also for
| platforms who are seeking a better moderation approach. For me,
| HN is a very special place - the way people interact, the way
| that it is moderated. I still dream that other platforms might
| follow suit someday.
| seumars wrote:
| I wouldn't attribute it solely on moderation though. The HN
| audience isn't very big and thread discussions never last too
| long because there's almost always something on the frontpage.
| Not saying it's a bad thing though.
| b1gtech wrote:
| I think HN has God Mod syndrome.
|
| HN is good due to the network effect, not the heavy hand.
| dang wrote:
| HN gets 1400-ish submissions and 12,000-ish comments a day,
| and 5M-ish users a month. Whether that's big depends on what
| you're comparing it to. It's big to us.
| nick__m wrote:
| The ratio of submissions/comments is impressively high,
| this surely explains why the upvoted articles are almost
| always interesting.
|
| Thanks for all that work!
| Oddskar wrote:
| HN is probably the only place that maintained its quality
| somewhat over the last 10 years for me. So many websites and
| subreddits blew up, grew too quickly, and burned out in
| quality.
|
| I think a lot can be attributed to strict moderation, but
| also like you say being pretty niche helps in that the mod
| team doesn't have to be very big.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| I have noticed a lot of the downvotong of things critical of
| YCombinator and it's bias against topics it doesn't like. I even
| have emails where the moderator or employee refuses to
| acknowledge or explain why I was downvoted and not others. It was
| eye opening that experience and reading this list doesn't
| surprise me. Everyone has an agenda.
| dang wrote:
| What you're "noticing" is not accurate. HN gets tons of
| comments that are critical of YC and YC-funded startups. Not
| only do we not censor those, we moderate less, not more, when
| YC is involved:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| Your description of those emails doesn't match my memory
| either. I spent hours trying to explain things to you. That was
| hardly a refusal to explain.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > Implicit Downranking of Topics Around Diversity and Inclusion >
| Likewise, topics around diversity and inclusion in tech have
| gained lots of visibility over the past few years. However,
| despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be
| flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately. (Moderators
| occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although
| it rarely sticks).
|
| This is a very interesting subject. I would dare say that the
| majority of technologists (by pure numbers) find the human,
| philosophical, and psychological impacts of technology less
| interesting than the pure technical considerations. (Older and
| more senior technologists gravitate in the opposite direction)
|
| Yet, the most interesting and in-depth hackernews discussions
| directly touch up on privacy, censorship, employee motivation,
| the entrepreneurial mindset, managerial skills and lack therefor,
| regulation, corporate responsibility. All of these are strictly
| "on-topic" by the definition on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
|
| > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
| That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
| reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
| gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
|
| So clearly, this community is passionate and interested in a wide
| range of "fuzzy" non-STEM subjects.
|
| Yet when it comes to D&I, the community is primarily
| disinterested and not intellectually curious, or has already
| concluded that anyone who IS interested is pushing a purely _"
| political"_ agenda. Therefore, the only "interesting" stories
| that get upvoted are those that butt against the current cultural
| movement (e.g. defending James Damore, RMS, etc).
|
| I am personally very intellectually curious about this very
| pattern, but I appear to be in the minority.
|
| I wonder if people on HackerNews are aware that a huge percentage
| of female and minority engineers that I know find the HN
| community discussions completely disreputable and unappealing.
| And it's a direct consequence of how they treat these subjects as
| "uninteresting" and "off topic", because to the dominant in-group
| these subjects are just not relevant.
|
| Personally, as a technologist, a "hacker" (Whatever that may
| mean, but i identify strongly with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture), I consider this
| blind spot in this community a "bug". I don't know if it's a
| fixable one, as any attempts to mitigate it would clearly be
| perceived as intrusion and a restriction on the individual
| freedoms of expression. But the status quo is the status quo, to
| the point that even this manual of undocumented "features and
| behaviours" has to call it out.
| dijit wrote:
| The problem is that D&I threads are _not_ intellectually
| curious. People are too emotionally charged to have a genuine,
| dispassionate and reasoned discussion about it.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Why does one preclude another?
|
| One can be intellectually curious while also being
| emotionally charged and passionate.
|
| There is genuinely outrageous behaviour out there in the
| world. China is orchestrating a modern genocide. Russia is
| maneuvering to violate international sovereignty. The USA has
| a humanitarian crisis at its border. And there is a climate
| change emergency being mostly ignored. It's reasonable to
| have an emotional charge to all these discussions even while
| looking for logical solutions to these problem.
|
| The other issue is that a lot of people don't classify
| behaviours as "emotional" consistently. The prototypical
| example is feminine expressions ("tears") are deemed
| emotional while masculine expressions ("anger") are not.
|
| That may seem ludicrous but it happens on this site too.
| People will go on tense emotion-laden tirades defending
| personal freedom or outrage over the treatment of <insert
| problematic public figure>, and they are heavily upvoted and
| deemed "intellectually curious". While those that are
| pointing out the problematic behaviour and the impact it may
| have had through heartfelt experience stories are deemed
| "emotionally charged".
| dang wrote:
| You've brought up a number of good and subtle points in
| this thread, so please don't take this comment as a generic
| disagreement--this stuff is complicated. It's not only hard
| to get right, it's hard to even discuss precisely. I just
| want to mention that
|
| > _People will go on tense emotion-laden tirades defending
| personal freedom or outrage over the treatment of <insert
| problematic public figure>, and they are heavily upvoted
| and deemed "intellectually curious"_
|
| ... isn't really accurate. Those tirades are not deemed
| intellectually curious, either by mods or by the majority
| of the community. The vast majority of such threads have
| been flagged. I wrote about this here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636.
| Nacdor wrote:
| Unable to reply to comments -- edited to remove.
|
| Response to dang: I disagree with the no-delete policy (our
| comments are ours and we should have the ability to delete them),
| but more importantly I refuse to leave a comment up when my
| ability to reply has been disabled.
| hu3 wrote:
| > The original forum style was much better.
|
| How was it before? It would be constructive if you could point
| out some differences. I understand that they can be subtle and
| hard to discern but I would appreciate any pointers to satiate
| my curiosity.
| [deleted]
| pugworthy wrote:
| I'm curious about the potential for comment bots that
| specifically aim to gain upvotes. Not with long comments, but
| with shorter more supportive "me too" comments. Target the "I
| can't be bothered to reply but I agree with this comment so
| I'll just upvote it" reader.
| ranger207 wrote:
| >our comments are ours and we should have the ability to delete
| them
|
| I strongly disagree with this. When you're part of a
| conversation your comments are critical to understanding the
| conversation. By having a conversation in a public space,
| you're allowing anyone who wants to listen in, and your
| comments are necessary for that. I can't tell you how
| frustrated I've been searching through old reddit threads in
| particular where the user has completely nuked their account,
| and the only trace of what they said is in replies. (Worst is
| when it's a technical issue and their comments are the only
| relevant search results: xkcd.com/979 where the answer has been
| actively removed.)
|
| If you want to have a private conversation, please use a
| private medium. Otherwise you're gaining the benefit of public
| spaces (you can view anyone's conversation, their ideas and
| wisdom, and watch the development of discussions and
| understanding) while preventing others from gaining those same
| benefits.
| cgriswald wrote:
| There's an uncanny sameness to the point you're making and
| the cartoon even without the deletion modification.
| Ultimately your point is about missing context (albeit
| through deletion). Here the missing context is when the
| cartoon was published. (Google tells me 2011, but there isn't
| anything on the page that I can see that says so and
| certainly nothing in the cartoon itself.) Although the joke
| still works, I feel there is a subtle difference reading it
| in 2021 compared to if I had read it in 2011 (which I
| probably did).
| Causality1 wrote:
| It needs a section on muting. If you receive too many downvotes
| in a certain time frame you'll find yourself muted for a while
| and get a "you're posting too fast" message when you try to
| comment. This can be triggered well after the comments were made.
| For example, if you you have a discussion thread where you have
| four or five comments they can sit on 1 even overnight but if you
| come back the next day to find the tide has turned and all of
| them are in the negatives you'll probably be muted for a few
| hours.
|
| This is why it can be smart to take the temperature of the crowd
| before replying to a thread. Your liability for a bad opinion or
| picking the wrong side scales linearly with the number of
| comments.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| This begs the question: why were these features undocumented, and
| left to an unpaid volunteer to weed out?
|
| The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over US$300
| billion as of January 2021. Certainly their news aggregator could
| get a little bit of love.
| dang wrote:
| It isn't lack of love, it's that it isn't in HN's DNA to spell
| everything out. The site guidelines, for example, make no
| attempt to be comprehensive
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
|
| The currency on HN is interest, not money, so 'unpaid
| volunteer' isn't the best way to frame this. If someone is
| interested enough to put together and maintain a list like
| this, that's in the spirit of the community in a way having an
| official list would not be.
|
| (Btw we're all in favor of it and I believe I've sent Max some
| details to add to the list. If pages like this are going to
| exist--and they will, because online communities are endlessly
| interested in themselves--better that they be accurate.)
| dang wrote:
| Re "better that they be accurate", I figured I'd check it
| again, since I haven't in a couple years. That led to the
| following errata, which I will send to Max. I thought I'd
| share them here too in case people are interested in this
| level of detail.
|
| > _it can be [dead] again at which point it can 't be re-
| vouched_
|
| I don't think that's right? Pretty sure it can be re-vouched.
| I'd have to check the code to be sure.
|
| > _the [+x] number on the right_
|
| Since changed to [x more], to make it easier to click.
|
| > _will usually be at the top of the front page at that time_
|
| It would be better to say " _on_ the front page ". The
| "$Person has died" thread is usually at the top for a while,
| but we leave the black bar up for longer than that.
|
| > _the line between technology and politics is blurred_
|
| I've written a lot about how we approach this; it might be
| helpful to point to some of that. I usually direct people to
| these links first:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
|
| There's lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&pa
| ge=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| > _The web button next to submissions_
|
| Removed in July 2020. I removed 'past' as well but there was
| more pushback about that so I put it back.
|
| > _what the front page looks like at any point in time_
|
| Not quite - it's a blended view of the front page for a
| 24-hour period, sort of like a weighted average of a bunch of
| snapshots. That turns out to be unsatisfyingly hard to get
| right; different algorithms produce very different blends,
| and none of them feels like a real front page. You can always
| look at
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com to
| see specific snapshots.
|
| > _https://news.ycombinator.com/lists_
|
| We added one for whoishiring and one for Peter Roberts'
| immigration AMAs. I should also add the Launch HN list for YC
| startups. (Edit: added now.)
|
| > _All public URLS with user-generated content_
|
| I don't have a comprehensive list but the quantifier "all"
| there can't be right.
| [deleted]
| minimaxir wrote:
| > I believe I've sent Max some details to add to the list.
|
| For transparency, I'll confirm that dang sent over some
| things when I first wrote the list in 2018.
| skavi wrote:
| I've always seen these features as something akin to easter
| eggs. Stuff you learn over time as you become part of the "in"
| crowd.
| minimaxir wrote:
| FWIW, I've never liked this argument, although that's not why
| I initially made this list. The _best_ case scenario from the
| community perspective is that it increases elitism, although
| companies like Snapchat went viral with teens for hiding away
| features.
|
| Note that relatively few companies hide features for
| serendipity nowadays.
| dang wrote:
| Getting less undocumented every year:
|
| _A List of Hacker News 's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
| (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June
| 2020 (266 comments)
|
| _A List of Hacker News 's Undocumented Features and Behaviors_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25
| comments)
|
| _A List of Hacker News 's Undocumented Features and Behaviors_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183
| comments)
|
| _Hacker News 's Undocumented Features and Behaviors_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391
| comments)
| [deleted]
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