Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!
1) loads instantly
2) is mostly plaintext.
Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit
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."
An excellent design motto. Respect what works!
> 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.
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.)
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
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.
Hey no knocks, just saying there’s a name for this tactic.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ask HN: HN user ghosted 5 years, why?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436276
Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN
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.
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.
It's simplistic but you can still use it to write a sh*ttier version of HN.
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
I just wish they'd open source their We're-Not-Reddit behaviors library.
While I appreciate that they finally added some mobile styling, it was very minimal and ignored accessibility best practices for touch target size.
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."
Is there some magic way to do that with CSS, replacing the "..." with the rest of the URL when you copy it? (There should be!)
Note that if you click the timestamp on the comment, links don't get shortened.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/truncate-string-with-ell...
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.
Happy to see that the most #bada55 colour of all is in that list.
I use #93a1a1, personally (i.e. $base1 from solarized https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/)
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
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.
Back when comment scores were public via the API, I retrieved the lowest-rating comments for each month. which was always -4: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgp...
Bonus histogram of comment scores calculated in 2014: https://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_p...
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.
It makes sense that you wouldn't want to encourage ads becoming actual threads.
Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that’s not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:
But that's not what they said. Were you asked to use your real name? Nothing stopping you keeping to one, anonymous sounding username
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 have a feeling you'll be back soon anyway.
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 :(
I have a feeling HN would never publicize that information themselves.
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).
I would absolutely love it if the comment box was taller than 7 lines on mobile, perhaps just at least when editing a comment.
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:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Could that reflect survivor bias (among all tutorials)?
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 yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.
Personally, I don’t use downvotes.
Intent is a noun. That is her intent.
Intent is also a verb: She is intent on winning the election.
You wanted "intent" as a noun in both your usages above.
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…
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%...
Making it a separate category bin bypasses all of the hemming and hawing over particulars.
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.
Unfortunately, it is widely agreed that a lot of good quality content goes unnoticed. Which might be due to the sheer number of submissions.
That could be seen in yesterday's post about quality content that goes under.
https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Direct link to top users by rep:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
(tptacek’s comments are super useful and extremely knowledgeable)
…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).
