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0 pointsbschne5y ago0 comments

I'm starting to despise UI patterns that discourage any sort of meaningful discourse.

This includes stuff like hiding comment threads and only showing one or two comments by people you follow on LinkedIn, or features like "canned comments" ("Congratulations, John Doe!"). I don't know why websites stopped respecting their users' agency, but my pet hypothesis is that some product team is being measured on some sort of superficial "user engagement" KPI and ended up optimizing for meaningless reactions instead of actual discussions....

0 comments

blaser-waffle5y ago

They either optimize for sales (of something), ads, data mining, or something more ephemeral like "discourse control" or "discussion shifting".

You're seeing the latter two happening with reddit, probably other sites like tik tok.

Spivak5y ago

I mean to a point these are good things, HN even has the "flame war" check where it take away the reply button for deeply nested threads.

bschneOP5y ago

Yes, but I'd argue that the "HN brand of discourse control" is more about keeping nasty impulsive human tendencies in check, like a forcing function preventing you from not thinking before you speak - while other kinds of "discourse control" actually reward exactly this sort of behavior

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