HN doesn't get enough credit for the tight rope they walk maintaining this community. I see some people post that HN should expand to other topics a la Reddit, but the team does a great job of maintaining focus.
It's not just HN's aesthetic that is minimal and no-nonsense, it's their moderation policies and the tone they set for the community. There is perfect alignment between their approach to content, community, and UX—no fluff, no nonsense, no manipulation, just the simplest, most valuable material possible.
If they expand the scope of acceptable content, it will be really hard not to tweak moderation policies, and eventually you end up with something like reddit, each subreddit might as well be its own (typically under-staffed) site.
EDIT: This is not critical of any post on this thread, just seeing the above comment about old-school reddit got me thinking.
> HN doesn't get enough credit for the tight rope they walk maintaining this community
You sure? Let me just check -theoretically- if you wanted to build a system to reinforce bubble thinking... how would it look different than this? There is hiding disagreeable posts, invisible moderation, and a magic karma system where 1 vote is not always 1 point.
Typically this isn’t a problem, but you aren’t paying attention if you think this isn’t by design and doesn’t exactly lead to a diverse spectrum of opinions here.
Okay, so how would you design it differently and achieve better results? Or point to examples that do it better? If not, the criticism is highly unwarranted.
Depends what you mean by “better”. I believe this is supposed to be a bubble. The issue specifically in HN case is most people don’t realize that.
If you mean, how would I present a variety of ideas but not let it get out of control with an extreme one way or another that puts common people off... easy.
Remove the score system. That little number in the corner is cancer.
Keep the vote system but only highlight when “many” people agree or disagree. Otherwise post are presented neutrally and the merit of the content must be evaluated. Even keep they grey out system but not at 4 people disagree, at 10 or so. It’s easy enough to find 4 people here that will want to hide the fact the WHO has dropped many balls during covid including faking that video interview dropout to not address that Taiwan is its own country and not an “area of China” - doesn’t mean it’s not true.
The thing that might not be clear here is that I do think this is all intentional and you used the right word “community”... but I think the danger is even long time users don’t know this, and think their ideas are “just right”, not that they are being cultivated into the same bubble they themselves are cultivating. Is everyone aware the “community” is not entirely natural?
The easy way to think about this is to steelman a topic you know a lot about. If you were to argue the other side of a topic, how would it be presented on this site? (Example, argue some debatable aspect against anthropogenic climate change) The answer to that is most likely hidden and downvoted into oblivion, so much so that it creates a chilling effect for anyone that would disagree in the future. That is wrong imo.
Edit: if you need proof there is a bubble with chilling effect, these posts are being hidden by anonymous disagreement :D
I've found accounts (possibly bots) that seem to go find the accompanying HN thread, and post a comment from it onto the reddit thread for karma. I sent reddit's anti-evil team a note about it since it's probably karma farming, but they never responded. Maybe it doesn't matter? It's not like we hold exclusive rights to stuff on here, so there's no legal issue, it just seems to be an efficient way of getting karma for that specific subreddit.
The reposts also result in a lot of not programming related content getting on that sub, which none of the mods seem to delete very often (stuff that should go to r/sysadmin or even r/technology).
I used to do something like this any time I detected twin threads (discussing the same URL) across HN and reddit. If anyone asked any unanswered question at one source, one of my bots would ask it at the other sources (plus Quora, usually) and wait for a response elsewhere, then paste that response back to the original OP with a link/citations. Including the citations got me autobanned a few times (which reddit admins graciously removed, repeatedly); if I weren't concerned with plagiarism, bot management would probably have been much smoother.
Would be pretty trivial to skip all the question/answer stuff and just share comments around sites. In a vacuum, I'd say it could be argued that mirroring comments around the Internet would result in good in various ways (sharing information, letting people choose what site they want to use, limiting censorship and/or site downtime, getting answers to people who might not know the best place to ask them, etc).
What you saw was probably karma farming, but could also have been someone trying to help in some abstract way. :)
