Heh. I get what you're saying, but I feel that vibe much more from Golang than from Rust. Rust seems down to earth.

I do think it's funny how this is the only comment in the thread that isn't greyed out.

I wonder if there would be a way to lose the 'value' of a downvote if the account in question predominantly downvotes a specific opinion too much (a form of abuse i think). The assumption being that, "ok, you downvoted three posts, that were all very incendiary; though the other 40+ you've downvoted were all that way, statically the chance that those posts are all offensive is unlikely."

Would be interesting to see; I don't hate Rust, but I don't appreciate the zealous nature of most of their advocates, and for me personally, there's nothing fun about writing in Rust. It's also a bit too bloated for my tastes, i would never want to run it in lowlevel personally. Yet most of the time I stay away from threads talking about Rust, because i just get sent to the bottom fairly quickly, on most sites that encourage discussion.

I mean, I heard it put this way and it has always stuck with me: every conversation here is implicitly inclusive of @dang. He’s wholly responsible for the vibes at large, and in the past several years it has become blindingly clear that he has no issues or qualms with Rusticles overtaking any thread they choose. I could write a scathing 10k word treatise on any topic with a single pithy remark about Rust in it somewhere and he’d allow the discussion to be dominated by the Rust tangent that would inevitably multiply in the comments here.

The chilling effect is as you describe, that I often feel discouraged from contributing my knowledge, experience or opinions because of the blatant manipulation of conversations by Rusticles and the apparently contentedness by dang for that to be the defining angle of discussion here.

HN should have tags. Every article gets tagged by users with high karma counts, by some sort of ranked consensus (maybe a rust tag, python tag, database tag, politics tag, etc) and users could just list tags they want muted in their settings.

Instead, I’ll be told about the HN guidelines and some minutia in this comment that is somehow worse than a thousand idiots hijacking literally every conversation about a particular topic.

As they say, not my monkey, not my circus…

Unfortunately that's often a result of administration. He does have notable ownership of how certain things are, and you do see his bias peak through in many different ways.

You mention the "chilling effect" that does exist, and you aren't the only one, I've seen a lot of comments like yours not just on this site, but on pretty much any site that sees any advocacy for the Rust they promote.

I think there might be some value in filtering through something like a GreaseMonkey extension; which I've been debating for a good while if i should just make. Simply allow to remove listings from the HN page that inlude 'blacklisted' domains and filter key words. Such as "rust" in the title would see a removal.

But yeah, I think there is a place for Rust, just not where we see it for the most part, and i am increasingly bothered by the issues it presents for the Linux community (which was disregarded by the article posted hilariously enough, they can't even show respect for the communities they cause issues for, a core inidicator of narccistic behavior).

Guess I haven't been on enough HN Rust threads yet. My assessment of Rust's vibe comes just from reading the docs and online help when I was using it in a project years ago. It feels like C where they're just trying to get stuff done. I don't have strong opinions on Rust or Golang, and I don't use either one regularly. In that project, I ended up doing most of my work in some FFI'd C code.

I do judge language communities based on the code reviewers at work. Python and Java people are chill, C++ people are obsessive, and Golang people are obsessed with not using C++. N/A for Rust or NodeJS.

That is a healthy option imo, it's not a terrible lang or anything like that; it just gets way more praise and has seen too much growth that it has yet to earn.

My preference is C for personal projects; I like the freedom.

C# because I work with .NET a lot; some might say too much, i get weary of it sometimes. Python is kind of goofy, but it's useful and easy enough to use that I don't mind it's presence in my work.

I will never work with Java professionally ever again if I can help it; I don't like the JVM; working with Android was the final killing blow, i hate mobile dev. simply because they often have me work with ART and i just can't do it with any real enjoyment. Golang is odd, and I have yet to find any real use for it.

The Rust community is pretty unsettling in their dedication, and they seem to actively lie if you question it's usefulness in a specific situation, so i'm weary of their advice. NodeJS is useful, but truly awful to maintain after the fact. It's also quite nonsensical; I would still spend the extra time just using php or python (with flask), Node is also far too bloated and the bottlenecks seem to make my life only more difficult anytime I try to make something even remotely performant without just throwing load-balancers onto every node website I've ever worked on... not worth it.

NIM is by far my favorite; I don't know why, but I love it, it's the language i would build if I had the time. And... C++ has way too many options to do one thing that it confuses most solutions when I've ran into problems, it's just too much.

Something I've learned over the years is that the choice of tool, before you even start on a project, must be taken seriously; if you mess that up, you will be paying for it for potentially years to come.

IMO there’s a widespread belief that these upvote/downvote systems are fundamentally stupid, which is actually true, but I think it also holds back the implementations a bit.

I’d love to see for example a site that treats them as endorcements or something. The logic could be something like: keep track of the graph of who upvotes what. When you upvote somebody, you reinforce the link between the two of you. Then, when showing posts, rather than just using the raw scores, measure the weight of the edges connecting two users or something like that.

Also have a button that, if you see a post you don’t like, shows you the edges connecting you to it so you can re-evaluate them and cut some.

Or something like that. I’m sure this is open to abuse. But the idea would be that you aren’t just generating like a gamified “high score” for comments, but trying to build a collection of people that you find or are likely to find interesting. It might even help reduce abuse of the voting system, in that people playing “let’s all upvote each other” games will just become an isolated clique, maybe?

There is pagerank, which is still easy to game when accounts are free. I like HN's system well enough, mainly cause it doesn't show comment scores except your own. It's not like the toxicity-inducing thing on Reddit.

I also made my own social network for links where "liking" something = reposting it, and you only see stuff posted/reposted from people you directly follow. There's no globally popular stuff. Not comparable to HN, though.

I would love to see a POC of this in action.

I think that this would not fix the issue entirely, but it deserves some thought. It's a unique way of looking at the problems.

Of course this becomes less effective when the community itself gets large, so it won't scale as easily.

Here we go, I'm at -3 and you are faint grey.

Hint: If you make a comment that is confrontational but makes no other points, many (if not all) of the people downvoting you are not your opponent, they're someone unrelated who thinks you made an annoying comment. Those downvotes prove absolutely nothing about your opponent.

The number one rule of all sites with voting is that we downvote discussions of voting itself!