There's a lot to like about HN, but it's worth acknowledging that the "good parts" are only half the picture. Anything that questions moderation or site culture is routinely flagged as "crankiness" and buried. You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
If you ever find yourself encountering the message "you're posting too fast, please slow down, thanks" your account has been deemed "problematic" by the mods and rate limited. You won't be warned beforehand or told why, and the limit is permanent until they decide otherwise. They used to slowban as well - have page loading be extremely slow so the site is almost impossible to use. The intended effect is to frustrate you enough that you eventually leave. They also shadowban but at least they warn you now, they didn't always. People would keep posting completely unaware that their comments were going unseen, for months or sometimes years.
The filter on my account appears to require a two hour cooldown after every five comments. I have no idea when I got it or what for, and I'm reasonably certain it used to just be one hour but they bumped it up at some point.
I feel like I need to decode for the reader that this is relatively high praise from a krapp comment!
I've removed the rate limit from your account now. You're right that the limit is permanent in the sense that it needs to be removed manually, and that's unfair in some cases. The counterargument though is that most accounts just don't change that much, so this ends up being globally the right call even though it fails in specific cases.
>I've removed the rate limit from your account now.
SNפIƎɹ SO∀HƆ
I mean thank you. I know I complain a lot but that's because I care, and I think I've mellowed out over time anyway. I think my greatest sin is just spending too much time here posting.
>The counterargument though is that most accounts just don't change that much, so this ends up being globally the right call even though it fails in specific cases.
If so, it seems to make more sense to apply it by thread rather than by account. Maybe to threads that trip the flamewar detector. For serial trolls the effect would be the same, but it wouldn't interfere with honest participation.
>and no, we didn't bump it up
Fair enough, it can be difficult to tell from the comment timestamps. As long as you're prompting the user anyway maybe add a cooldown timer?
I don't envy you or the other mods your jobs but I do think you put more effort into tone-policing than you need to.
I didn't mean to ask about penalties. Penalties are good and necessary for problematic users trying to bring politics to the site, wage culture war, and erode the standards that make HN tolerable. I meant to ask about specifically the GP views as bad reasons for penalties to be enacted:
> If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here
>You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
I don't think that's true, an intellectually curious comment about site moderation would be fine (this one for instance). Usually what I see penalized are broad insults like "everyone on this site is so fucking dumb, why do I even come here" or people complaining about how they got flagged/downvoted for a post.
For real, the downvote access threshold is way too high. If I wanted to get points, I could just join the circle jerk for a while. But actual curiosity is not rewarded.
Piece of advice: I used to care more about downvotes, and was very upset when my comments got a "0" or "-1" next to them. Then I realized that they're just internet points that I'm unnecessarily attached to, and that seeing a downvote on my comment is just my pride being offended. This makes me way less upset about unjust downvotes - and, on average, it seems like I get more unjust upvotes (e.g. upvotes on comments that actually aren't substantial) than downvotes (those which I would say are justified).
> at least if you are the first to down vote a comment
This is actually a clever idea (that would avoid endless repetitions of the downvote reason) - I like it!
I don't know how that doesn't immediately create new threads of arguing about why and whether something should be downvoted.
- "Downvoted you because I found your comment rude to OP."
- "How is calling them a cheese-hole-lover rude?! They said they love Swiss cheese and the more Swiss cheese you have, the more cheese holes you have, so they obviously love cheese holes!!"
Honestly I don't care about downvotes if I can at least downvote as well. When I've been on this site for months and made hundreds of killer comments, and the only reason I can't downvote yet is because I don't match the hive mind enough, it really pisses me off. Also, this creates an erroneous impression of which comments are good and which aren't. I reckon most users here have under 500 points or whatever and thus cannot downvote. If I had never been downvoted I'd probably have another thousand points on top of what I already have.
In my own experience, I think I am not "match[ing] the hive mind", nor do I try to, and as such my karma growth is slow but not painfully so. I think that I've been treated more or less fairly.
I think your downvotes mainly come on some of your political comments. Political threads are not great to begin with, and I think you're giving yourself some undue credit as to your participation to them. I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled. I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets. I make it a point to not take sides and be critical of all opinions (of course I don't implement it perfectly), and I think I have been treated more or less fairly. I linked some political threads I participated in to demonstrate non-downvoted non-liberal comments. If some of my opinions are "liberal" and others are "conservative", I'll just say that I try to be fair and reasonable.
I only downvote people who I think are degrading the conversation who seem outlandishly wrong or off-topic. If I just disagree with someone, I may reply or not. It's reasonable to disagree on the basis of holding different values or beliefs.
Haven't read that before, but nicely read. I've had related thoughts on this, and I agree. I like the quote "keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out". Alternatively, change always comes, so be adaptable to change and face it head on. It's not clear how to divorce what I like from my identity, because I'm not a perfect automaton, but I try to minimize its influence and appreciate that we're all the same, standing in different places.
One person's "outlandishly wrong" is another's "boringly obvious" opinion.
>I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets.
Liberal comments are often in bad faith. The top/only political posts that get upvoted are entire bad-faith liberal propaganda hit pieces. The liberal commenters find a way to wedge politics into anything remotely political, spewing Trump Derangement Syndrome or climate hysteria narratives. These comments get upvoted. Trying to talk sense into these people gets consistently downvoted unless you're willing to do a lot of waffling and phrase your objection in the most milquetoast way you can think of.
>I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled.
The audience (that comments, anyway) is mostly a liberal hivemind. There is a lot of dog-piling here. You shouldn't be downvoted for simply disagreeing or presenting a reductio ad absurdum argument but it happens here all the time. It's not as bad as Reddit but still not so good. The rate limit sucks too because you can be spammed by like 5 people and not be able to respond to them quick enough.
I might do better if I pretended to be more on the fence than I am, but I am very opinionated. Some of these comments I respond to are SO stupid that I think shock therapy is the appropriate approach. I try not to be personal. I just point out the absurdity of what they are saying and hope they just snap out of it or say something interesting to prove me wrong.
Based on that last paragraph, I think it's pretty likely you're getting downvoted for your attitude and not for your opinions.
That's actually pretty consistent with a lot of the other comments I see where the author claims their opinion is being downvoted when they're actually just being a jerk.
> and hope they just snap out of it
Is this something you do a lot? Someone talks down to you online and you go "huh! They're right!" and change your mind?
I'm definitely getting downvoted primarily for my opinions and disagreement. I don't know if you've noticed but people really hate being proven wrong or challenged on their opinions. The default is they treat you like a jerk unless you kiss enough ass, and even then they probably still hate it. If I waffle around and get carpal tunnel from typing out overly polite replies to absurd takes, I might avoid some of the downvotes. But there's no pleasing these people. I wouldn't care so much if not for the hive mind effect, where people like me can't downvote anyone no matter how rude or wrong they are. It creates an illusion of consensus, and reinforces bad ideas.
Honestly don't know what this has to do with my comment.
Edit: I guess the topic is downvotes, sure, but I feel like your comment would be better made somewhere further up the comment chain where it's actually relevant.
If I don't care about them (except for the indignity of getting downvoted by people I can't downvote) that implies I wouldn't get into a debate about the cause of the downvote. I might have intended to reply to a different comment at this level though, actually...
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.