Version two: hide foes? Come to think of it, maybe the 'foe' aspect is the fun part...
EDIT: it's like I summoned him.
My first thought was this replacement of the HN karma system would make it a lot like FB and Xitter - a collection of disjoint echo chambers. My second thought was the same, then I stopped thinking about it.
And this seems normal. I have a friend in real life who I like talking to, we share some views, and vehemently disagree on other subjects. He likes to bring them up and I tend to divert the discussion because I don't want to lose them as a friend
I feel that any system which injects opinions into comments/submissions before you read and process it, work against the principles of Hacker News. A system like this might be great for a community full of trolls, but another one of Hacker News' strengths is it's heavy moderation. I see maybe <5% troll/bad-taste comments, and most of those are already flagged and [dead].
I searched a few comments I agreed using the "Ask HN: What are some iconic comments on HN?" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719253) and I'm pleased to see some green comments here and there :)
I also made 2 QoL [fire|grease]monkey extensions for hn:
- display favicons of sites next to links: https://gist.github.com/corentinbettiol/6d9dc3a032c17ebcd94d...
- display karma next to usernames: https://gist.github.com/corentinbettiol/289503b4033a788df91f...
I'd state the exact opposite, especially in times where fake news, bot farms and AI generated content are everywhere it matters if something comes from a trusted source or not.
I don’t care about how many up or down votes some comment or piece of content has. I also have never blindly trusted videos or pictures. All sources can be corrupted and as such shouldn’t be trusted without verification.
Which is why I still don’t value accounts nor read user names.
Even with people I personally know I have always used the phrase: “trust, but verify”
Mostly because I really miss newsgroups though.
If you truly want certain users to be "ignored", then you probably want any of their comments (and the subtree of descendant comments) to be hidden/collapsed/made less legible, so that you don't accidentally read them, and thereby don't accidentally get rage-baited by them into wasting your day arguing with them. Same as e.g. kill files on Usenet.
Given that this comment collapsing/hiding/visibility-decreasing is something already built into HN (for comments/subtrees with strongly-negative score), it'd be really easy for the extension to hijack this functionality for its own purposes... if it actually wanted the red button to mean "ignore".
That the extension doesn't do that, implies to me that the extensions intended semantics for "foes" isn't "I don't want to engage with this person" but rather "I want to notice this person more." Perhaps "so that I can take the opportunity to actively antagonize them / argue with everything they say."
(I'm not saying that this is a good thing; just that insofar as "the purpose of a system is what it does", this is the purpose of a plain "foe" signal!)
I'm fine with friend or foe, because they are in reality, just coloured blobs
To me, your response would have been just fine with only the last sentence.
One of the reason we come to HN is that curiosity and caring about details is rewarded and makes for great discussion
Also your comment has no substance. I stand totally unimpressed by your opposition between the whole and the details and I fail to see how this is relevant. Care to explain what tackling the whole would look like ?
Or are you just trying to handwawe away some potential issue you are too lazy to consider just because you like the project ?
Note that IIRC the guidelines ask you to refrain from "This is HN/reddit" comments because they are fundamentally uninteresting (and lazy)
This has some pretty serious connotations. I have been here for an awful long time for someone who is not a target audience, please take a moment of self reflection at that.
I don't think nitpicking is a synonym for 'caring about details'. I am acusing commenters of picking on unimportant details, and I'm acusing them of doing it because it is easier than the more substantive concerns that are further down the thread. It looks superficially clever, but is actually just pedantry.
> because you like the project ?
That kind of statement is intellectually dishonest. I wont be installing this extension, but not because of a name for the buttons that didn't form part of the UI.
> Note that IIRC the guidelines ask you to refrain from
Well, I just checked rather than relying on the my fallible memory and, and I don't believe it does. If you want to police people's comments, perhaps take a little more care.
> It looks superficially clever, but is actually just pedantry.
I'll just defend why is think this is not in fact pedantry but a genuine concern : The "great divide" is now such commonplace, especially in the US, with people living in their online and media environment bubbles that "gardens" like HN are more valuable than ever. The world is already tribal enough as it it. "friend" or "foe" encourages tribal behaviour instead of engaging with different viewpoints. Tribal behaviour is deeply ingrained in all of us and nothing to scoff at. The extension encourages glossing over diverging viewpoints, setting yourself up to dismiss quickly. I just don't think that's in the spirit of HN. There's already community moderation to prune comments who are failing HN guidelines.
You are indeed correct about the guidelines. This is the part I remembered wrongly:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit.
However I don't think it would be against the spirit of the law to extend the guidelines with "Don't make comments about the general population of HN. Such vague generalizations bring nothing interesting to the table"
There is a reason why in the current political climate in the US people who don’t agree are labeled literally foes.
Repeat it often enough and your perception will change.
Words have power.
I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.
This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.
I'd prefer not to label things such that I'm justifying the label's negative potential by the disproportionately small "even if" range of positive ones.
I like it. sometimes my greatest foes become my dearest friends. Funny how life works that way.
Most things are interesting if you look deeply into them. People on the other hand can be repetitive and boring about them. Which would extend to the excessive use of meta-argument: complaining people aren't listening but also not actually saying anything of substance.
If that suggestion (which I suppose you'll ignore anyway, but maybe it inspires some other thought in you) came from a foe, then ... you'd be directed away from paying attention to it? Because you've incontinently flipped a colored orb at some point in the past, and now you're going to use that statistical information to direct you to where the most inspiring ideas mostly are? I see.
But maybe this is not very high quality information in the first place (the information that you provide for yourself by flicking an orb)?
Although there are some commenters I would want to follow because they are potato.
There is something so magical about some of the more delulu Take Havers around here.
This is HN. The focus should be "does this person provide interesting or thought provoking comments", not "relationships" or "engagement".
There are plenty of HN commenters whose opinions I absolutely dislike (I'm sure it's mutual ;), but I still read them - they are at least well reasoned or point out missing facts. I don't have to like them to learn from them.
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774
What do you feel is the benefit to the community for this that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions?
I ask not out of malice, I ask because 2 reasons: 1. I imagine spending time on this/it's working well required you to see the value/benefit to it. 2. We must assume all hacker news commenting follows the rules, IE; good faith comment with relevant experience when required. This seems like a way to promote getting around that.
There is no “native blocking” on HN. You cannot block a user or hide their comments and submissions in perpetuity. You can only hide on a per-story basis.
I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
- like it is literally trained on some data set to identify posts that are trying to bait people into commenting on them and simply hide such posts.
- the world would be a far better place if we had such an extension
I imagine just looking at the first degree connections of the votes would be a pretty strong signal.
Edit: wait, just a custom CSS will do it.
How about an option in the HN settings to hide user names then?
But now I prefer blocking and favouriting people https://overmod.org/
There are good commenters here. Just overshadowed by lots of garbage.
How old is that icon set? I swear I used that same peppers icon for a Windows app that I published around 2002.
While I have our attention: Is there any plans on making the hacker smacking profile not public?
Sadly I don't think I'm going to use it. I'm the kind that prefers to read only the comments and not the names attached to them.
2. Deploy it on cloud
3. Post it on HN
4. Sell your house to pay cloud debts
(I mean the page is down already)
What happens if friends conflict?
Personally I like hn because there is karma, but it's an afterthought. Although I'll it a try. I suspect the problems of reputation and the internet are unsolvable, that doesn't mean we can't try and improve it.
I guess if you just prefer wearing horse blinders?
For a further improvement, let the extension set some orbs automatically at random, to encourage discoveries. Then upgrade this to all the orbs.
It had a little text label next to names so you could manually add whatever you want. Recently I've thought about this extension and using it to tag the LLM users, or the humans who tend to pop up to fan the flames or who regularly post thought terminating comments - little tags to remind me to ignore the bots and trolls.
1. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
On the other hand, there are a number of things I'm not very informed about, and I do frequently find a few posters in those threads who seem to have very insightful things to say, but I'm not sure if they actually are (sometimes you can tell from replies) or if it's just because I'm a neophyte.
Which all goes to say I don't know if this system would really help, or would just turn into bad opinions getting even more support because the crowd-sourcing is coming from others who don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate what's worth listening to.
Challenge my core belief? Well… I could rationally evaluate that, or, I could just use a tool to block it from my vision! Bubble thickener.
Also, many comments just take a wrong premise and attack you (e.g. that not wanting the slaughter of innocent people equals supporting terrorists who want to slaughter innocent people). They don't offer anything more than that, so that IMO taking the time to consider their mostly one-note opinion is just wasting said time.
As moderators we can only judge comments according to the guidelines, and can only ban accounts if they repeatedly breach them. You're always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about an account that has been continually breaching the guidelines.
Plenty of users help us by emailing us about egregious accounts that they notice, and you’re most welcome to do that too. We can take action or reply to you explaining our interpretation of their activity in relation to the guidelines. We’re always happy to explain our thinking once we have a specific example to discuss.
That's where an ignore system is useful.
We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!
Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.
I have a better idea. Why not distinguish quality from non-quality by reading a series of characters and then deciding for yourself if you like the subject and tone of voice? People themselves can choose how many characters they use. Let's call these characters the alphabet.
Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.
I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.
> identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters
> not about hiding writers you disagree with
> It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with
[But] > to reinforce your opinion of them. [Did you misspeak here?]
> this reduces the time I spent on Hacker News
> find the good stuff based on people you trust
This is very confused.
* Do we want to avoid ideas that we disagree with?
* Do we want to avoid authors we've labelled as annoying? (This is about meta-level bad ideas, about how to interact.)
* Do we want to avoid meta-level ideas that we disagree with?
* What if your friends disagree about who their friends and enemies are?
* What it they don't disagree, isn't that creepy? Echo chamber much?
* Is it right to pre-empt your own interest by labelling material before reading it? I don't know!
Seems to me that rational pre-filtering should be along subtle, personal, ever-changing lines, and you should constantly be deciding on the spot based on complex information including your current mood and dyspepsia. How should interest work? You may start reading a thing and decide "this is not for me" (or "this is a troll or a bot"). Or with a tool like this one you may carry out the same process faster, and more crudely, using less information and less serendipity. So you're encouraging people to be in a rush and make more superficial choices instead of mining for the gold. On the other hand, maybe they are in a rush and need to be like that.
