I was recently reminded just how unusual this place (HN) is - I think there was a common thread between HN and Reddit, and so I followed the link from HN and read a fairly tame comment that drew quite shocking personal vitriol, and there was no community correction, no obvious moderator action. I closed the tab.
The weather "out there" is pretty horrible. It's much nicer here by the warm fire.
And we should thank pg, dang and the many other moderators and commenters for keeping that fire going. communities at scale is hard.
Sometimes I do read the comments without reading the op, but then I won't comment, unless it's something unrelated (like this very comment, for example, even thought in this case I did read the OP).
But yes, there's plenty of "Didn't read the article, but...".
I always feel somewhat bad when I do this, but it really is much easier to read the first few comments. For really long articles, I often only read the beginning, catch something I want to comment on, and hope I didn't need the rest for my comment to be valuable.
It's not great, and honestly feels a little like in high school when you didn't actually do the full reading assignment for english class, but it can be hard to keep yourself to high standards.
It's something we do on Lobste.rs. Its guidelines allow a short, purely-factual description just to save people time. On CompSci papers, I always put the abstract in there either whole or trimmed. Some people TL;DR the articles in their comments which happens here, too.
Allowing a super-short summary might be a good practice here, too. Especially for long articles or videos. On videos, maybe link to transcript or slides, too, so people don't have to dig them up. It's another thing I try to do over there.
This is great and I would love you to keep doing this, however couldn’t HN software be made better so I could follow people and provide many different ways to surface fascinating commentary? Even being able to see what people had favourited over the last month would give another great list of incredible commentary from all the clever people here.
This is a neat way to highlight interesting things going on here, but as others are pointing out, it surfaces the challenges of a temporal ranking system creates...this was a very manually curated post that could probably be easily automated.
A few of us have been chatting at https://hackerforums.co because of this after a thread here made me realize many others pined for the bulletin board systems of old. It’s much quieter than day 1/2 but it’s still healthy.
I have a draft thread in the works that highlights how it’s all running and how it’s done growth-wise since launch, hoping to get it posted next week.
Hi, man! I saw your forum had experienced spam-bots attack. I have a suggestion...
Do you know any messenger app based on replicating database in which users' messages are acknowledged by their transfer history through a social graph? So, a new user must ask several registered ones to broadcast the creation of a new node in that social graph, and then he will be able to post his messages by relaying them to the rest of the system through those users who registered him. Spam-bots could be then filtered out by black-lists...
Simple idea, I'm sure someone had to make it already. Do you know any? Thanks for the effort!
As a counterpoint, I love the conflict on HN. I usually go to reddit for my warm-fuzzies, but when it comes to making sense of the world HN is my favorite spot on the internet.
That said, I'm slightly conflating intellectual rigor with standoffishness. I'm not sure that they have to go together (but it seems they often do), but I'd rather have both than neither.
I'm always surprised at how in 2018, screenshots are often the fastest and most aesthetic way to share a few paragraphs of text. Considering the amount of text shared like this, I would have thought that there would be more search-friendly alternatives
I'm surprised that it's used in the ycombinator blogposts, considering that it must be easier just to copy-paste the excerpted text into a stylized div. However, screenshotting text is the best way to share excerpts on Twitter, because of the lack of styling options and the character limit.
jwz uses CSS to reproduce the look of the iPhone Messages app when he is posting a text conversation. It's better than a screenshot since it's still text.
(I would like to an example but jwz doesn't allow links to his blog from HN.)
The weather "out there" is pretty horrible. It's much nicer here by the warm fire.
And we should thank pg, dang and the many other moderators and commenters for keeping that fire going. communities at scale is hard.