Hacker News Reader

Comment by masterzora | Hacker News Reader

I agree that I don't want to see confirmations in my GitHub, but you are incorrect about them being equivalent. The optimal way to use confirmations is often not hitting "Reject" to requests you don't want. Just do nothing. In most well-designed systems, as long as there's an outstanding request, they can't bug you any more.

View on HN

You can't have "do nothing" mean both "do not accept (yet?)" and also "accept!"; if no action keeps you from accepting, it means it'll take an extra step to actually accept an invitation. If the common case is not trolling, that adds friction.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Obviously "do nothing" can't mean both. Obviously the entire point of a confirmation would be such that it would take an action to be "accept", so that means that "do nothing" would have to be "do not accept (yet?)". Obviously this is only useful for GH if trolling is the common case. And obviously I started my post by saying I did not want confirmations. So what exactly are you trying to argue against?

Upon rereading I'm not sure what I meant either. My guess is that I was responding to

> The optimal way to use confirmations is often not hitting "Reject" to requests you don't want. Just do nothing.

and didn't read carefully. I was probably pointing out that if trolling is not the common case then that system is not in fact optimal (which I think we agree on), without realizing you didn't claim it was the optimal system but only the optimal system-which-uses-confirmations. Sorry about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com