Hacker News Reader

Comment by MeinBlutIstBlau | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't like this. Hackernews and slashdot do good jobs of moderation by making you have to be a participant that's contributed with well thought out comments. Reddit fails because the "upvotes/downvote machine" is just an opinion meter. Also the gaming of it is not good either so it's a matter of time before Twitter publicly displays your stats as you tweet. It's another slippery slope for them to show ignorance at the top and not legitimate criticism that often gets downvoted because it doesn't fit the norm. Reddit died in the sense that /r/popular is as unique as 9gag. It's all content from other sites and 1 word top comments.

View on HN

Every single upvote/downvote mechanism on the internet (including on HN) is an opinion meter, regardless of what rules/etiquette the site tries to push. And I'm pretty sure that's what Twitter wants, because it means that all the safe, popular replies to a Tweet will automatically bubble up on top and they won't have to deal with the controversial ones because the community will take care of them.

Kind of but not really. reddit has a lot of minority communities that just get mass downvoted too since downvoting costs nothing and other people organize to just mass nuke everything for things like women/trans/whatever focused subreddits that they dont like.

HN is kind of different in that downvoting as at least gated behind _something_, you cant just spin up an account and immediately downvote everything.

As far as I'm informed, Reddit shadowbans downvotes from new accounts and accounts with low karma. You can downvote and the GUI will tell you that downvoted but the karma system will just ignore it.

I like the design where you must give reason for downvotes. This seems to discourage mindless downvotes.

I think the slashdot moderation is best. It's borderline random when you get the chance to do it and they become "use it or lose it" mod points. That way the community has to engage, not just lurk.

It was random who got mod points, additionally the 10% most active and 25% least active users were excluded from getting mod points at all.

Which community/platform has tried this?

I fully agree with you that slashdot has/had a better model. Both the awarding of karma points to spend and the max cap on the number of points a comment could accumulate were positive things.

I don't know if r/popular is going to kill reddit but it's at least no longer interesting to me at all. It's similar to twitter in that it's mostly "outrage" with the addition of some random tiktok videos or current events like sporting sprinkled in.

> Hackernews and slashdot do good jobs of moderation by making you have to be a participant that's contributed with well thought out comments.

You should see how much karma some people have when they finally get banned and reconsider your evaluation of that method's effectiveness. It's not difficult to grind 500 karma here, it's not a signal of anything but time spent.

I imagine it still represents an added cost, which works towards suppressing or adding difficulty towards facilitating comment / post manipulation as GP alludes to.

Much of that cost is offset by the design of Hacker News being biased towards flagging and downvoting.

Plenty of threads get flagged into oblivion because a couple of people objected to them, and several people have noticed every comment in their history getting voted down from time to time. Upranking posts by manipulation is difficult, downranking them is almost child's play.

What really offsets that isn't the karma cost for upvotes but the moderators' own manual tweaking of the knobs, sometimes correcting improper flags and changing the rankings, which can't really be gamed around.

“well thought out comments” in this case means “well thought if your comment is aligned with the herd's opinion”.

More often than not the spicy contrarian hot takes of those who don't "follow the herd" are just the bleats of sheep following another herd.

Nice statistics, your source is reliable and the numbers are impressive and trustworthy.

And it doesn't change the fact I’ve posted.

You get what you give.

You are you

Reddit is alive and well. If Reddit is a failure, I want such failures.

It's alive and well as far as numbers and users and time spent. I think it can be considered a failure in other ways. Is it creating healthy online communities, things like that. Are good things coming out of it, or is it effecting the real world in a negative way.

I tried to refrain from making reddit out to be a "failure" but it's undeniable they're not the same as they were 10 years ago. Reddit definitely felt more HackerNews like: decent articles, articulated comments, and the moderation was not nearly as bad. I am fully aware that they're successful and they're keeping it that way. Reddit however has gone the ways of just following the mob. They're not trying to foster a reason for people to stay on aside from addiction and boredom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com