Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kaibeezy | Hacker News Reader

Agree. It’s hard to have a conversation here, but I don’t know exactly why. I suggested once that if usernames were just bolder it would make a difference. Avatars seem like fluff, but I think they really do make it easier to spot a familiar “face”.

Oh, also… I do check “threads” sometimes if I want to keep up with a conversation.

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The difficulty in having conversations reduces the tendency for people to get caught up in the cycle of reactive response. Were to introduce response notification, the engagement metrics would rise, but so would the number of fights. Given that HN isn't incentivized to increase engagement to sell ads, posing such an impediment isn't clearly tied to a dollar valued opportunity cost and therefore easier to swallow.

>The difficulty in having conversations reduces the tendency for people to get caught up in the cycle of reactive response.

The increasingly frequent multi-thousand comment long garbage fire political threads disagree with you.

Right, I'm comparing the design effects of different social media platforms, while you're looking at HN over time. We're not really talking about the same things.

I think we are talking about the same things. I'm claiming the design being discussed doesn't have the effect you believe it does, with the growth of contentious threads being evidence to the contrary.

This is like me saying that the cost of living has certain geographical causes and you saying that's not true because housing prices are rising in Miami.

Are living related and housing price changes related? Sure, but that's not how one would dispell a statement about the former.

If you want a dumpster fire you can head to Reddit. I greatly prefer what HN does to reduce that

I’ve had conversations cut off by the site when there’s too much back-and-forth between me and one other person. Is that still in force?

Yes. Happened to me the other day.

When this happens, you can still reply by clicking the timestamp above the post. The reply button will also appear after a while, the system just wants you to slow down.

i wonder if 'slow' notifications might be a good sweet spot. instead of notifying you about a reply instantly it could send a summary of replies once or twice a day

I feel like the `threads` page already serves this function though, even if not in quite the same way.

Anecdotally yes. The increased use of the threads page correlates to my descent into long threaded back-and-forths.

To me, the nested format of comments is the issue. In a flat format like a forum, people are forced to stay on a main line of conversation, with occasional tangents using quotes or new threads. In the HN style, everyone peels away into their own little side discussions, which themselves generate side discussions. It's almost like socialization at a party, and it's encouraged by the heirarchical structure. A detailed one-on-one conversation rapidly runs off to the right side, which discourages it.

Hacker News has a weird cultural dissonance where it's designed to encourage tangential conversations as you mention, but also has numerous features designed to discourage engagement and casual style for the sake of maintaining quality and avoiding the Eternal September effect. It wants to be a water cooler or a pub where people discuss interesting things, but no one polices the conversations in a pub or around a water cooler for topicality, novelty or substance.

It really should use a flat format to that end, but it's written in a lisp, so not having it render a tree view is probably sacrilege.

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