Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly believe that those are anti-features. They're metrics that drive antisocial behavior and make the world a little worse.

View on HN

You say so on a website that displays the number of likes (here: "points") for every post right on the front page.

This take is so tired. They’re stuck posting where engagement is because there’s nowhere near the level of discussion elsewhere.

Participating in something and trying to discuss how it could be improved when you disagree with it is normal human behavior.

Why do you think the engagement is here, and on other sites that do keep track of imaginary internet points -- and not so much on sites that don't?

Begin with "this take is so tired" if you want, but then I want to hear actual reasons.

Karma and voting are ruining Hacker News as well, just not as quickly because the algorithms here are not as aggressively tuned to maximize engagement.

This is just such a strange thing to point out when the more relevant thing is that the comment itself does NOT display the number of likes even though that USED TO BE how the site worked because the people who maintain it decided doing so was actually a bad idea and actively removed the display of display of like counts one day, and while some people momentarily whined pretty much no one does anymore as it absolutely did turn out to be better to not have that mental clutter in the user interface as, in practice, it was irrelevant information for how people use the website.

That doesn't mean he agrees about them being good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com