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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

pg (or possibly another admin these days) will remove the create-account functionality if HN suddenly becomes very popular, as with the LinkedIn thread. I'm trying to find one of his comments where he mentions this, but there are 8,511 to wade through, and the obvious searches haven't found it yet.

edit: I may have misremembered; the first reference I've found was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481174, but I'm still looking.

edit: Gave up looking. I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

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Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481174

That was a very classy way to say "I don't want reddit to do to HN what Digg did to reddit."

It was the day of the SOPA blackout IIRC. Redditors were bored and looking for their hit of lolcats.

Bashing Reddit on HN? SO BRAVE

Does graying out a downvoted comment attract less or more attention to it?

Probably more. I'm looking at -40 from that comment alone, hah.

I also vote more :)

I tend to ignore slightly grayed out text. When I see a barely visible comment (such as mine!), my curiosity gets the best of me.

FYI Metafilter does the same thing.

they also change a minimal amount - $5 i think - that discourages idle registration. i think it works well for them. maybe hn should consider it (it's not for profit - it's for the psychological "bump").

SomethingAwful forums does it too ($10 i think?) -- with the additional caveat that 'bad' posters can and do get banned.

The problem with Metafilter is that $5 over time hasn't scaled. It's been $5 since they implemented it way back when, and as the popularity of the site rose, $5 wasn't enough to stop people from registering to add their pointless commentary anyway.

A few years ago I used to really find value in their community and felt that the added registration fee filtered out people that were just there to give bad advice on the green or self-post on the blue, but for the two years or so, it seems as if paying such a little amount makes people even more likely to post crap because they feel some sense of validation or privilege after payment.

Additionally (since SA was mentioned), there are so few moderators at MF that subtle trolls and misinformation loudmouths are prevalent (some have been known for their antics for several years) and threads derail and turn into a get-off-my-lawn!-fest really quickly.

I remember this too... pretty sure it had something to do with reddit.

It was gone last night, before the LinkedIn news. I know because my session happened to expire and I noticed. At least 12 hours ago, possibly more.

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