Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree with aspenmeyer violently on all those fairness issues that came up a few weeks ago in the similar discussion, but I think he‘s right with pushing back on this in general.

I am a very active HN user and was totally surprised by the declaration that submission bots are fine with you. It goes against pretty much all earlier communication (which, in fairness, was usually about comment bots), but I think in the past my submission behavior was repeatedly ruled okay when challenged by other users, because I‘m submitting manually.

I do feel I‘m losing interest a bit when we‘re all just firing scripts. Manual submission at least makes you care enough to spend those seconds, bot submissions mean nobody cares anymore because you can just fling shit and see what sticks. And maybe we high-volume submitters should even be reigned in more.

(Also it feels unfriendly towards lobste.rs, when HN is effectively just bulk copying their submissions.)

Thanks for this. I think you make good points, and I apologize if I came off as hostile toward you directly or indirectly in that other thread. The closest I have come to scripted submissions is using the HN provided bookmarklet, and even that felt like scripting to me. I'm not a purist about this, but the inconsistency feels strange to me too, and I would rather not have scripts be the primary posting or comment method, but please keep the faith with me here on HN.

If we don't make an effort and intention to care and stay here despite bad calls by refs, we'll just have to take our ball and go home, but for many, they don't have another home like HN, so that would be a net loss for them. We owe it to ourselves and each other to show up where we want to effect change that wouldn't happen without our presence and involvement. That's what user generated content is all about!

I don't know why this would matter, re: lobste.rs; it's two sites with the same remit and different groups of users, of course they're going to share stories.

It feels like this site can always use strong incentives for better, more informed, and more civil conversation in threads. But it doesn't need much incentive to get good stories posted; that happens organically.

The simplest solution here would be to eliminate "karma" outright.

I see a difference between the same set of stories being submitted organically, and one VC-driven site basically scraping the smaller site.

Eliminating karma is probably not a bad idea, I don‘t think it will stifle submissions, but it may improve commenting dynamics.

I don't see that distinction at all, for what it's worth, and while there are things I have liked about Lobste.rs, I don't think it's a more authentic community than this one. Either way, so long as there is karma, there's an arb to run between Lobste.rs and HN, and people are going to run it. Fighting it seems like a waste of energy.

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