tomhow

> Something else is going on, what is it?

The world is changing fast and everyone has to adapt.

Further, HN exposure only has any value if the interestingness level of content that makes it to the front page is high. If the interestingness drops – and there have been many complaints this year that the interestingness has dropped due to AI code generation and AI-generated writing – then the value of HN drops for everyone, including everyone who wants their project to be on the front page, including you.

> “System is already perfect, if your work is not getting up it must be shit”?

I didn't say the system is perfect, I literally wrote “we're working constantly to develop new ways of identifying” good work. And I didn't say work (by you or anyone) that doesn't make it to the front page is “shit”.

The question that matters is what is interesting to the HN audience.

Yes, you had some big hits on the front page, and we gave you plenty of support with that. It's also the case that after a while, your subsequent projects were minor variations on the same theme, and some members of the audience found them repetitive.

It's always the case that when an individual developer submits multiple variants of a similar concept, their exposure has to be reduced, because repetitiveness is bad for HN and also for the developer. We've often seen that developers who submit similar projects over and over get ignored or resented. It’s unclear which is worse, but neither is good.

Projects that are interesting, novel and offer some gem of insight for the audience to learn about will always have place on HN.

Of course we want to see “good work”; we're working constantly to develop new ways of identifying it. And the moderators are not going to down-weight work that is “good”; if we did that we'd be hurting HN and YC. Most of what it submitted to Show HN, we don't see, because so much is submitted that it's impossible to review it all.

What we are looking for is evidence of credibility, substance, depth and novelty, and it's actually not very hard to convey that if it exists; you just need to make make the effort to write a good post that tells the story of why and how you built the project and what you overcame and learned along the way.

If a project has already been on HN and has set off a flamewar, you don't get a better outcome by submitting the same project under a different URL the following week.

You take the feedback and think about how to improve the product or the messaging, then try again when it's changed enough to be worthy of another shot at the front page.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It would be much better to think about novel ways of overcoming the issue and sharing that in the spirit of curious conversation, which is the primary ethos of HN.

If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.

If you want to participate here, please read the guidelines and make an effort to contribute in a way that's consistent with HN’s intended spirit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

It's been a bit of a thing of mine for much of my life to notice likely bullshit in commonly-held beliefs, and to dig a little to understand what really happened or what was really said or meant.

And yes, I have always done this regardless of the political side, including in cases where there was uproar about things Trump supposedly said, including about the pandemic. (For the record, I'm not a U.S. citizen/voter, and I've voted for both sides of politics in the country where I am a citizen/voter, and my bullshit detector has been applied to both/all sides, including whichever one I was voting for.)

For the record, this is the comment that dang replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158222.

We don't ever delete anything from HN (except in rare cases where a user asks us to do so for privacy reasons). If we had deleted something as controversial/inflammatory as what you're claiming, it would easily be exposed; the HN API is public and many people ingest and store everything that is posted, so someone would have a record of it and could easily dig it up. That's aside from any cached copies in The Internet Archive, any screenshots of it, any tweets about it, etc. We never even consider trying to hide anything that's happened on HN, because it would so easily be exposed if we did. If something bad happens on HN, we own it and work to improve.

Edit:

The thread you must be referring to is this, in January 2024:

ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1401 comments)

This comment, which appears near the bottom of the thread, is from someone identifying as an IDF soldier and sharing their perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39147721. That user posted 9 comments in a thread with 1401 comments. Most of the replies to them were hostile but attracted no moderator action. Some of your replies attracted user flags and comments from dang due to breaking the guidelines. This is routine moderation. The guidelines apply, regardless of the topic; otherwise there would be no point having guidelines, and we'd never be able to have discussions about any difficult topics at all.

The main topic and the overwhelming majority of comments in the thread were critical of the IDF.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I characterize it as fulminating due to the use of capitalization (which is specifically against the guidelines), along with an overall belligerent tone.

It’s just not a cutthroat enough topic to get too insistent about. We can discuss these things in a conversational style, which is what HN is meant to be for.

Edit: I see from looking over your comments in the thread that you have a personal connection to ARPANET and Vint Cerf. That’s great and we sincerely appreciate you sharing your personal insights here. We just really want HN to be a place for curious conversation rather than belligerence, which is how your first reply came across. I can understand it may not have seemed that way to you when you wrote it and I’m sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding.

I originally took a cue from the Wikipedia page, which says, in the opening sentence, that he is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet”.

I’ve since tweaked the title again to be more ambiguous, but, honestly!

That is not a claim that he “created the Internet”. He, of anybody, knows that sponsoring legislation to enable the creation of a thing is not synonymous with personally creating the thing.

If he got anything wrong it was to be clumsy with words in a live interview. Who among us has not occasionally been clumsy with words in live conversation? That doesn’t license people to keep insisting we said a thing we didn’t actually say.

We’d love to see good jokes on HN, but they’re a precious rarity. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.)

I guess this one stings because I hate that HN is a place where our idea of a joke is mocking the work of a politician who really is credited by the pioneering technologists of the field to to have played a crucial role in enabling our industry to develop.