The dumb joke comment definitely resonates with me. Personally its the reason I stopped reading Reddit. I used to love it but now every comment thread is some self-referential inside joke. Or some other combination of “this” or “your mom” or something equally as stupid. Im glad there is a culture on here of downvoting those comments and keeping things fairly on topic.
This is something I'm really curious about. How can users tolerate this? that is, when you share anything or ask a question, someone immediately leaves a silly comment, but the strange thing is that users are very happy with it. I guess I will never understand this.
So you expect to "voice your opinion", but anyone who does not agree with you is not allowed to, otherwise they are "stupid" and doing you some kind of offense. Interesting.
The problem here is not Reddit or HN, nor those comments.
Reddit nowadays is uniquely fit for killing some 10 minutes while you wait for something. It's not useful for deep conversation, so people don't use it for that.
I sometimes wonder if all the puns and silly jokes on Reddit are legit. Comedy drives a lot of clicks, and to me it doesn't sound natural at all. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't know.
Using reddit can be made slightly more bearable if you're willing to build up a list of blocked keywords. I've got a vast list of subreddit, political terms, and annoying phrases in my block list that prevents those posts from appearing. It makes it a nicer experience.
Does the keyword blocking feature exist in Reddit's site? I am having a hard time finding it. Most of the search results are pointing towards Reddit Enhancement Suite.
I don't know if they offer that feature. I use reddit enhancement suite and mobile clients for the functionality (allows for filtering even if not signed in or don't have an account).
> Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly.
The kudzu comparison is excellent. If you've never been to the US South, kudzu is a vine that was brought in from Japan by the Works Progress Administration in 1935 to help control erosion. It sounded like a great idea, as it grows fast - really fast (up to 30cm a day, in the right conditions) and adds nitrogen to the soil. But it's essentially unstoppable and it will use existing plants to support itself and get access to sunlight, smothering them in the process. When the vines droop and touch the earth, they can start a new root system from there. The only way to control it is via goats, and there aren't a lot of goats in the South.
So if bad comments get a solid hold on your site, they can be really painful to remove. Like kudzu, they support themselves on legit comments. And will smother them if allowed to spread unchecked.
There is an ideology for web businesses based around the 0 cents customer model that starts to view accounts and their customers as worthless too. A lot of the web business model is that the cost of many customers is almost 0 cents so you push it to actually zero and then fund another way. But these companies also often adopt 0 value customer attitudes as well, viewing the cost of support and maintenance as an unnecessary annoyances and attempt to do it as cheap as possible and usually algorithmically.
There is little attempt by most web companies to try and raise the bar of discussion or promote it, only to do what they are legally required to do. A lot of them are desperately trying to police their platforms with algorithms (Google, Youtube, Facebook, Discord, Ebay) and throwing away legitimate customers all the time when they have been wrongly identified by the algorithm or reported by a nefarious organisation or individual. But because every account is effectively 0 cents to run they view the value of any individual customers as nothing as well, whether they pay the platform or not, as worthless. Customers don’t view their accounts like that, certainly Youtubers and social score sites especially those with bands of participation when they target legitimate customers in this way drive them away and build an ever increasing list of detractors. Everyone will one day get scammed on ebay, its their business model. Every one will have their account nuked on Google, facebook and discord because none of those companies value their customers accounts and never will. If you post content on youtube you will get copyright striked despite never actually copying someone elses work. In all cases you’ll find support worthless.
I haven't seen that attitude and philosophy on hacker news, maybe it exists and I am blissfully unaware of it but its definitely something Reddit and many other big sites are doing regularly. It is never quite the same thing, but the core attitude of accounts being worthless and throw away to the business but not the customer seems to be very common. Its a very inhuman way to treat your customers and I doubt it leads to a company that will last the test of time. There is no doubt it leads to massive profits sometimes however. Its also clearly not the only way to do things as Amazon has shown that good customer service can be a focus at web scale for all its other faults.
That's absolutely spot on. The fact that 'stuff is free' doesn't mean that you can have an attitude of 'well you got it for free, so you have no right to support or to complain'. And that attitude seems to be extremely pervasive. Even free users have rights, including the right of having support and not having the rug pulled out from under them in some bait-and-switch to give just two examples. Failure to understand this is a major problem for many of the large brands.
And if your business model does not work long term then don't start like that in the first place so that your external capital funded company doesn't ruin the world for the rest because that's a form of temporal unfair competition. But this is screaming into the wind: plenty of companies see these tricks as valid strategies because they are not technically illegal.
> I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN.
> Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.
Not explicitly covered in the Submissions section nor the Dilution sections is the trend toward more general and larger volumes of less tech-focused or leading-edge content. Perhaps it was not as noticeable in 2009.
The dumb joke comment definitely resonates with me. Personally its the reason I stopped reading Reddit. I used to love it but now every comment thread is some self-referential inside joke. Or some other combination of “this” or “your mom” or something equally as stupid. Im glad there is a culture on here of downvoting those comments and keeping things fairly on topic.
This is something I'm really curious about. How can users tolerate this? that is, when you share anything or ask a question, someone immediately leaves a silly comment, but the strange thing is that users are very happy with it. I guess I will never understand this.
Wild speculation but maybe the communities in which it happens see a lot of short-term members, for whom it is novel and interesting?
Because people like to smile and laugh?
And it's not like those are the only answers, how hard is it to ignore them?
> And it's not like those are the only answers, how hard is it to ignore them?
I mean exactly such comments. I have voiced my opinion and I have to see such stupid comments. interesting.
So you expect to "voice your opinion", but anyone who does not agree with you is not allowed to, otherwise they are "stupid" and doing you some kind of offense. Interesting.
The problem here is not Reddit or HN, nor those comments.
Reddit nowadays is uniquely fit for killing some 10 minutes while you wait for something. It's not useful for deep conversation, so people don't use it for that.
I sometimes wonder if all the puns and silly jokes on Reddit are legit. Comedy drives a lot of clicks, and to me it doesn't sound natural at all. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't know.
Using reddit can be made slightly more bearable if you're willing to build up a list of blocked keywords. I've got a vast list of subreddit, political terms, and annoying phrases in my block list that prevents those posts from appearing. It makes it a nicer experience.
Does the keyword blocking feature exist in Reddit's site? I am having a hard time finding it. Most of the search results are pointing towards Reddit Enhancement Suite.
I don't know if they offer that feature. I use reddit enhancement suite and mobile clients for the functionality (allows for filtering even if not signed in or don't have an account).
> Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly.
The kudzu comparison is excellent. If you've never been to the US South, kudzu is a vine that was brought in from Japan by the Works Progress Administration in 1935 to help control erosion. It sounded like a great idea, as it grows fast - really fast (up to 30cm a day, in the right conditions) and adds nitrogen to the soil. But it's essentially unstoppable and it will use existing plants to support itself and get access to sunlight, smothering them in the process. When the vines droop and touch the earth, they can start a new root system from there. The only way to control it is via goats, and there aren't a lot of goats in the South.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States
So if bad comments get a solid hold on your site, they can be really painful to remove. Like kudzu, they support themselves on legit comments. And will smother them if allowed to spread unchecked.
There is an ideology for web businesses based around the 0 cents customer model that starts to view accounts and their customers as worthless too. A lot of the web business model is that the cost of many customers is almost 0 cents so you push it to actually zero and then fund another way. But these companies also often adopt 0 value customer attitudes as well, viewing the cost of support and maintenance as an unnecessary annoyances and attempt to do it as cheap as possible and usually algorithmically.
There is little attempt by most web companies to try and raise the bar of discussion or promote it, only to do what they are legally required to do. A lot of them are desperately trying to police their platforms with algorithms (Google, Youtube, Facebook, Discord, Ebay) and throwing away legitimate customers all the time when they have been wrongly identified by the algorithm or reported by a nefarious organisation or individual. But because every account is effectively 0 cents to run they view the value of any individual customers as nothing as well, whether they pay the platform or not, as worthless. Customers don’t view their accounts like that, certainly Youtubers and social score sites especially those with bands of participation when they target legitimate customers in this way drive them away and build an ever increasing list of detractors. Everyone will one day get scammed on ebay, its their business model. Every one will have their account nuked on Google, facebook and discord because none of those companies value their customers accounts and never will. If you post content on youtube you will get copyright striked despite never actually copying someone elses work. In all cases you’ll find support worthless.
I haven't seen that attitude and philosophy on hacker news, maybe it exists and I am blissfully unaware of it but its definitely something Reddit and many other big sites are doing regularly. It is never quite the same thing, but the core attitude of accounts being worthless and throw away to the business but not the customer seems to be very common. Its a very inhuman way to treat your customers and I doubt it leads to a company that will last the test of time. There is no doubt it leads to massive profits sometimes however. Its also clearly not the only way to do things as Amazon has shown that good customer service can be a focus at web scale for all its other faults.
That's absolutely spot on. The fact that 'stuff is free' doesn't mean that you can have an attitude of 'well you got it for free, so you have no right to support or to complain'. And that attitude seems to be extremely pervasive. Even free users have rights, including the right of having support and not having the rug pulled out from under them in some bait-and-switch to give just two examples. Failure to understand this is a major problem for many of the large brands.
And if your business model does not work long term then don't start like that in the first place so that your external capital funded company doesn't ruin the world for the rest because that's a form of temporal unfair competition. But this is screaming into the wind: plenty of companies see these tricks as valid strategies because they are not technically illegal.
> I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN.
"Reading the Hackernews comments makes me lose a bit of faith in humanity."
— someone I forgot to warn about HN comments
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1389891571718443010
> Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.
Not explicitly covered in the Submissions section nor the Dilution sections is the trend toward more general and larger volumes of less tech-focused or leading-edge content. Perhaps it was not as noticeable in 2009.
HN sets itself up for this by giving interviews to non-technical media:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052
Guess it's hard to say 'no' when you have a business to promote.