(1) an initial wave of objections to the article;

(2) a second wave of objections to the objections;

(3) those get upvoted, so that

(4) the most popular comment becomes the one about how the site is so negative, all people do is complain, etc., producing

(5) irony!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If you study this phenomenon, it becomes clear that the difference between (1) and (2) is not negativity, just timing. And the upvotes of (3) are negative in the same way. Negativity about negativity is not positive. It's an idempotent operation.

(Edit: I hope it's clear that I don't mean to pick on you or anyone else personally! This is a systemic problem that we're all part of—that's kind of the whole point actually.)

If we want a solution to the ambient negativity that can afflict HN threads—which we do—we need to tackle it a little more deeply. We all need to become aware of how the same negativity that we perceive in others exists in ourselves, and without cheap avoidances like "well, the others do it worse". It always seems like others do it worse; everyone experiences that. It is the chief way we avoid looking at ourselves.

If we admit that we're all just mirroring our own denied negativity to each other, we can start taking steps to a solution. Not that we'd never be negative any more—but maybe we can get less mechanical in our responses if we learn something about how the mechanism works in ourselves. Denouncing it in others doesn't work—that's how the problem recreates itself: all this disowned negativity keeps circulating through the system, when what's needed is for people to work with it internally so that it can start to shift a little.

That's why the site guidelines now include this line: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." – as a baby step in that direction. The HN community has been around for long enough that I think we can take this as a task to work on together. It would be a big step towards optimizing this place for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is what we're all here for.

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

I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic).

We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Without introducing more UI/UX it could then work like this: On-topic comments would go first, then side/generic comments and then down-voted comments. Side-vote would be a little like down-vote, but side-votes would count against other side-voted comments.

As always it would go down to many checks and balances. So it it easier to say then do.

Your manual intervention as you describe is often visible and welcome.

edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven signals to automatically partition or downweight subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in existing moderation actions and how they might extrapolate.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff.

Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways.

This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.

A lot of the "meta" is useful to me.

I come here for the comments, and like all the comments, even most of the silenced blurry ones.

Sometimes it sounds like a echo chamber, but I like the diversity of this crowd.

I think most of the regulars here realize HN has some strong rules. A bit too strong for myself, so I refrain from saying what I really feel.

I think most of us know the culture at Hacker News. Would I like to see the boundaries expanded--yes, but I understand most of you are afraid of this site becoming Reddit, and so am I.

A bunch of niceties over a article, or controversial subject, is not helpful to me.

(More meta coming up. Does anyone know the exact source code to HN. I've seen the old source code at Git. I'm looking for something current. I want to learn Lisp, and programming a site I like would be nice. Or, is there another language better suited (I guess more libraries) that would be a better fit for a HN clone?)

Maybe @dang is right that the negativity actually results from both popularity and timing of comments. That's an intriguing hypothesis. It wouldn't be right to kill the popularity of HN, but maybe there's some way to fix the timing or visibility of comments. I hope that doesn't mean a complicated moderation system. Maybe a new algorithm could help.

The right thing to do is to downvote it. If you can't downvote comments yet, well, they'll usually get downvoted by others soon enough. IMO, the nice thing about HN is that for all that it's imperfect, compared to most of the internet the community moderation (and official moderation) works very well!

There are also comments that are perhaps not exactly related to the story, but are adjacent enough to be on-topic or arise naturally from conversation. It's natural for conversations to move between topics, and many of these discussions are super interesting!

Can there be comments which are legitimate but nevertheless also predictable, unthoughtful, unsubstantive? Sure there can. We don't need those here. They don't affect threads in a good way.

Can there be comments which are illegitimate, but nevertheless manage to be thoughtful/substantive/unpredictable? Surely this must also be possible. Such comments could well make for interesting conversation, in which case they'd be fine.

There's no rule requiring commenters to be right (which is handy, since to a first approximation we're all wrong about everything and rarely have any idea what we're talking about—this is what they used to call "the human condition"). When people approach conversation with a strong need to be right, that doesn't lead to curious conversation, it leads to the situation in the famous xkcd classic.

I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter and certainly not that people should just bullshit. Bullshit is a lot less interesting and more predictable than it assumes it is. I'm saying that an open-minded, exploratory, conversational way of looking for the truth yields best results here, and trying to categorize things as legitimate vs. illegitimate isn't in that spirit. As for "legitimate denouncements", god help us, that covers every denouncement ever made, as far as the denouncer was concerned.

I noticed on twitter that the culture (at least in my bubble) valued „smartness“ over empathy. In attempt to say something „smart“ it lead to many snarky responses.

I also noticed this pattern in myself, which is why I stopped replying to tweets. (It was easier for me to stop replying than stopping to reply in a snarky way).

For twitter I think this is not only a question of community, but also a question of design (ui/ux). And how the ui/ux shapes the community.

If I ran HN, I would consider if there are any (small) UX changes in the comment flow that could improve the „well, actually“/contrarian metric.

But based on your comment, you either: a) were inspired by the post itself and decided to have a little fun roasting this comment; or b) need to take a vacation.

It's not how to generate spam, robocalls, improve your targeted facebook ads or some other form of active marketing - it's about making your passive marketing message more effective.

I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products? As with all things moderation is key and this guy is focusing on the most neutral kind of marketing out there!

Because 99% of marketing is bad.

Only like...80% of marketing is bad.

All marketing is inherently untrustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers. At best you get language that emphasizes upsides while downplaying downsides.

There's a reason people search forums like reddit when they need real product reviews: marketing simply cannot be trusted.

> Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products?

Word of mouth.

Absolutely not, unless your business model relies on single sales.

In functioning organizations with actual products, marketing and sales are advocacy functions for the customer as much as they are revenue functions for the business. They're how you know what to make and who to target.

The statement wasn't about whether the product is actually good or not, though in extreme cases, yes, the product is worthless while the marketing is all rainbows and sunshine. But relying on marketing is bad for the user in nearly every case, even if the product is good.

And even if you are "one of the good guys", your users won't know that. That's why you should verify from independent sources, or do your own research.

If marketing was really a reliable source of information, reviews, samples, product trials etc. wouldn't be a thing.

People should assume all marketing is incomplete or untrustworthy information at best.

In as big a font / for as long and loudly as the supposed benefits? As prominently towards the top of the page / the beginning of the clip?

Let me guess: Hardly, right?

> What market are you seeing unregulated drug marketing in?

It's not a matter of regulated vs unregulated, it's a matter of how close to ignoring the regulations one can skate. And of lobbying the regulators enough to get very-skatable regulations... In what market are you seeing marketing regulations (for drugs or any other product / service) that cover length and prominence as per my first paragraph above?

> Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/05/13/ads-are-im...

Yet another example.

I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing. It took years for users to spread the word to any significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have never even heard of us...

Is slow growth not fine? I think organic growth is healthier for society. All this explosive never ending economic growth we see today seems pathological to me.

> Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion?

Those first users are presumed to be close to the person who made the product. People trust their friends. They'll tell other people about it if they liked it.

> my reverse image search service SauceNAO

Thank you for making SauceNAO. I first saw it on image boards, it's a well-integrated feature of those sites.

I'm not sure if you have a business model so I can't tell if advertising would present conflicts of interest.

I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality than to start altering the product to turn customers into salesfolks.

It's less trustworthy. A simple example of trustworthy form of communication is instant messaging with people I know. I have friends who are knowledgeable about all kinds of subjects and I absolutely trust them several orders of magnitude more than any random marketing material out there. If a friend tells me they had a great experience with some product or service, I believe them.

Probably the 'roasting' part reminded me of bikeshedding / every yokel with their own advice that occurs surrounding a font or button color or something .... that's kinda a horrible peeve for a lot of folks and came to mind for me.

But the article and ideas seems sensible.

Landing pages are hard, I think there's a lot of magic and weird theory out there on them. I did enjoy how focused and down to earth this article / his advice was.

Anyone who felt similarly I suggest giving the article a read, it's pretty good IMO. Probably not going to turn a landing page into a customer magnet but nothing really does that and I think the advice is good / I find it useful.

I very much would have ignored it on Twitter ;)

Glad I did not here.

In any case even though I could have done without the repeated revenue stats being thrown around I think its great this guy made the extra effort to consolidate his observations and conclusions as an open resource. What more can we all do as members of this community?

That said after reading the article and a lot of the comments I did find myself wondering, if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds? And is that even something we'd want?

This is not what the OP is suggesting. He's paraphrasing a well-established usability guideline [1] to use text that has a readability score of 5th grade or lower, because people are in a hurry and they don't read text on the web, they scan it. Using more complex sentence structures in this context only leads to misreadings and misunderstandings.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/

(I am assuming that no-one thinks that Japanese consumers read security filings before making their weekly shop?)

dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented

This is the ideal dream state you send your students to absorb? A bunch of terminal-users obsessed with building everything in the terminal? Why indoctrinate your students into that?

Note: Reading over the above I realize it sounds antagonistic, probably because I formed everything as a question. I don't mean it to be antagonistic. It's just me not understanding where you're coming from.

if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds

Yeah, maybe. But... I'm not sure if you want my dad to be part of your idealized future, but if you do, the terminal is not going to be the way to do it

I'm all for finding ways to empower users, but how does that lead to you getting off the train at no GUIs, instead of better GUIs?

MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.

Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

> Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

For me it was newsgroups. (Sure, I read them in a Windows-based Usenet reader, but it was the contents that were addictive, and that was all text.)

s/planet/www/;s/HN/& commenters/;s/its/their/

This is funny because I have always had a dream about ordering from the command line, instead of fiddling with HTML forms in web pages in graphical web browsers. Then we users could more easily automate purchases.

In the dream, order details are in the HTTP headers. There is a standard for collecting user order information that all sites follow.

HTTP headers can be an efficient way to convey information. Consider a (failed) proposal like the DNT header. Instead of being able to manipulate a user into giving "consent" via ever more "creative" web forms, popups, etc., the question, "Do you want tracking?" is standardardised. There are only two answers: "yes" or "no". The answer can be automated by the user. Progress!

Then I wake up. We remain stuck with HTML forms of infinite variability.

Also, the word "snobby" is interesting. Much like that word "elite" that has become "weaponised" in today's online (and offline) discourse. Neal Stephenson compared Linux to a free tank and MacOS to a European luxury car. Wouldn't the "snobs" be the ones using an "elite" interface like the one offered by Apple.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...

Hahaha! Congrats, I actually chuckled.

Technically though, I don't think there's anything that by default is purchasable via CLI. But, yes, that's why it's funny.

amzn buy --ship fedex --address home "micro usb 6' cable"

The hooks for Amazon Dash are likely closed as it was phased out a year after start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash

Though, it can be done through Alexa.

There's this :

https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli

But I have no idea what a bamazon database is.

Personally I don't think I'd ever want to build a product on top of a huge company's product. That way lies madness.

    grep "features" | sort price

... Unironically, that would be amazing. Maybe an optional page for pictures/screenshots, but otherwise I don't see a problem with that if your audience is compatible. I mean, I don't expect everyone to go that way, but if I never had to leave my terminal I'd count it an improvement.

/s

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

Let's hope that HN is around for the rest of our lives because it will probably take at least that long.

Edit: I pinched this comment for a long explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616

I genuinely wonder whether there was a time when the majority here were actually entrepreneurial, even in the early days