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by goostavos
1633 days ago
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I've had "automatic top dismissive HN comment" on my list of project ideas for at least 7 years ^_^ FWIW, I actually feel like it used to be much worse than it is today. At one point, it felt like it was practically a meme that the top post would be someone poo-pooing whatever was being discussed / shared. Maybe I've just become purposefully blind to the negativity or something, but I feel like I see a lot more interesting comments at the top these days. |
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It's not that those comments are necessarily bad—it's rather that those categories of comment reliably attract lots of upvotes for reasons other than intellectual curiosity. It's not in HN's interest to have them at the top of a thread, because their tendency to attract upvotes creates a feedback loop that the system can't break itself out of. They just sit there, accruing ever more mass and choking out more interesting conversation.
The solution is to have moderation (and to some extent software) carry out a countervailing function. That's basically what moderation is for, anyhow—to jig the system out of its default failure modes.
I was just writing about this here, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29788303
(Someone observant might ask why we didn't do that to this very subthread, i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781971, which is still at the top of the page. The answer is that the rest of the thread wasn't that great in this case. Had there been lots of curious conversation going on elsewhere on the page, we'd have downweighted the generic/meta subthread. It's still helpful to let those run sometimes, though, as a kind of valve for community self-reflection—we just want that to happen in places where it isn't choking out something better.)