[Edman274]

Sure, but you chose only the last panel as your witty rebuttal. Honestly, I don't think that the first panel is that off. If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that you're doing something that's a little hypocritical. People see the contradiction and then wonder how strong the conviction and argument is when the person making the contradiction is hidden.

You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?

Let's ask this:

1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?

2. If not, what would you change?

3. Do you use it?

4. Do you think that it should exist?

5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?

[brimble]

> If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that you're doing something that's a little hypocritical.

It's not, though? Else we are all constantly hypocrites in this regard. We may think the electoral system is broken and should be reformed, yet rarely vote for a candidate who supports that (because the current system provides few such candidates), et c. So calling it out seems pointless. We all deal with imperfect information and with the choices that the current system presents, but not others that might exist (or, rather, represent more-practical alternatives than they do now) instead, if the system were different. Prefacing criticism with public confessions when it's not very relevant is just a waste of space, and is stating the obvious.

> You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?

The "something" being improved would be worker protections, essentially. Publishing other people's stuff would probably require human review of it all. Given that AFAIK publishing houses aren't inundated with tsunamis of abusive content, I don't think that level of review is a problem in practice, as far as being abusive to the people doing the work—rather, it's the fact that abuse gets through with some regularity, that draws it in the first place. What's done now with review of user-posted online content clearly is hurting people, and it's the way certain businesses operate that are causing the problem.

If you asked me to draft legislation for this, I'd at least consider a carve-out for very small (low head count) operations. That's already super common in all kinds of business and, specifically, worker protection, regulations.

> 1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?

It doesn't seem to be a significant part of the problem, no, but I'd happily lose it in the name of reforming social media (=publishers with terribly lax submission and go-to-print standards) generally.

> 2. If not, what would you change?

Oh man. Nothing related to this, actually. Probably put in better poster-identity-tracking capabilities so it's easier to remember when you've already been down an unproductive garbage-thread with someone, or watched someone else do it (I do not have present company in mind here, to be clear) and over time people prone to creating those stop drawing replies at all and hopefully go away. There's a lot of inside-the-rules shitty posting that can't easily be user-policed right now, as it is on some other sites. I get the motivation behind weakening poster identity across threads, but I think it's beyond clear that it does more harm than good, now. Posters I read elsewhere today on HN, who were wondering how some subreddits can see HN as a cesspit: this is a big part of why.

The main downside is that meta-discussion about who's what kind of poster is low-value noise, but norms around here do an OK job of policing worse than that (provided the content being policed follows a clear pattern), so I think it'd work out OK. Just allowing personal tags for users, maybe with color-coding (visible only to the tagger) for posts, would go a long way. Some kind of hide-user functionality might help too, though it'd take some thought to make it work OK with HN's threading. Probably have to hide entire sub-trees they're at the root of, but I've definitely seen users for whom doing that would strictly improve my reading experience and I wouldn't miss a thing worth reading.

> 3. Do you use it?

LOL.

> 4. Do you think that it should exist?

Again, I'm not sure the entire category of thing is, fundamentally, not a crazy thing to bring into the world. It's like having an open email relay then trying to police messages passing through. Clearly insane. But, also again, most of the harm seems to kick in at scale. So, I dunno, maybe.

> 5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?

Chiefly in size. Fewer users, fewer employees, way less visual or auditory media to evaluate as a percentage of posts (I'm counting links, or it'd be zero). Arguments in favor of one and not the other are purely the practical sort—what's doing harm in practice, and how do you narrow in on that as specifically as possible—not the iron-clad-pure-reason sort; but, again, that's a pretty common approach with this kind of thing, for good reason.