It's harder to keep track of diYsj5;£ and diYaba36£- versus benj111 and ctack.
I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works. We can identify people but they don't have a karma score over their head. Annonymising everything would be breaking that. It might work sure. But it feels like changing something that already works.
There are ways to generate unique identifiers besides random strings. Many sites generate them based on words rather than characters. And given how few unique commenters there likely are in any thread, even if they were random strings they wouldn't need to be very long. Three characters would be sufficient for most cases.
Plus, in a threaded forum, you're always replying either as a child to one specific commenter or to the main thread anyway, which adds greater context. IDs could be generated locally for each user and applied only to other users commenting to them. The site could even highlight which comments belong to which users. There are multiple ways this can be done.
>I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works.
It doesn't, and it isn't intended to. Normal human discourse is noisy, repetitive and emotive, and isn't graded on quality, brevity and uniqueness as it is here. The goal here is signal over noise. Identity is noise most of the time, so it should be eliminated, or at least reduced as much as possible.
>But it feels like changing something that already works.
Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. Hacker News isn't perfect. Given the amount of effort put into minimizing the UI here, reducing contrast and the number of links on a page, all in the service of minimizing distraction from the information itself, why not also eliminate usernames? What value does the specific string "krapp" bring to this conversation? or "benj111?" None, beyond providing a link to a profile which is empty more often than not, and a way to keep track of identifiers. None of that requires specific identities.
> Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon.
True. It only implies that it could be broken.
You may not see the value in usernames, but that doesn't mean there is none. It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: if you do not understand the value of something for its users, don't mess with it.
Is that really a problem that needs solving? Right now, you see the user name only if you want to, it works fine.
True, but then you get random character strings.
It's harder to keep track of diYsj5;£ and diYaba36£- versus benj111 and ctack.
I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works. We can identify people but they don't have a karma score over their head. Annonymising everything would be breaking that. It might work sure. But it feels like changing something that already works.
There are ways to generate unique identifiers besides random strings. Many sites generate them based on words rather than characters. And given how few unique commenters there likely are in any thread, even if they were random strings they wouldn't need to be very long. Three characters would be sufficient for most cases.
Plus, in a threaded forum, you're always replying either as a child to one specific commenter or to the main thread anyway, which adds greater context. IDs could be generated locally for each user and applied only to other users commenting to them. The site could even highlight which comments belong to which users. There are multiple ways this can be done.
>I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works.
It doesn't, and it isn't intended to. Normal human discourse is noisy, repetitive and emotive, and isn't graded on quality, brevity and uniqueness as it is here. The goal here is signal over noise. Identity is noise most of the time, so it should be eliminated, or at least reduced as much as possible.
>But it feels like changing something that already works.
Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. Hacker News isn't perfect. Given the amount of effort put into minimizing the UI here, reducing contrast and the number of links on a page, all in the service of minimizing distraction from the information itself, why not also eliminate usernames? What value does the specific string "krapp" bring to this conversation? or "benj111?" None, beyond providing a link to a profile which is empty more often than not, and a way to keep track of identifiers. None of that requires specific identities.
> Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon.
True. It only implies that it could be broken.
You may not see the value in usernames, but that doesn't mean there is none. It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: if you do not understand the value of something for its users, don't mess with it.
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