Comment by dredmorbius
2 years ago
As always, thanks for your response, dang.
My principle concern here is with transparency and fairness. I'll argue that HN is reasonably good about the latter. For the former, though, there's some pretty serious spelunking that's required to determine practices and policies. The task isn't impossible, you've written numerous times on why shorter and more flexible guidelines are preferable to long and strict ones. And I often (though sometimes grudgingly) come to understand, if not necessarily accept, your position.
I'm well aware of the recent flood of Reddit submissions, and I've made the point myself a couple of times in the past weeks: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687485600&dateRange=custom&...> Still high, but not quite so overwhelming as your points>50 threshold. It's also well above the number of stories which have made the front-page archive for 2023 to date.
It would be interesting to compare specific keywords which either don't appear on the front page, with high votes, or which do appear on the front page but with low votes. That's not trivial to accomplish presently.
> There was a suggestion a few months ago for HN to feature a dedicated "customer-service-of-last-resort" section. I'd like to see that developed further.
I'm afraid I must disappoint you. We're never going to do that, because (1) it would go against what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (2) we don't want to run a customer support forum for other people's products. That would be a circle of hell, and not an outer one.
Re "highly significant" discussions - this is an internet message board. The genre is transient and trivial, and as we know from McLuhan, that factor dominates any of the content channeling through it. That's why when people try to do "highly significant" things in internet threads, it always comes across as overblown and overwrought.