Comment by mike_hearn
5 months ago
I'd say that's the main thing. People hate ads, HN uses unobtrusive text ads. The moderation isn't that a competitive advantage, IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't. It's just a plain old up/down system with the added filip of a "super down" button, for those who are really committed to banning their opponents. I read with showdead turned on because perfectly reasonable comments are so often greyed out or dead. That used to happen much less on Slashdot because there were far fewer people with moderation rights and the bad ones got filtered out via metamod.
Maybe now it's been ported to Common Lisp it'll be easier to add features.
"HN uses unobtrusive text ads"
HN has ads? I've been on some 2011 and I have never seen them...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#jobads
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#yc
Although those aren't ads in the sense that people pay for them?
In terms of paid advertising I guess the whole of HN kind of advertises YC who fund it.
Also, self promotion in comments - often as "shameless plug" - like in any other platform that let you write public text:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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You didn't notice they were ads.
Never realized there were stories i couldn't comment.
Then again, Im not in CS so the job by boards posts are never interesting to me
Usually it's just "so and so is hiring" (not to be confused with the who wants to be hired threads) weaved in to look like just another submission
I always thought those were a feature. I figured they were paid recruitment, they also seemed to be relevant to most of the community here, win win!
They're the ones you can't comment on.
> "super down" button
The flag button?
> IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't.
Really? IIRC, Slashdot's moderation was garbage, remember penis-bird, GNAA, goatse?
You're talking about false negatives, not false positives. People have different tolerances for these kinds of errors.
But yes, I remember that to see that stuff you had to expand the down-modded comments.
That stuff was also a product of its time. Slashdot had the strong free speech ethos of the early internet, so CmdrTaco had a policy of never deleting comments unless they broke the site somehow or there was a legal process requiring it. Sometimes that meant very new stories would get these comments and they'd be visible before they got modded, but if you browsed stories that had been active for a little while you wouldn't see them.
One downside of a sophisticated moderation system on a site designed for programmers is that some people take it as a challenge. The reason Slashdot trolling was a bunch of dumb memes rather than e.g. commercial ads is because a lot of bored teenagers found spamming it a good way to learn web programming. The systematic nature of the moderation meant that it was a system to beat, a game to conquer. Hence the brief influx of "page widening posts" and other technical hacks. But I don't know if you'd see the same stuff today. The culture has changed, there are much better ways to learn programming and way more opportunities now. And you don't have to be fully automated. CmdrTaco had a strongly systems-oriented streak, but the problem on HN is hardly ever the actions of dang and the other paid moderators, it's really abuse of the overly simple system by other users that's a problem. You could have both good paid moderators and stricter controls on user moderation.
Turns out those GNAA guys are actually white supremacists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev
You just reminded me of the beautifully rendered, colored penisbird ascii art dipshits would spam on IRC lol
Most of that was downmodded and hidden by default though.