Comment by embedding-shape
6 days ago
Thanks for a lot of references!
One comment stands out to me:
> Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is already handling this issue pretty well.
I guess me raising this question is because it feels maybe slightly off that people can't really know about this unwritten rule until they break it or see someone else break it and people tell them why. It is true that the community seems to handle it with downvotes, but it might not be clear enough why something gets downvoted, people can't see the intent. And it also seems like an inefficient way of communicating community norms, by telling users about them once they've broken them.
Being upfront with what rules and norms to follow, like the guidelines already do for most things, feels more honest and welcoming for others to join in on discussions.
The rules are written; they're just not all in that one document. The balance HN strikes here is something Dan has worked out over a very long time. There's at least two problems with arbitrarily fleshing out the guidelines ("promoting" "case law" to "statutes", as it were):
* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).
* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.
Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.
> Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
God I hate this. And it cuts across society, not just on HN or among nerds. Something like 10% or so of the people I interact with seem to just rules-lawyer their way through life as a default. "Well... as you can see in the rule book, section 5, paragraph 3, the rule clearly says we shouldn't do X, but it doesn't say we mustn't do X, so I'm clearly allowed to do X." Insufferable.
It's human nature, I think? But also: the way HN addresses this is kind of elegant, and it emerged partially in response to that constraint, which is kind of neat.
That's why my favorite rule for anything and everything* (online or offline) is "Don't be an asshole". If someone starts arguing against it, they're pretty much saying they're an asshole.
*Not applicable to Nations or States, or any place where people aren't free to come and go as they please.