Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
2 days ago (hackersmacker.org)
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).
Main website: https://hackersmacker.org
Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...
The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.
I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.
Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.
Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.
Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker
Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!
I’d encourage a change of labels away from “friend/foe”. It may seem minor but the subtle loaded nature of those paired terms encourages an adversarial stance rather than one of productive discourse. It’s not catchy so there’s probably better than this but, just as an example— “engage/ignore” could better signal to the user a neutral “do I want to bother with this person?”
That would imply a slightly different semantics than what the extension currently provides, though.
If you truly want certain users to be "ignored", then you probably want any of their comments (and the subtree of descendant comments) to be hidden/collapsed/made less legible, so that you don't accidentally read them, and thereby don't accidentally get rage-baited by them into wasting your day arguing with them. Same as e.g. kill files on Usenet.
Given that this comment collapsing/hiding/visibility-decreasing is something already built into HN (for comments/subtrees with strongly-negative score), it'd be really easy for the extension to hijack this functionality for its own purposes... if it actually wanted the red button to mean "ignore".
That the extension doesn't do that, implies to me that the extensions intended semantics for "foes" isn't "I don't want to engage with this person" but rather "I want to notice this person more." Perhaps "so that I can take the opportunity to actively antagonize them / argue with everything they say."
(I'm not saying that this is a good thing; just that insofar as "the purpose of a system is what it does", this is the purpose of a plain "foe" signal!)
Agreed, independent of where the terminology came from, I think if you're trying to promote healthier engagement both for yourself and others using this extension, then not having such adversarial names it's probably a good idea. It should just end up being a sort of web of trust to help you decide what's worth engaging with — and sometimes perfectly valid people that you're not actually enemies with or anything just aren't worth your time engaging with because of fundamental axiological or positional differences.
That's just Slashdot's influence. They did the same thing at some point.
Ah, okay-- though that doesn't mean the author can't do better, if I'm not just being too nitpicky.
4 replies →
I've wanted something like this for a long time and also thought of the slashdot system. This is directly from that.
Bring back hot or not!
favorite / potato
Although there are some commenters I would want to follow because they are potato.
There is something so magical about some of the more delulu Take Havers around here.
potato / tomato?
As a boomer, I had fun trying to decode your last sentence!
I like friend and foe far more than engage and ignore. A foe isnt someone you ignore. Ignoring is what builds bubbles. A foe can often be right even if you disagree.
A foe is also someone you might preemptively punch in the face if they get too close before you could determine if they actually meant you harm right then.
I'd prefer not to label things such that I'm justifying the label's negative potential by the disproportionately small "even if" range of positive ones.
1 reply →
People I want to ignore I usually disagree with as well, but that's not the problem: the problem is they are repetitive and boring.
2 replies →
That's such a friend thing to say!
Follow/Distance?
Ahh, I have you green orbed, and I recognize your username from NB. The system works!
Arian/Non-Arian
I'd suggest to move even beyond "engage/ignore".
This is HN. The focus should be "does this person provide interesting or thought provoking comments", not "relationships" or "engagement".
There are plenty of HN commenters whose opinions I absolutely dislike (I'm sure it's mutual ;), but I still read them - they are at least well reasoned or point out missing facts. I don't have to like them to learn from them.
I'm color blind, and those colors look very similar to me. I could not tell if it was green or red or something else. Please use something like blue and red.
There's na open issue to address this exact need. I haven't figured out a good compromise yet, but an option to include symbols would be good.
https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/issues/3
I wonder what the second order effects of this on the HN karma system will be. It'll create a graph of karmic supernodes perhaps. Say I green-blob someone with a big reputation here, say jacquesm; no doubt lots of other people will do the same. The friends-of-friends icon is going to appear widely but it'll all be a single edge away from Jacques' node. Is that much of a signal? I dunno. That's 30 seconds of thought about it. It's a fun idea though so I'll try it.
Version two: hide foes? Come to think of it, maybe the 'foe' aspect is the fun part...
EDIT: it's like I summoned him.
> I wonder what the second order effects of this on the HN karma system will be
My first thought was this replacement of the HN karma system would make it a lot like FB and Xitter - a collection of disjoint echo chambers. My second thought was the same, then I stopped thinking about it.
everybody loves jacquesm
Pagerank
> Version two: hide foes?
That's a good idea.
Here's my bad idea: the extension auto downvotes foes and auto upvotes friends. :)
automations get your account in trouble, it's against the rules
Thanks to the HN moderators for re-posting this after I posted this a few days ago. I only notice now that it's on the front page.
Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.
I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.
I've been testing it out for a bit, unfortunately the layout shift when all the icons load in is very distracting.
The layout doesn't shift down. It only moves the meta information to the right of the user name over a little bit.
I created and shared Ethos which is a sentiment and discourse analysis thing for HN and it's been plugging away. You're welcome to use its API if you want. Submit a PR for the CORS to be changed as needed.
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774
I wish there was a way for HN to sponsor scale up so that sites have more availability for the HN hug of death
Related, there is already an extension that allows selected users to be highlighted, but without the shared server data for computing friend-of-a-friend relationships:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598
How would two neutral labels sound? There's something somewhat confrontational about "friend/foe" and those dynamics seem to worsen discussion. At the least, it should auto hide "foes", since predisposing people to be against a comment before reading it isn't ideal. Neutral labels, like "apple/orange", with slight connotations could be interesting. Of course, this kills networks, but I'd question if that's even a good idea in the first place.
502 Bad Gateway
Oh man, I had no idea this got reposted and I just discovered now, 8 hours later. Anyway, I kicked the server and its back up.
Same here. Thought it was my firewall at first. Thanks for confirming.
HN's hug of death
hacker smacker smacked down
HN smacked
I would prefer to do the opposite, where everything is displayed in chronological order (with an option to display by threads or not; even if not you can still find what each one is a reply to) regardless of voting and regardless of who wrote them.
A lot of discussion on the labels. I agree friend/foe is counter to what most of us would like HN to be about. How about align/diverge or similar, suggesting whether a commenters position usually reinforces or challenges your viewpoint?
I have a text file of commentors I normally disagree with and check in on them from time to time (about weekly). Its good fun and often I find there will be topics I do agree with them on. Reading the same opinions all the time is no fun.
A question, per your final comment on being available to answer questions:
What do you feel is the benefit to the community for this that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions?
I ask not out of malice, I ask because 2 reasons: 1. I imagine spending time on this/it's working well required you to see the value/benefit to it. 2. We must assume all hacker news commenting follows the rules, IE; good faith comment with relevant experience when required. This seems like a way to promote getting around that.
The reason I have this extension is because I don't want to hide those comments. I want to be able to read them when I quickly scroll a thread. Oftentimes, I'm reading so many Hacker News threads that I want to be able to pull out the commenters that I like. I even like reading the comments from commenters that I dislike in the hopes that I see if I still disagree with them.
I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
> that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions
There is no “native blocking” on HN. You cannot block a user or hide their comments and submissions in perpetuity. You can only hide on a per-story basis.
Interesting. I'd love to have a browser extension that automatically blocks all comment sections on every site I visit, so I wouldn't feel the need to interact with anyone online.
Lol, I had a self-extension for a short while like that https://github.com/roshan/hnncnn/blob/master/hnncnn.js
But now I prefer blocking and favouriting people https://overmod.org/
There are good commenters here. Just overshadowed by lots of garbage.
14 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991435
As opposed to OP's extension, I would heartily recommend this one.
14 days ago exactly this was submitted to HN: https://rickyromero.com/shutup/
It sounds great, except I am getting 502 Bad Gateway when following the URL. I think the site went down.
https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/blob/main/web/im...
How old is that icon set? I swear I used that same peppers icon for a Windows app that I published around 2002.
At least 15 years, if the git history is to be believed.
That's absolutely correct. I started programming at eight in 1993, so I have a soft spot for those types of icons.
I just keep a custom stylesheet that annotates usernames with various emoji. Most of the time I update it as I read, but occasionally I’ll peruse the hidden comments to note e.g. uncharitable participation and revealed bigotry.
Funny; I wrote a greasemonkey script to be able to highlight certain commenters here, but didn't even once consider adding a "networked" element to it.
Way down on my list of projects to vibe code is tags for HN users. I.e `Elon Stan` , `smart about aeronautics` , `grumpy` , `reasonable` etc etc. I like reading different opinion but if I formed an opinion about a user id like to record that without using my brain
Getting a 502 bad gateway error when I try to access the main website as an FYI.
Installed! Lets see how this goes. I'm going through previous interactions I've had with people.
Hmm, I installed this in Waterfox for Android, and I don't appear to be able to tap on the bubbles next to people's usernames
I used https://github.com/ToneyAlexander/HackerTagger for a bit almost a decade ago. Data locally stored, good but didn't transfer across machines, not so great.
It had a little text label next to names so you could manually add whatever you want. Recently I've thought about this extension and using it to tag the LLM users, or the humans who tend to pop up to fan the flames or who regularly post thought terminating comments - little tags to remind me to ignore the bots and trolls.
It'd be interesting to run pagerank over the trust graph
Getting a 502!
Oh no… hugged to death!
this seems like it would increase tribalism and polarization
Indeed. Why engage with ideas on the merits when you can color (literally) your own opinion of them before even reading.
I guess if you just prefer wearing horse blinders?
There's nothing about this that's horse blinders. It's literally a way to highlight riders that you both agree and disagree with. It actually makes it more likely that you're going to engage with the ones you disagree with, because now they have a red orb.
That's weird, I'm reading HN every day and never felt a need for something like that. In my experience, the quality of comments is very high and really bad ones tend to be downvoted or flagged fast. Could this be a time zone issue such that people in certain time zones are less fortunate than others?
"Less fortunate" is a generous wording and framing.
Another step towards the Redditification of hackernews. This is the exact opposite kind of functionality pages like HN need, we need ways to get people to engage with others' ideas more substantively rather than literally put someone on the "bad guy I won't talk to list".
people seem to prefer only reading things from people they agree with
matthew 5:47
wish this idea was more prevalent in modern politics !
what about privacy?
It would appear that friend/foe lists are entirely public (the latter feels a bit rude)
Poof!
What’s the purpose? More echo chambers and circle jerking parties?! Why some people are so inclined to label others? I might dislike someone’s comment on something or disagree with their opinion about it, but absolutely love their comments on another topic. And if that is an “overall” score for a person’s comments, then who are you to hijack my personality and tell me this person is good or not to engage with? Unless it’s just a joke, the concept is stupid.
[flagged]
Finally someone brings this place the explicit toxicity it had been missing all those years. /s
If you're on HN and you look in the comments and can't tell who the toxic one is, it's you.
I believe the argument is that introducing personal aspects like this friend foe business inherently serves to increase argumentative bias and reduce quality of discussion. personally this seems like a slop project either way , so regardless as to how beneficial it could be, I'm still going to behave toxically towards it - if you really love or hate someone so much , you would have memorized their name already !
I would suggest categorizing the quality of comments by its content and not its creator. Oh, nevermind, that’s a silly thought.
Challenge my core belief? Well… I could rationally evaluate that, or, I could just use a tool to block it from my vision! Bubble thickener.
There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...
Also, many comments just take a wrong premise and attack you (e.g. that not wanting the slaughter of innocent people equals supporting terrorists who want to slaughter innocent people). They don't offer anything more than that, so that IMO taking the time to consider their mostly one-note opinion is just wasting said time.
> There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...
As moderators we can only judge comments according to the guidelines, and can only ban accounts if they repeatedly breach them. You're always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about an account that has been continually breaching the guidelines.
4 replies →
I have emailed HN before when I spot really terrible things and they have been quick to effect change.
There are enough bad-faith commenters on HN that I personally would find this very useful.
asking this out of curiosity due to recent reflection on similar - what's stopping us simply not responding to those arguing in bad faith ?