Comment by abtinf
3 days ago
Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines.
99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture.
Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.
I mostly agree, although we've seen big shifts in the culture towards rule-deviating norms over time. Look at the guidelines for ideological battles or throwaway accounts, for example. And, as always:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
This is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree
That’s true. Fortunately, by virtue of it being added to the guidelines, quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule. Just search for “shallow dismissal” to see many examples.
It will take time, but eventually everyone will know about it.
> quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule
Note that the guidelines do explicitly say not to post about guidelines violations in comments, and to email them instead. I know this isn’t a well-loved guideline in this modern era, but duly noted: those well-intended comments are themselves breaking the guidelines.
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What constitutes “at edited”. If I throw a block of text in to an ai see if it makes sense — say a response to a post — and fold the suggestions in, is that “ai edited”?
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Sadly, I suspect the rate of generation of AI "everyones" vastly exceeds the community's capacity to teach culture.
Nah they are pretty good a banning users that don't follow the guidelines.
Yes, and it’s not like they just insta-ban every infraction.
I’ve broken the guidelines on this site before. The mods reply and say “hey, stop doing that, here is the guideline”. I stopped doing it. Life continues.
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One of the virtues of HN is polite prodding when the rules are broken.
That's assuming community input / democracy, but especially online there's a good argument to be made for authoritarianism.
When creating an account, there should be a short screen with the salient points from the guidelines to follow.
That will just prompt someone to create a HN account creation agent and post it to Moltbook.
This https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
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This discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.