Comment by WestCoastJustin
12 years ago
I do not think anyone will disagree with you, but what do we do about it? If you look through PG's comment history, you will see that it is indeed on his radar [1, 2], and as recently as a last couple months.
12 years ago
I do not think anyone will disagree with you, but what do we do about it? If you look through PG's comment history, you will see that it is indeed on his radar [1, 2], and as recently as a last couple months.
Hacker news has never been 100% technical; part of why I'm here (and involved in the Hacker Dojo) is to hang out with those skinny-jean wearing hipsters who have, you know, social and business skills, as well as some technical skill. Broadens my mind, you know? but the thing is, there is something of a filter there; you need to be 'this technical' to enter, as it were.
How do you enforce this? I don't know. It seems to be... subtly enforced in person. How do you enforce it on a website?
I think we have a broader problem with politics; There are many people that I have a lot of respect for technically, who have political ideas I can only describe as 'kooky' - I mean, that's okay, but I don't really want to hear about it, you know? I /really/ don't want to get sucked into that discussion.
I am just as susceptible to the siren song of a political discussion as anyone else; I often find myself writing two-page rants, only to save myself at the last minute by hitting the delete button.
But this might be part of how this is enforced in person. In person, well, the level of vitriol that political discussions have is just not acceptable.
First time I've heard of hipsters "broadening" someone's mind.
Eh, I mean hanging out with business people who seem like they are at least partly human (and some of them technically admirable) is a good experience for me. It helps remove some of my more self-destructive prejudices.
How about a designated "policy" section, up there with "ask" and "jobs"?
It might be nice place to discuss the legal ecosystem for startups, too.
A noble thought, but given the way TechCrunch, et al. scour the site for something, anything to blow out of proportion, a policy section could be asking for trouble. Nothing worse than bloggers conflating your personal politics with would-be thought-leaders whose endowment of idle time is surely coincidental.
I think someone was working on an extension that filtered out stories with certain keywords.
To tackle it on the user rather than keyword level, I'd personally use a highlight/killfile extension for users, if one were available and didn't break things. Add some kind of highlight around the comments of users who are listed in the highlight file, and just remove the comments (and associated sub-thread) posted by users in the killfile.
At the moment I think I would highlight 10 users and killfile 2, and I think both moves would improve my HN experience.