HN can make up whatever rules they want to in order to attempt to have a normal forum community. I will not dispute that.
However, the following things about this rule make it a hostile community to me:
1. To be an established user on HN, I must be tracked easily on HN by any user on HN. Anyone and anything must be able to go into my history of comments to see whether I’m a XXX, and therefore should be tried as a XXX and executed under whatever new law will be that allows my country’s dictator to decide that is appropriate. People depend on me, so there is more than personal cost of my life at stake. Therefore, I cannot allow this.
2. If I do not want to be tracked, then I must be mostly silenced. I comment on some thread perhaps, or wait a long time to comment. This does not take away my right to free speech as long as I want to be easily tracked by literally anyone or anything on the internet easily. See (1).
fsflover•1mo ago
hnthrowaway5461•1mo ago
Moderation is already done for new users based on content and users have other acceptable restrictions.
Times dictate a change now. If you don’t believe me, look at the news over the past week.
fsflover•1mo ago
Perhaps a decentralized alternative like Mastodon or Lemmy could work better here: Smaller islands interacting (if they prefer so) make it harder for attackers to scale. The moderation is decentralized there allowing for islands of certain topics and opinions.
> Moderation is already done for new users based on content
I'm pretty sure it's not the full story.
krapp•1mo ago
Times may change but Hacker News doesn't.
An overriding design goal of Hacker News is avoiding the Eternal September effect at all cost. That means preserving the original culture of Hacker News at all cost. Every change made to the way the forum looks or works and every deviation from established norms leads us ever closer to the corruption and destruction of this community. Not to lean into a "semi-noob illusion" but one can already smell the rot around here.
There is already too much abuse of new/green accounts as it is, having full anonymity would lead to trolling and degrade the quality of conversation and signal to noise ratio and turn HN into just /g/ without the pictures. Allowing sub-accounts makes it easy to post vile content while avoiding the karma cost/bans which undermines the effect of the moderation mechanisms at work here. People already do that all the time, and most of the time it's so they can post anti-semitic and racial slurs.
Hacker News is not (and has never been and can never be) a free speech platform, it is a curated speech platform. Those two goals work at cross-purposes (quality vs quantity, or more abstractly "safety" vs "liberty") and HN has chosen the latter at the cost of the former. And the vast majority of people here are fine with that.
Note that I have my disagreements with a lot of this - but it is what it is. Keep complaining and eventually you just get filtered, or banned if you're too annoying or repetitive about it. This is definitely a "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" kind of culture. Hacker News cannot change and remain Hacker News, and remaining Hacker News is paramount.
querym•1mo ago
The rot of quality happened in the 2010s. The only time it was worthwhile was when it was a tight community of those making the news themselves.
Now, we are a community of relatively smart people, on average.
What you seem to be saying is that it will still be the church, even when the Nazis will be controlling it later. Why must it be that way?
krapp•1mo ago
For the most part because that's what people here want, and it's what the moderators and owners intend.
For many people HN is the last bastion of a web and a culture they feel has disappeared from the world and can no longer be found anywhere else. The last place in a world swarming with bots and ads and normies where interesting people can be found and and high quality conversation is possible. This is their lifeboat in the ocean of shit that is the modern web, and they're going to cling on to it to the bitter end.
And the more people join, and the bigger HN gets, the more deeply that sentiment is held and the more aggressive the moderation and tone policing become. The more conflicts arise within the community as the pressure to change meets the pressure to conform. The nature of battling entropy is that you inevitably create the very force you seek to control.
Also this forum is owned by a billion dollar Silicon Valley startup incubator. It exists to advertise the "hacker cred" of that company and as such they want to curate a specific kind of culture and mindset, that of the brilliant and curious autodidact engineer interested in gratifying intellectual curiosity and nothing else. Any deviation from that risks changing the vibe YC is trying to project for itself through the community.
It's best to just accept HN for what it is and go elsewhere if you want free speech. Or stay and take your lumps. Expecting change is futile.
fsflover•1mo ago
Unless the karma from sub-accounts affects the main karma.
krapp•1mo ago
fsflover•1mo ago
On HN, it works without personalities. Here, posts are judged, not people. Names are greyed out by design.
krapp•1mo ago
Names are greyed out like everything else besides comment text to be minimally distracting. If pg wanted post content to be entirely divorced from the person writing it he could have designed the forum that way, but all of these features are designed as operant conditioning for the person behind the name.
fsflover•1mo ago