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Show HN: Hacker Smacker – spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

https://hackersmacker.org
38•conesus•2d ago
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!

Comments

titaniumtown•1h ago
Installed! Lets see how this goes. I'm going through previous interactions I've had with people.
ineedasername•1h ago
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?”
jacquesm•1h ago
That's just Slashdot's influence. They did the same thing at some point.
ineedasername•35m ago
Ah, okay-- though that doesn't mean the author can't do better, if I'm not just being too nitpicky.
logicprog•33m ago
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.
scrumper•1h ago
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.

drcongo•46m ago
everybody loves jacquesm
toomuchtodo•23m ago
Seconded.
SV_BubbleTime•1h ago
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.

netsharc•44m ago
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.

tomhow•33m ago
> 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.

omoikane•1h ago
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

ImPostingOnHN•1h ago
this seems like it would increase tribalism and polarization
subdavis•6m ago
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?

ZpJuUuNaQ5•32m ago
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.
alt187•25m ago
As opposed to OP's extension, I would heartily recommend this one.
efilife•22m ago
14 days ago exactly this was submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991435

https://rickyromero.com/shutup/

nickthegreek•21m ago
14 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991435
logicprog•24m ago
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
elcapitan•16m ago
Finally someone brings this place the explicit toxicity it had been missing all those years. /s
Retr0id•12m ago
It'd be interesting to run pagerank over the trust graph
jonathanstrange•8m ago
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?
goodpoint•6m ago
what about privacy?
Retr0id•5m ago
It would appear that friend/foe lists are entirely public (the latter feels a bit rude)

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