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!)
I see this as a very hn type commenting. Nitpicking over semantics rather than engaging the whole. Your comment is fine, but the whole response in the rest of the thread is boorish.
I'm fine with friend or foe, because they are in reality, just coloured blobs
I think there is a difference between “nitpicking” and “discussing” details. I personally do not see any nitpicking in OP’s comment, I rather see it as valuable and well-presented contribution to the general (wholistic) discussion.
To me, your response would have been just fine with only the last sentence.
For once a "this is a very HN" comment seems earned but I think it just marks you at not really the target audience for HN
One of the reason we come to HN is that curiosity and caring about details is rewarded and makes for great discussion
Also your comment has no substance. I stand totally unimpressed by your opposition between the whole and the details and I fail to see how this is relevant. Care to explain what tackling the whole would look like ?
Or are you just trying to handwawe away some potential issue you are too lazy to consider just because you like the project ?
Note that IIRC the guidelines ask you to refrain from "This is HN/reddit" comments because they are fundamentally uninteresting (and lazy)
> I think it just marks you at not really the target audience for HN
This has some pretty serious connotations. I have been here for an awful long time for someone who is not a target audience, please take a moment of self reflection at that.
I don't think nitpicking is a synonym for 'caring about details'. I am acusing commenters of picking on unimportant details, and I'm acusing them of doing it because it is easier than the more substantive concerns that are further down the thread. It looks superficially clever, but is actually just pedantry.
> because you like the project ?
That kind of statement is intellectually dishonest. I wont be installing this extension, but not because of a name for the buttons that didn't form part of the UI.
> Note that IIRC the guidelines ask you to refrain from
Well, I just checked rather than relying on the my fallible memory and, and I don't believe it does. If you want to police people's comments, perhaps take a little more care.
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.
maximize your projection onto like minded commenters, create that bubble you always yearned for but until now have never had the add-on to empower the inner-you! finally, you can ignore that filthy plane of delusional outcasts and banish them to the orthogonal abyss forever.
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.
That makes sense, but then what is the purpose of the 'foe' label? I can see the logic behind using it as a time-saver (as described by conesus) or a reminder that engagement will probably be unproductive. But if you intend to learn from and engage with the foe, it seems like the 'foe' label is just going to prejudice you against their comments before you read them, without much benefit.
Hacker Smacker doesn't mean you ignore your foes. Their comments are now labeled with the tiny red orb, giving you acknowledgement of how you've felt about them in the past.
I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.
This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.
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.
I sure hope the disagreement to ignore ven diagram doesnt look like that. If u never engage, how will you ever know you were wrong about something repetitive and boring?
Most things are interesting if you look deeply into them. People on the other hand can be repetitive and boring about them. Which would extend to the excessive use of meta-argument: complaining people aren't listening but also not actually saying anything of substance.
Yes, and you just found that you "favor" WorldMaker, and therefore ... read the suggestion "Follow/Distance?" more eagerly?
If that suggestion (which I suppose you'll ignore anyway, but maybe it inspires some other thought in you) came from a foe, then ... you'd be directed away from paying attention to it? Because you've incontinently flipped a colored orb at some point in the past, and now you're going to use that statistical information to direct you to where the most inspiring ideas mostly are? I see.
But maybe this is not very high quality information in the first place (the information that you provide for yourself by flicking an orb)?
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 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...
> 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.
I'm interested in peoples thoughts about this. There are people in here that I generally respect, but on certain subjects I have seen comments that are not helpful. If I saw one of them first I might click 'foe' and then ignore them in the future.
And this seems normal. I have a friend in real life who I like talking to, we share some views, and vehemently disagree on other subjects. He likes to bring them up and I tend to divert the discussion because I don't want to lose them as a friend
This is my concern as well. IMO, one of the great aspects of HN is the semi-anonymity (no profile pics, names are just strings that you probably don't memorize unless you see the same name often, no visible upvotes, etc.). This makes us take the comments and submissions at face value, evaluating the content rather than relying on past experiences with the author, or other people's evaluation of it (upvotes).
I feel that any system which injects opinions into comments/submissions before you read and process it, work against the principles of Hacker News. A system like this might be great for a community full of trolls, but another one of Hacker News' strengths is it's heavy moderation. I see maybe <5% troll/bad-taste comments, and most of those are already flagged and [dead].
But marking someone as foe based on their first comment might be very misleading, not to speak of good practice of discussion despite of agreement or disagreement. I'm coming to the stage of my life that I try (sometimes hardly) to speak with people with which I disagree. It's my crusade against cancel culture. People are more than one dimensional and even if we disagree on one two dimensions we might agree on others, or just play D&D together sometime
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I wish Twitter had this. It's always frustrating to read someone I've been following for a long time saying some bit of lore or unusual position that would change the whole way I think about them, except I know I won't be able to remember to associate it with their username next time I see them.
HN was never the place to add trendy, unnecessary "features" and I doubt there would be a point in adding this one, considering how it seemingly goes against the entire ethos of the community: engaging with the substance of what the people are saying.
I made some changes and the extension now recognizes if you can't hover and will allow you to tap to show the orbs before selecting one. It now works on mobile browsers with extensions.
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.
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.
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".
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?
The Most Intolerant Wins[1]: different groups in society are more likely to shun and organize against others (usually those who live in Modia, not Mundia[2]). So if you don't need this feature, then others want it to use against you.
I think it frequently depends on the thread you're reading and your expertise in that area? There are a few things I'm intermediate to expert in - frequently the quality of comments in those threads is quite poor, but the noise & upvote-y memes look like signal in those areas, so it may not look as bad from the outside.
On the other hand, there are a number of things I'm not very informed about, and I do frequently find a few posters in those threads who seem to have very insightful things to say, but I'm not sure if they actually are (sometimes you can tell from replies) or if it's just because I'm a neophyte.
Which all goes to say I don't know if this system would really help, or would just turn into bad opinions getting even more support because the crowd-sourcing is coming from others who don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate what's worth listening to.
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.
I don't have the name(s) off the top of my head, but can't you do a query of users whose account age are greater than (some threshold) but whose median comment score /amount of flagged to death comments is past some other threshold.
Mathematical quality scoring doesn’t work well for moderation of human behaviour in a community. Context matters a lot. Feelings influence people’s conduct and perception of others’ conduct a great deal. A user may get huge numbers of upvotes for comments they make about a technology or their profession, but then attract many downvotes and flags when they're commenting about politics. This is particularly true when political topics involve war or other life/death matters (which is a major reason why those kinds of topics are difficult on HN – they can bring out the worst in otherwise very positive contributors).
I think that's the point though? Plenty of things not worth engaging with also aren't technically violating any rules: but wasting the brainpower on them also isn't worth it in a reliable way.
Sure, I was just addressing the apparent dissatisfaction that some accounts remain active despite posting “moronic” comments, and pointing out that we can't moderate HN according to our judgement of someone's comments being “moronic”, we can only apply the guidelines that everyone on HN implicitly agrees to follow. (To expand on that: “moronic” will mean different things to different people depending on their worldview; whereas the guidelines and our application of them need to be defensible, regardless of the position.)
We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!
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.
I have not found that to be the case. I have over 150 commenters on my Hacker Smacker foe list and I have only found once or twice that somebody who goes into the red bucket deserves to go into the green bucket.
Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.
I have a better idea. Why not distinguish quality from non-quality by reading a series of characters and then deciding for yourself if you like the subject and tone of voice? People themselves can choose how many characters they use. Let's call these characters the alphabet.
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 !
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?
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.
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.
> identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters
> not about hiding writers you disagree with
> It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with
[But] > to reinforce your opinion of them. [Did you misspeak here?]
> this reduces the time I spent on Hacker News
> find the good stuff based on people you trust
This is very confused.
* Do we want to avoid ideas that we disagree with?
* Do we want to avoid authors we've labelled as annoying? (This is about meta-level bad ideas, about how to interact.)
* Do we want to avoid meta-level ideas that we disagree with?
* What if your friends disagree about who their friends and enemies are?
* What it they don't disagree, isn't that creepy? Echo chamber much?
* Is it right to pre-empt your own interest by labelling material before reading it? I don't know!
Seems to me that rational pre-filtering should be along subtle, personal, ever-changing lines, and you should constantly be deciding on the spot based on complex information including your current mood and dyspepsia. How should interest work? You may start reading a thing and decide "this is not for me" (or "this is a troll or a bot"). Or with a tool like this one you may carry out the same process faster, and more crudely, using less information and less serendipity. So you're encouraging people to be in a rush and make more superficial choices instead of mining for the gold. On the other hand, maybe they are in a rush and need to be like that.
i clicked to fast. "please leave the link in your about section and it'll allow..." it will do what? i don't want to put ands there. what was the function of leaving it?
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!)
I'm fine with friend or foe, because they are in reality, just coloured blobs
To me, your response would have been just fine with only the last sentence.
One of the reason we come to HN is that curiosity and caring about details is rewarded and makes for great discussion
Also your comment has no substance. I stand totally unimpressed by your opposition between the whole and the details and I fail to see how this is relevant. Care to explain what tackling the whole would look like ?
Or are you just trying to handwawe away some potential issue you are too lazy to consider just because you like the project ?
Note that IIRC the guidelines ask you to refrain from "This is HN/reddit" comments because they are fundamentally uninteresting (and lazy)
This has some pretty serious connotations. I have been here for an awful long time for someone who is not a target audience, please take a moment of self reflection at that.
I don't think nitpicking is a synonym for 'caring about details'. I am acusing commenters of picking on unimportant details, and I'm acusing them of doing it because it is easier than the more substantive concerns that are further down the thread. It looks superficially clever, but is actually just pedantry.
> because you like the project ?
That kind of statement is intellectually dishonest. I wont be installing this extension, but not because of a name for the buttons that didn't form part of the UI.
> Note that IIRC the guidelines ask you to refrain from
Well, I just checked rather than relying on the my fallible memory and, and I don't believe it does. If you want to police people's comments, perhaps take a little more care.
I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.
This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.
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.
I like it. sometimes my greatest foes become my dearest friends. Funny how life works that way.
Most things are interesting if you look deeply into them. People on the other hand can be repetitive and boring about them. Which would extend to the excessive use of meta-argument: complaining people aren't listening but also not actually saying anything of substance.
If that suggestion (which I suppose you'll ignore anyway, but maybe it inspires some other thought in you) came from a foe, then ... you'd be directed away from paying attention to it? Because you've incontinently flipped a colored orb at some point in the past, and now you're going to use that statistical information to direct you to where the most inspiring ideas mostly are? I see.
But maybe this is not very high quality information in the first place (the information that you provide for yourself by flicking an orb)?
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.
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.
Version two: hide foes? Come to think of it, maybe the 'foe' aspect is the fun part...
EDIT: it's like I summoned him.
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.
That's a good idea.
Here's my bad idea: the extension auto downvotes foes and auto upvotes friends. :)
And this seems normal. I have a friend in real life who I like talking to, we share some views, and vehemently disagree on other subjects. He likes to bring them up and I tend to divert the discussion because I don't want to lose them as a friend
I feel that any system which injects opinions into comments/submissions before you read and process it, work against the principles of Hacker News. A system like this might be great for a community full of trolls, but another one of Hacker News' strengths is it's heavy moderation. I see maybe <5% troll/bad-taste comments, and most of those are already flagged and [dead].
2. Deploy it on cloud
3. Post it on HN
4. Sell your house to pay cloud debts
(I mean the page is down already)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598
- like it is literally trained on some data set to identify posts that are trying to bait people into commenting on them and simply hide such posts.
- the world would be a far better place if we had such an extension
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774
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.
I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
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.
https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/issues/3
But now I prefer blocking and favouriting people https://overmod.org/
There are good commenters here. Just overshadowed by lots of garbage.
https://rickyromero.com/shutup/
How old is that icon set? I swear I used that same peppers icon for a Windows app that I published around 2002.
I guess if you just prefer wearing horse blinders?
For a further improvement, let the extension set some orbs automatically at random, to encourage discoveries. Then upgrade this to all the orbs.
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.
wish this idea was more prevalent in modern politics !
1. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
2. https://brianoflondon.me/mundia-and-modia/index.html
On the other hand, there are a number of things I'm not very informed about, and I do frequently find a few posters in those threads who seem to have very insightful things to say, but I'm not sure if they actually are (sometimes you can tell from replies) or if it's just because I'm a neophyte.
Which all goes to say I don't know if this system would really help, or would just turn into bad opinions getting even more support because the crowd-sourcing is coming from others who don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate what's worth listening to.
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.
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.
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.
That's where an ignore system is useful.
We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!
Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.
I have a better idea. Why not distinguish quality from non-quality by reading a series of characters and then deciding for yourself if you like the subject and tone of voice? People themselves can choose how many characters they use. Let's call these characters the alphabet.
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.
> identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters
> not about hiding writers you disagree with
> It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with
[But] > to reinforce your opinion of them. [Did you misspeak here?]
> this reduces the time I spent on Hacker News
> find the good stuff based on people you trust
This is very confused.
* Do we want to avoid ideas that we disagree with?
* Do we want to avoid authors we've labelled as annoying? (This is about meta-level bad ideas, about how to interact.)
* Do we want to avoid meta-level ideas that we disagree with?
* What if your friends disagree about who their friends and enemies are?
* What it they don't disagree, isn't that creepy? Echo chamber much?
* Is it right to pre-empt your own interest by labelling material before reading it? I don't know!
Seems to me that rational pre-filtering should be along subtle, personal, ever-changing lines, and you should constantly be deciding on the spot based on complex information including your current mood and dyspepsia. How should interest work? You may start reading a thing and decide "this is not for me" (or "this is a troll or a bot"). Or with a tool like this one you may carry out the same process faster, and more crudely, using less information and less serendipity. So you're encouraging people to be in a rush and make more superficial choices instead of mining for the gold. On the other hand, maybe they are in a rush and need to be like that.