Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN
Maybe I am biased, but increasingly feel HN is subject to number of dark patterns related to potentially meritless rep-mining, voting, flags, etc.
What are examples if any that users are seeing and how might they be better addressed?
Would HN consider being more open about their policies or allowing trusted 3rd party to audit the effectiveness of these policies?
You seem to have asserted there is meritless rep-mining and provided no details. Then you ask others to provide details about where they see meritless rep-mining. I know you already know about this repository documenting HN
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
So I'm really not sure what more you are after with respect to how things work.
Why would HN be interested in having a 3rd party audit their policies? What possible positive outcome would be in it for them?
Right, I am a HN super user.
I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move onto a new account; no reason other than by doing so I am never able to downvote regardless of the desire to do so, let’s me easily benchmark perception of my comments & excluded community’s bias to upvote known users, it’s a minor form of OpSec, etc.
Here are a few examples:
- HN automates a lot of mod related tasks, but to my knowledge rarely prior to establishing such automation defines a measurable outcome, then tests to confirm the desired outcome holds true;
- Recently discovered user that’s been shadowban 5 years will likely never know they are ghosted unless I tell them;
- Other examples which are likely considered “secrets” that might not be appropriate openly disclose; I personally object to this;
- as for the audits, it would allow HN to get an independent opinion in a way that doesn’t result in data they normally withhold from being public.
Happy to address or clarify anything on request.
> Right, I am a HN super user. I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move onto a new account
Please don't. For HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. If you change your identity routinely, you're interrupting that functioning. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you don't want to be able to downvote, I'm sure we could figure out a way to make that work.
Okay, understand; unfortunately that means I will just stop posting on HN, since I neither have the desire to have “an identity” on HN, nor do I intend to disregard any guidelines. Thanks for all the work you do to keep HN running, please don’t take this personally, understand and agree with your position, just not good fit for me. Cheers!
I would be interested in a way to disable downvotes from affecting the comment ranking.
> as for the audits, it would allow HN to get an independent opinion in a way that doesn’t result in data they normally withhold from being public.
While I see obtaining feedback on user behavior and satisfaction valuable, I'm still unsure of how a public audit would benefit HN. It might already be the case that HN conducts private audits and we never know.
I don't really feel that HN has a community or reputation problem in the way that I feel Stack Overflow does so without understanding what you see as the motivation for a public review, I'm not sure what HN or the community would get out of the results.
One thing I would say is that I personally think "shadow bans" are a little petty. I don't agree with the idea of making the site artificially slow and making participation "seem" to work when it does not. That said, I accept that this is the way HN has chosen to work.