

Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Some of these terms are listed as if HN created them (they did not). Reddit existed years prior to HN, and upvoting/downvoting started there, if not earlier.
"Karma" meanwhile goes much farther back, used on GameFAQs in the late 90s.
- One thing I want to know is that my comments can get downvoted but I cannot downvote others' comments. Initially I could downvote people's comments but for a couple of years now that ability is not showing to me. I can only upvote the comments.by Guestmodinfo
- A few corrections:
• The company that launched a search tool for Hacker News in 2014 is called Algolia, not Agolia.
• Algolia is not just another search tool, but Hacker News’s official one. It’s the tool you’re redirected to if you enter text into the “Search:” text field that appears at the bottom of many HN pages, such as the home page and story pages.
• The paragraph about the comment ‘Did you win the Putnam?’ is missing the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079. It would also be worth noting that that comment was made in 2007.
by roryokane - What happens to an account if its karma becomes negative? Can someone's account still post if it has negative karma or is the account deleted if it is negative karma account?by Guestmodinfo
- I have always been curious about the "auto-dead" blacklist of domains referenced here. I just wonder how its maintained/how big it is.
- I really wish flagging had some kind of consequence. Imo it ought be a mandatory public act. If you exercise such power to sway and direct discussion, you should have to do it under your name. That's basically my only critique of serious consequence, so far.
I could see the case being made that vouches should be too, but i haven't carefully weighed out my reasons thoughts & feeling on this. Where-as on flagging, it seems screamingly blitz evident.
- Would be great to also include some of the idiosyncrasies in how HN comments/discussions often develop.
The way the first comment is often about something very tangential to the main topic of the post, and then proceeds to attract a large number of replies, completely sucking the oxygen out of the post’s main topic.
Or the way the first comment to a Show HN isn’t about any aspect of the project being shared, but instead is “you might find this other thing interesting”.
Or the inevitable “in mice” comment on any story about medicines.
Or in answer to an article about the discovery of free energy for mankind forever: “the CSS is totally broken”, inevitably followed by “works for me on Firefox”.
by JSR_FDED