Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance (opens in new tab)

> 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.

It's not bi-directional. When you friend jacques, you see people who he has friended as FoaF, not people who have friended him. It's a curator-style system, not a direct popularity one.

everybody loves jacquesm

Pagerank

> Version two: hide foes?

That's a good idea.

Here's my bad idea: the extension auto downvotes foes and auto upvotes friends. :)

> Accounts are ephemeral and worthless.

I'd state the exact opposite, especially in times where fake news, bot farms and AI generated content are everywhere it matters if something comes from a trusted source or not.

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

It's the difference between 99% and 100% of an accounts' posts. Maybe for those rare accounts that only speak when they have something to say on a topic they are knowledgeable on it's higher.

I'd divide that green by the amount of posts the account makes (and maybe start red lower and multiply) test that and you'd probably find most accounts are beige.

I've been wishing for a News (NNTP) portal for HN. Would solve that as well as making it easier to follow larger threads by allowing you to track read/unread.

Mostly because I really miss newsgroups though.

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.

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!)

That's just Slashdot's influence. They did the same thing at some point.

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 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.

Agree, one of the great parts of HN is that we can still have wholehearted, earnest discussions with people we disagree with. I don't think bringing the combative nature of other platforms makes sense here. We're not at war with eachother or people we disagree with, as much as most media outlets want that to be the case.

I'd suggest to move even beyond "engage/ignore".

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.

That's such a friend thing to say!

Bring back hot or not!

Follow/Distance?

"signal/noise" possibly?

favorite / potato

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.

I propose: Bubble/Whistle

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.

Oh man, I had no idea this got reposted and I just discovered now, 8 hours later. Anyway, I kicked the server and its back up.

Same here. Thought it was my firewall at first. Thanks for confirming.

HN's hug of death

hacker smacker smacked down

HN smacked

I'm afraid you just have to delete Twitter. The algorithm, is designed to push rage bait to the top.

Lol, I had a self-extension for a short while like that https://github.com/roshan/hnncnn/blob/master/hnncnn.js

But now I prefer blocking and favouriting people https://overmod.org/

There are good commenters here. Just overshadowed by lots of garbage.

14 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991435

14 days ago exactly this was submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991435

https://rickyromero.com/shutup/

As opposed to OP's extension, I would heartily recommend this one.

There's na open issue to address this exact need. I haven't figured out a good compromise yet, but an option to include symbols would be good.

https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/issues/3

Perhaps you'd like if the "green" blob for friend also included a "+" symbol and "red" one a "-"?

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?

people seem to prefer only reading things from people they agree with

At least 15 years, if the git history is to be believed.

All the possible states are up at the top, right under the title (I missed it too!). It'll be a pill that's half friend half foe, just like on Slashdot.

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.

My HN extension [1] does this. So many "but humans!" user notes and an unfortunate number for LLM psychosis / mania.

[1] https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

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.

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.

1. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

2. https://brianoflondon.me/mundia-and-modia/index.html

"Less fortunate" is a generous wording and framing.

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.

Hah, at least I'm consistent.

The layout doesn't shift down. It only moves the meta information to the right of the user name over a little bit.

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.

That was the toughest lift of all! Firefox and Chrome extensions were easy, just had to go through a quick review. Apple rejected the safari extension 4-5 times and wanted me to make changes to the metadata and even questioned the extension itself. Took a lot of back and forth to get the safari extension approved.

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.

It would appear that friend/foe lists are entirely public (the latter feels a bit rude)

Poof!

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 enough bad-faith commenters on HN that I personally would find this very useful.

If you're on HN and you look in the comments and can't tell who the toxic one is, it's you.

Is that what it's about?

> 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?