I sent an email to dang about the problem of people flagging comments just because they disagree. I think he's unaware that it is such a severe problem. I've been collecting a list of example comments to send him.
I think if an account is frequently flagging comments which get vouched by others, that is a red flag for ideological flagging and they need to have their flagging ability reviewed.
It should be changed so flagged comments are still viewable, just hidden. This would somewhat counteract the disagreement flagging. Maybe show who flagged too.
There’s been a lot of time and effort and money put in to siloing away independent forums so that you don’t use them.
Someone go ahead and explain to me the actual rationale that RDDT has a higher P/E ratio than Nvidia. It’s not because of some dumb “ai training deal”. It’s because until they run it into the ground, it is the place to find what used to exist in forums.
> Someone go ahead and explain to me the actual rationale that RDDT has a higher P/E ratio than Nvidia.
Investors in RDDT are pricing more growth than they are into NVDA. NVDA had a high P/E until their net income grew ($4B and change to $72.2B in from FY 2023 to FY 2025 and over $100B for FY 2026)
The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.
Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.
On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.
I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
I have heard that shadow banning is more commonly used on Reddit than here, which just makes the problem worse: banning humans but allowing bots through.
Because paywalls are trivial to bypass and it's exhausting hearing people constantly complain about them. The GP in this thread has been on HN for 10 years. They should know how to bypass it by now. Hell, four minutes after they posted someone posted the bypassed link.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
Interesting. At the time, the vote count was notably low given the post age, and there were no comments IIRC. So my thought was, to avoid the poster thinking "well that didn't work - I guess HN didn't like this - doesn't want future similar posts from me", by noting an engagement funnel bounce step they may not have been aware of. Given that paywalls are often probabalistic UX. Sort of using an empty comment thread as TFA poster DM channel?
Hmm. So, maybe, if my comment had noted the age/vote pair, and was clearer about the motivation for mentioning the paywall, that would have been less likely to create a meta discussion? And perhaps been consistent with the "don't post complaints about paywalls" policy?
> The answer, plain and simple for any 5-year-old to see, is
Read it later. If you can't read it at work, you can read it on your phone or after work from another computer.
Also, the guidelines and FAQ are both easy to read, and shouldn't be blocked by any CMMC nonsense at your office if HN itself isn't blocked. This one is a useful guideline for people like you, whose shouting makes you seem like a crazy uncle sending emails from your AOL account:
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. Instead, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
"Read it later. If you can't read it at work, you can read it on your phone or after work from another computer."
Negative, as I have ZERO TIME when working with things involving security.
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. Instead, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."
Yea, no. See your asterisks didn't italicize. I'm looking at your comment right now, with screencap in clipboard buffer if you need a pasted proof of this formatting not working - https://imgur.com/a/7TzQOKw - No italics there. Unless the > at the beginning indicates (stupidly) to ignore formatting rules placed after it, your comment has zero formatting outside of regular spacing.
But you see, I was already aware that function didn't work reliably. Which is why I will continue to use caps for emphasis as it's guaranteed to work.
reply