That's a high exaggeration of course, but in the wonderful old HN tradition of perceiving the site as dominated by $badness, where everyone has their own perception of $badness.
Fine. Looking at today's /active, it's more than half just based on the titles. (Likely 2/3 or more in practice, but I did not delve into each post.) And this does not feel particularly unusual.
(Apologies if you've commented on the following already, but I've not seen it.)
The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.
I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.
Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.
I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.
I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
> comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead].
I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist.
I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
I have vouched a couple (~3-5) benign comments a while back and now I no longer have a vouch button for comments.
I don't know if the vouch threshold has increased or if the mods have removed my ability to vouch for other comments entirely.
Wondering if it was my good faith attempt to inform a user of their comments being auto-flagged [1] before I had any context that they were supposed to be persona non grata.
Your account is fine - nothing changed. Most probably you're just expecting vouch links where there aren't any. (They only show up on posts that are [dead].)
Yes, you're correct. The vouch button doesn't appear when viewing the thread context containing the `[dead]` comment. It only appears when clicking the specific comment directly via its permalink (or comment ID). I may have misremembered being able to vouch with the context to the comment being visible.
I always vouch them but have never bothered to email. I figure the mods are seeing the same HN I am. But maybe I spend too much time here some evenings..
But yes, it's the "going against the zeitgeist" ones I have in mind. It feels very damaging to the community.
It's a rare individual that reads all the comments .. my impression is they appreciate on point heads up emails about accidentally auto-binned comments and are happy to reverse flagging on good comments, even those that try and make the dark side of a case.
Probably best not to try and flood the zone with anti/pro pet subject matter karen emails though.
FWiW I semi frequently pick apart comments supporting cases I'm in favour of .. because I want to see better arguments being made and to discourage weak easily dismissed shallow support.
I agree with that, the ones I see flagged are frequently espousing viewpoints I disagree with. But they should be debated then, and flagging them denies everyone that opportunity.
I try to flag only bad-faith arguing. I need to get more disciplined about flagging bad-faith arguing for stances I agree with: I don't flag those comments nearly as much, perhaps because I simply don't perceive them as bad-faith if I agree with them.
Then again, I'm perfectly capable of perceiving bad-faith comments opposing generative AI. I had dismissed the possibility out of hand, so it's possible that the reason I don't see many bad-faith agrees-with-me comments, AI-bashing aside, is because there aren't many: maybe people who agree with me tend to act in good faith.
My vouch works well, but I barely use it: mostly on select comments of shadowbanned users. My flag, on the other hand, feels like it requires heavy consensus: even when it's successful, the comments I flag tend to get vouched back into existence on a hair-trigger.
Personally, I've seen two - both ones that I emailed about (and I really disliked the stance taken on one of those, but they were debating at a level that was polite, addressed objections raised, acknowledged other PoVs etc.)
Vouch, I've perhaps seen reverse things several times (more of a background observation not pursued, so, you know, fuzzy anecdata at best), I did get feedback from @dang that one comment I vouched for was, in fact, a legitimate AI gen comment .. so clearly I'm human enough to fall for the occasional clanker.
I'm not picking on you - it's practically a universal response, so much so that it must be driven by human hard-wiring. I've written about this so many times that for once I don't even know what to link to. Perhaps https://hackertimes.com/item?id=23308098. Or maybe https://hackertimes.com/item?id=48427800