I’d encourage a change of labels away from “friend/foe”. It may seem minor but the subtle loaded nature of those paired terms encourages an adversarial stance rather than one of productive discourse. It’s not catchy so there’s probably better than this but, just as an example— “engage/ignore” could better signal to the user a neutral “do I want to bother with this person?”

• derefr

  today at 1:51 AM

  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!)

• logicprog

  yesterday at 7:10 PM

  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.

• jacquesm

  yesterday at 6:28 PM

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

  • ineedasername

    yesterday at 7:08 PM

    Ah, okay-- though that doesn't mean the author can't do better, if I'm not just being too nitpicky.

    • jacquesm

      yesterday at 8:09 PM

      The last thing HN needs is to become more like Slashdot.

      • avadodin

        yesterday at 10:26 PM

        In Soviet Russia, Slashdot becomes HN!

    • Lerc

      yesterday at 8:12 PM

      Dot product of opinions? Using a fancier term for the same thing might be a significant axis though.

      • globalnode

        yesterday at 9:40 PM

        maximize your projection onto like minded commenters, create that bubble you always yearned for but until now have never had the add-on to empower the inner-you! finally, you can ignore that filthy plane of delusional outcasts and banish them to the orthogonal abyss forever.

  • unethical_ban

    yesterday at 9:55 PM

    I've wanted something like this for a long time and also thought of the slashdot system. This is directly from that.

• raddan

  yesterday at 11:22 PM

  Bring back hot or not!

• tyre

  yesterday at 9:21 PM

  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.

  • pavel_lishin

    yesterday at 10:17 PM

    potato / tomato?

  • scrozier

    yesterday at 10:42 PM

    As a boomer, I had fun trying to decode your last sentence!

• rustystump

  yesterday at 7:59 PM

  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.

  • ineedasername

    yesterday at 9:20 PM

    A foe is also someone you might preemptively punch in the face if they get too close before you could determine if they actually meant you harm right then.

    I'd prefer not to label things such that I'm justifying the label's negative potential by the disproportionately small "even if" range of positive ones.

    • rustystump

      today at 1:26 AM

      Woh there cowboy we are talking about online chat miles away. If u dont like it, cool beans.

      I like it. sometimes my greatest foes become my dearest friends. Funny how life works that way.

  • XorNot

    yesterday at 8:29 PM

    People I want to ignore I usually disagree with as well, but that's not the problem: the problem is they are repetitive and boring.

    • rustystump

      yesterday at 9:20 PM

      I sure hope the disagreement to ignore ven diagram doesnt look like that. If u never engage, how will you ever know you were wrong about something repetitive and boring?

      • XorNot

        yesterday at 9:57 PM

        Which is not at all what I wrote.

        Most things are interesting if you look deeply into them. People on the other hand can be repetitive and boring about them. Which would extend to the excessive use of meta-argument: complaining people aren't listening but also not actually saying anything of substance.

• ting0

  yesterday at 8:26 PM

  That's such a friend thing to say!

• WorldMaker

  yesterday at 8:12 PM

  Follow/Distance?

  • conesus

    today at 1:59 AM

    Ahh, I have you green orbed, and I recognize your username from NB. The system works!

  • wartywhoa23

    yesterday at 8:26 PM

    Arian/Non-Arian

• groby_b

  yesterday at 10:31 PM

  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.

• yesterday at 8:26 PM

I'm color blind, and those colors look very similar to me. I could not tell if it was green or red or something else. Please use something like blue and red.

• conesus

  today at 2:54 AM

  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

I wonder what the second order effects of this on the HN karma system will be. It'll create a graph of karmic supernodes perhaps. Say I green-blob someone with a big reputation here, say jacquesm; no doubt lots of other people will do the same. The friends-of-friends icon is going to appear widely but it'll all be a single edge away from Jacques' node. Is that much of a signal? I dunno. That's 30 seconds of thought about it. It's a fun idea though so I'll try it.

Version two: hide foes? Come to think of it, maybe the 'foe' aspect is the fun part...

EDIT: it's like I summoned him.

• bigbadfeline

  today at 1:14 AM

  > 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.

• drcongo

  yesterday at 6:57 PM

  everybody loves jacquesm

  • yesterday at 7:20 PM

• cousinbryce

  yesterday at 8:02 PM

  Pagerank

• cpeterso

  yesterday at 9:12 PM

  > Version two: hide foes?

  That's a good idea.

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

  • verdverm

    yesterday at 10:16 PM

    automations get your account in trouble, it's against the rules

Thanks to the HN moderators for re-posting this after I posted this a few days ago. I only notice now that it's on the front page.

Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.

I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.

I've been testing it out for a bit, unfortunately the layout shift when all the icons load in is very distracting.

• conesus

  today at 2:25 AM

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

I created and shared Ethos which is a sentiment and discourse analysis thing for HN and it's been plugging away. You're welcome to use its API if you want. Submit a PR for the CORS to be changed as needed.

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774

I wish there was a way for HN to sponsor scale up so that sites have more availability for the HN hug of death

Related, there is already an extension that allows selected users to be highlighted, but without the shared server data for computing friend-of-a-friend relationships:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598

How would two neutral labels sound? There's something somewhat confrontational about "friend/foe" and those dynamics seem to worsen discussion. At the least, it should auto hide "foes", since predisposing people to be against a comment before reading it isn't ideal. Neutral labels, like "apple/orange", with slight connotations could be interesting. Of course, this kills networks, but I'd question if that's even a good idea in the first place.

502 Bad Gateway

• conesus

  today at 1:47 AM

  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.

• sentrysapper

  yesterday at 9:47 PM

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

• TheJuli

  yesterday at 10:04 PM

  HN's hug of death

• duncangh

  yesterday at 10:20 PM

  hacker smacker smacked down

• varjag

  yesterday at 10:18 PM

  HN smacked

I would prefer to do the opposite, where everything is displayed in chronological order (with an option to display by threads or not; even if not you can still find what each one is a reply to) regardless of voting and regardless of who wrote them.

A lot of discussion on the labels. I agree friend/foe is counter to what most of us would like HN to be about. How about align/diverge or similar, suggesting whether a commenters position usually reinforces or challenges your viewpoint?

I have a text file of commentors I normally disagree with and check in on them from time to time (about weekly). Its good fun and often I find there will be topics I do agree with them on. Reading the same opinions all the time is no fun.

A question, per your final comment on being available to answer questions:

What do you feel is the benefit to the community for this that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions?

I ask not out of malice, I ask because 2 reasons: 1. I imagine spending time on this/it's working well required you to see the value/benefit to it. 2. We must assume all hacker news commenting follows the rules, IE; good faith comment with relevant experience when required. This seems like a way to promote getting around that.

• conesus

  today at 1:53 AM

  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

• chatmasta

  yesterday at 8:31 PM

  > 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.

Interesting. I'd love to have a browser extension that automatically blocks all comment sections on every site I visit, so I wouldn't feel the need to interact with anyone online.

• arjie

  yesterday at 11:04 PM

  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.

• nickthegreek

  yesterday at 7:22 PM

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

• alt187

  yesterday at 7:18 PM

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

• efilife

  yesterday at 7:21 PM

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

  https://rickyromero.com/shutup/

It sounds great, except I am getting 502 Bad Gateway when following the URL. I think the site went down.

https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/blob/main/web/im...

How old is that icon set? I swear I used that same peppers icon for a Windows app that I published around 2002.

• austinjp

  yesterday at 9:50 PM

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

  • conesus

    today at 1:53 AM

    That's absolutely correct. I started programming at eight in 1993, so I have a soft spot for those types of icons.

I just keep a custom stylesheet that annotates usernames with various emoji. Most of the time I update it as I read, but occasionally I’ll peruse the hidden comments to note e.g. uncharitable participation and revealed bigotry.

Funny; I wrote a greasemonkey script to be able to highlight certain commenters here, but didn't even once consider adding a "networked" element to it.

Way down on my list of projects to vibe code is tags for HN users. I.e `Elon Stan` , `smart about aeronautics` , `grumpy` , `reasonable` etc etc. I like reading different opinion but if I formed an opinion about a user id like to record that without using my brain

Getting a 502 bad gateway error when I try to access the main website as an FYI.

Installed! Lets see how this goes. I'm going through previous interactions I've had with people.

Hmm, I installed this in Waterfox for Android, and I don't appear to be able to tap on the bubbles next to people's usernames

I used https://github.com/ToneyAlexander/HackerTagger for a bit almost a decade ago. Data locally stored, good but didn't transfer across machines, not so great.

It had a little text label next to names so you could manually add whatever you want. Recently I've thought about this extension and using it to tag the LLM users, or the humans who tend to pop up to fan the flames or who regularly post thought terminating comments - little tags to remind me to ignore the bots and trolls.

It'd be interesting to run pagerank over the trust graph

Getting a 502!

Oh no… hugged to death!

this seems like it would increase tribalism and polarization

• subdavis

  yesterday at 7:37 PM

  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?

  • conesus

    today at 1:54 AM

    There's nothing about this that's horse blinders. It's literally a way to highlight riders that you both agree and disagree with. It actually makes it more likely that you're going to engage with the ones you disagree with, because now they have a red orb.

That's weird, I'm reading HN every day and never felt a need for something like that. In my experience, the quality of comments is very high and really bad ones tend to be downvoted or flagged fast. Could this be a time zone issue such that people in certain time zones are less fortunate than others?

• alt187

  yesterday at 7:41 PM

  "Less fortunate" is a generous wording and framing.

Another step towards the Redditification of hackernews. This is the exact opposite kind of functionality pages like HN need, we need ways to get people to engage with others' ideas more substantively rather than literally put someone on the "bad guy I won't talk to list".

• JohnMakin

  yesterday at 10:41 PM

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

  • Aeglaecia

    today at 12:21 AM

    matthew 5:47

    wish this idea was more prevalent in modern politics !

what about privacy?

• Retr0id

  yesterday at 7:38 PM

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

• n4bz0r

  yesterday at 10:25 PM

  Poof!

What’s the purpose? More echo chambers and circle jerking parties?! Why some people are so inclined to label others? I might dislike someone’s comment on something or disagree with their opinion about it, but absolutely love their comments on another topic. And if that is an “overall” score for a person’s comments, then who are you to hijack my personality and tell me this person is good or not to engage with? Unless it’s just a joke, the concept is stupid.

[flagged]

Finally someone brings this place the explicit toxicity it had been missing all those years. /s

• croisillon

  yesterday at 10:19 PM

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

  • Aeglaecia

    today at 12:19 AM

    I believe the argument is that introducing personal aspects like this friend foe business inherently serves to increase argumentative bias and reduce quality of discussion. personally this seems like a slop project either way , so regardless as to how beneficial it could be, I'm still going to behave toxically towards it - if you really love or hate someone so much , you would have memorized their name already !

I would suggest categorizing the quality of comments by its content and not its creator. Oh, nevermind, that’s a silly thought.

Challenge my core belief? Well… I could rationally evaluate that, or, I could just use a tool to block it from my vision! Bubble thickener.

• netsharc

  yesterday at 6:59 PM

  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.

  • tomhow

    yesterday at 7:10 PM

    > There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...

    As moderators we can only judge comments according to the guidelines, and can only ban accounts if they repeatedly breach them. You're always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about an account that has been continually breaching the guidelines.

    • netsharc

      today at 12:25 AM

      I don't have the name(s) off the top of my head, but can't you do a query of users whose account age are greater than (some threshold) but whose median comment score /amount of flagged to death comments is past some other threshold.

      • tomhow

        today at 2:40 AM

        Mathematical quality scoring doesn't work well for moderation of human behaviour in a community. Context matters a lot. A user may get huge numbers of upvotes for comments they make about a technology or their profession, but then attract many downvotes and flags when they're commenting about politics. This is particularly true when political topics involve war or other life/death matters (which is a major reason why those kinds of topics are difficult on HN – they can bring out the worst in otherwise very positive contributors).

    • XorNot

      yesterday at 8:32 PM

      I think that's the point though? Plenty of things not worth engaging with also aren't technically violating any rules: but wasting the brainpower on them also isn't worth it in a reliable way.

      That's where an ignore system is useful.

      • tomhow

        yesterday at 11:47 PM

        Sure, I was just addressing the apparent dissatisfaction that some accounts remain active despite posting “moronic” comments, and pointing out that we can't moderate HN according to our judgement of someone's comments being “moronic”, we can only apply the guidelines that everyone on HN implicitly agrees to follow. (To expand on that: “moronic” will mean different things to different people depending on their worldview; whereas the guidelines and our application of them need to be defensible, regardless of the position.)

        We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!

  • ddtaylor

    yesterday at 7:45 PM

    I have emailed HN before when I spot really terrible things and they have been quick to effect change.

• kmeisthax

  yesterday at 7:56 PM

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

  • Aeglaecia

    today at 12:20 AM

    asking this out of curiosity due to recent reflection on similar - what's stopping us simply not responding to those arguing in bad faith ?