Looking at the comments here, am I alone in being completely unaware of famous users here? While browsing HN I pay zero attention to the users and simply look at the content or comments.
I think I am like you. I recognize almost no one. It gives me this weird feeling that every comment comes from a unique person, and that the number of people commenting is approximately infinite. Which I understand rationally to be wrong, but still.
The value should be in the arguments and the merit of the comment itself, nothing should emphasize the user in my view. That said it’s sometimes nice to just click the name and see if there is a profile.
But if youre having a conversation with someone who's raising points over multiple comments it would be nice to know those points so you can argue against them, else you risk strawmanning.
It's harder to keep track of diYsj5;£ and diYaba36£- versus benj111 and ctack.
I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works. We can identify people but they don't have a karma score over their head. Annonymising everything would be breaking that. It might work sure. But it feels like changing something that already works.
There are ways to generate unique identifiers besides random strings. Many sites generate them based on words rather than characters. And given how few unique commenters there likely are in any thread, even if they were random strings they wouldn't need to be very long. Three characters would be sufficient for most cases.
Plus, in a threaded forum, you're always replying either as a child to one specific commenter or to the main thread anyway, which adds greater context. IDs could be generated locally for each user and applied only to other users commenting to them. The site could even highlight which comments belong to which users. There are multiple ways this can be done.
>I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works.
It doesn't, and it isn't intended to. Normal human discourse is noisy, repetitive and emotive, and isn't graded on quality, brevity and uniqueness as it is here. The goal here is signal over noise. Identity is noise most of the time, so it should be eliminated, or at least reduced as much as possible.
>But it feels like changing something that already works.
Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. Hacker News isn't perfect. Given the amount of effort put into minimizing the UI here, reducing contrast and the number of links on a page, all in the service of minimizing distraction from the information itself, why not also eliminate usernames? What value does the specific string "krapp" bring to this conversation? or "benj111?" None, beyond providing a link to a profile which is empty more often than not, and a way to keep track of identifiers. None of that requires specific identities.
> Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon.
True. It only implies that it could be broken.
You may not see the value in usernames, but that doesn't mean there is none. It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: if you do not understand the value of something for its users, don't mess with it.
There's no deep and profound reason why usernames are used on HN, other than usernames being a common idiom on forums.
Since I've been here, numerous extra links have been added to the comment headers (prev, next, context,) hiding comments was added, vouching was added making hellbanning reversible, thread folding was added, two new pages were added to the header, the repost pool was made public, submitted links now automatically search for canonical URLs and titles are automatically edited. And before that, user karma was made invisible in threads. And that's just the stuff I remember or noticed. And the site hasn't broken yet.
Removing usernames could break things, but I can think of a number of problems it could also improve. Even just generally reducing engagement and thread velocity across the board would increase quality in aggregate. At the very least, it might be worth beta testing. If it doesn't work it can always be reverted.
I love that HN is content-oriented. It's not the only criteria, Reddit is also content oriented, and it certainly has its flaws, but given its size and spread, I think it's still doing remarkably well.
However, people-oriented media are unbearable for me. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.. All are full of people who want to build a reputation, and even though everything about them are different superficially, they all feel very similar.
I agree, relatedly it's also nice to have a place where physical attractiveness doesn't get outsized attention. You'd think it'd be a commodity online at this point, but it's interesting to me it seems to never lose value.
On one extreme there's Instagram where that's the main currency, but even on Twitter (which is supposedly about what you write), where you just have the one profile photo/maybe occasional other pictures, you can see it draw disproportionate attention and skew content. Naturally Twitter then inserts these accounts that draw lots of engagement into the feeds of everyone else so they're not possible to easily avoid.
Twelve years ago the userbase was much smaller, and a lot more people used real names either verbatim or stylized. It was much, much easier to know who people were. Now it's the same for me. Outside a handful of old timers that I recognize automatically, I don't really see usernames because the majority either start with "throwaway" or are otherwise gibberish to me. I myself abandoned my real name account 6 years ago, around the time I realized it was going to be a great risk to have ones name attached to ones thoughts permanently on the public web.
When I thought about it. I actually recognized your username from a hilarious no-bs image host post you had a few years back.
My experience is generally the same. I read for content. If I’m interested, I might click a profile link to see how long user has been on the site or if they have a personal site.
I am aware of one user, dang, and I learned he is the moderator of HN. Over time, I started to recognize his posts and to appreciate the enormous work he is doing each day.
"famous" :) . I'm on the list and wouldn't consider myself famous.
Thanks for putting this together, interesting to see the links of HNer's with a lot of karma.
Lots of other good suggestions as to what to do with this dataset, but I think it'd be fun to see a collection of the highest ranked comments by each user, perhaps with a minimum length. It'd be a way to get a collection of well thought out "essays" on different topics by use.
I've noticed that the heavily influential people are so busy with what they do that they don't pay attention to their fame. They let other people (who, to put bluntly, often aren't as clever or intelligent) praise them later, often posthumously in a best-selling biography.
We all have a scarcity of time on this planet, and I'm convinced that it's the duty of the excellent to (to quote William and Theodore from the 80s movie) "be excellent".
You're not alone. This submission showed me that I've interacted with some of the highest karma people on this site without even realizing it. I'd be lying if I said that didn't make me a little self-counscious.
