The gamification was in large part misaligned with the site's objectives. It's a shame Atwood and Spolsky didn't realize the problems and didn't explicitly solicit and incorporate feedback about it basically ever. (Not that random user proposals were ever especially good, but.)
At Codidact we're trying to build systems that hand out privileges based on actions taken that are relevant to the privilege. There's still a reputation system but the per-user numbers are relatively de-emphasized. And posts are by default sorted by Wilson score, with separate up/down counts visible to everyone by default, so that downvotes on an upvoted post (and vice-versa) have meaningful effect and "bad" voting can be more easily corrected. There's also a system of "reactions" for posts so that people willing to put their username behind it can explicitly mark an answer as outdated or dangerous.
AFAIK, not a lot in HN gets outright removed. A decent amount of stuff will get flagged (and thus becomes invisible) especially when it's anywhere near politics.
But even in those spaces, few things end up actually being flagged even when the flames are burning hot.
> there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either
Once it became a product there was constant tension between community and management. A 24 year old PM who had never worked in software would come declare a sweeping change and then accuse the community for being toxic uninclusive trolls.
Also Joel violated all rules and norms and used it to promote his personal political platform.
It isn't necessary to identify the world's most unfortunate person to recognize that most redditors have privileged lives, yet choose to wallow in misery.
I don’t think Craig gets enough blame. He’s the one who just loves gadget features and shiny stuff. I don’t think Apple has championed a single Mac feature around making your computer more a powerful system for professional work since he has taken over.
Let’s focus on the specific claims in your comment.
> People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism
Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.
Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment and address the rest point by point. You’ll find that it expands from that first point, and describes the consequences of capitalism and competition as an organizing principle.
We are discussing UI/Icon design, not the geopolitical implications of AGI or the Holocene extinction event.
Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?
Why is capitalist competition worse than any other form of competition? Wouldn’t wartime competition over land and sovereignty be far worse? Didn’t the Soviet Union have extreme forms of political competition?
People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.
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