Okay, understand; unfortunately that means I will just stop posting on HN, since I neither have the desire to have “an identity” on HN, nor do I intend to disregard any guidelines. Thanks for all the work you do to keep HN running, please don’t take this personally, understand and agree with your position, just not good fit for me. Cheers!
Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise ratio for negative votes beyond pushing them below the “new comment” boost is of little positive impact in filtering content, in my opinion.
And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.
“Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and increase accountability. If you know a current user of the site [1], ask them for an invitation or request one in chat [2].”
Nothing stopping any user from creating posts related to an aspect of the content on any of those ADs, but it’s obvious allowing comments for ADs would potentially cause unneeded overhead for the advertiser; clearly if any YC advertisers want to post on HN, they’re free to do so within the guidelines on HN.
HN doesn’t block negative posts about YC companies.
My experience is the post without URLs, but say 10 upvotes are generally of lower quality than URL related posts with 10 upvotes. Not sure why this is, but I was forced to speculate, URL post intend tend to be by an expert on a topic and while non-URL post tend to be seeking experts; again, just speculation, might be wrong.
Yes, there’s a lot more upside to comments as a result.
Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote, downvote — allowing more downvote would most like have more negative than positive impact on the community.
Not sure that’s always been true, or at least for sure PG was open about subsets if the code. Generally, there’s reason to open source code, and open sourcing it would likely result in more overhead not less; generally HN goal is to very, very slowly change the code, interface, etc.
Honestly, cloning HN really would not be that hard, cloning dang, that’s another story.
EDIT:
Here’s a recent comment from dang on open source HN:
Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that’s not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542