You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)
What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.
And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.
It was to the point that we were discussing just shutting down the comments entirely. But then we got gems! [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all, but also because it shows who is reading Hackaday!
Or take [Al Williams]’s article on mold-making a cement “paper” airplane. It was a cool technique, but the commenters latched onto his assertion that you couldn’t fly a cement plane, and the discussions that ensued are awesome. Part of me wanted to remind folks about the nice mold-making technique on display, but it was such a joy to go down that odd rabbit hole, I forgive you all!
We have an official “be nice” policy about the comments, and that extends fairly broadly. We really don’t want to hear what you don’t like about someone’s project or the way they presented it, because it brings down the people out there who are doing the hard work of posting their hacks. And hackers have the highest priority on Hackaday.
“52 comments” and there’s only 7 left??
I also noticed a recent surge in negative/pointless comments but, as an adult, I scroll past them. I do the same with articles that I’m not interested in or are just a link to a youtube video.
Sometimes I see an interesting article and, if I have something positive to say, I’ll add that.
Quite a few times I’ll see a pointless hack and comment to mention a much simpler alternative.
How about you allow a simple vote on comments and then, if it drops below a certain threshold, hide that comment?
Voting causes gaming of the voting system and echo chambers, but you’ll see this comment disappear in seconds because they’re now in damage control mode trying to erase the whole discussion about it.
streisand effect in progress.
I like reading funny comments.
I like making funny comments.
Am I going to be banned?
theres a thread on reddit now.
Is that you J. List?
There’s always some person who doesn’t understand that their direction in life is all in their own hands. There’s no positive way to deal with negative people. I wouldn’t mind a personal block button, although that’s probably hard to implement in this kind of forum.
Negativity isn’t that bad really. Helps balance out the positive.
I hope the comments will stay. As you write someone will always add some fantastic informational addition.
An article about comments is attracting a lot of comments, how meta.
streisand effect.
Hello where is my comment?
Tact, Class, intelligent conversation using facts … it’s all long gone.
The new ‘masculinity’ is to revert to caveman status and trash talk and beat down.
A sad, cringy display of ‘toughness’.
Killed a political party – – Destroying a nation.
Kyrie Eleison
Look. If you want to shut down the comments section because people are disagreeing with your editorial choices over topics and projects to cover, and the contents therein, then do it. Don’t play these games with deleting dissenting comments, discussion and criticism. You know you only want the “good opinions”, like when some professional chimes in to correct you, and you don’t want the unwashed masses come interrupting you when you’re talking about stuff you like.
Just do it. Shut down the comments section.
There’s nothing you gain from having to police the comments section to only contain people going “Good job!” and having no real conversation over the pros and cons, or whether it’s even a hack or some youtube clickbait or a scam. You don’t really want the public to have an opinion at all. If you want to have total control, you already have it. Just stop pretending. You owe that much to your viewers – to be honest about the business you’re pulling.
well, maybe have a real comment system would help ie something we could actually discuss the projects properly in (including editing our comments).
And I often find the comments to be more informative than the articles.
…and then there were 5.
That escalated quickly.
The convenient thing about censorship is the assumption that whatever was censored was bad – so the 200+ comments worth of discussion was “obviously” just trolling.
This site is to highlight and present and encourage hacks, projects, and related topics.
Why shouldn’t they delete unsuitable comments?
I think your anger at their “control” is telling. What is this imaginary “..pretending..” and “..business your pulling” you claim?
I suggest you start your own “Let’s Troll this Project” site, and a “hackaday sucks” reddit…
…well, this no longer makes much sense, since the comment I responded to is gone …
It makes perfect sense. You’re saying that HaD has the right to delete unsuitable comments, which is unquestionably correct.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. It’s the only conclusion I can have after viewing hackaday comments over so many years. I think the authors are spot on with all of their opinions and should have full reign over what comments people are allowed to post.
LOL they are having a complete meltdown and deleting comments everywhere XD.
When I complete a project I don’t go looking for praise for how good of a job I have done that info is useless to me, I want to know where I messed up I want to know if it was a stupid idea in the first place if I rejected all criticism and negative commentary entirely I’d never improve my skills or grow as a person instead I’d be as vapid and useless as the current moderation of this web forum.
I’m confused. We had 117 posts the last time I viewed this page to 65 being listed now … and only 8 posts actually shown. Did we overflow a buffer or something??
Or did the censors simply go crazy overreacting and mess up all the html ….
they are just deleting everything. i even went to follow up my posts on the nuclear and crt threads, and they were just gone. dude posted an positive comment and it was deleted within seconds. going scorched earth on your own community is not my idea of kindness. bye post. i know you will be gone soon.
Maybe hackaday is filing for an IPO. Have to present a squeaky-clean image to investors.
I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware this was a personal diary where the article writers recorded their thoughts on projects they liked, for their own reading.
I thought this was a site with articles summarizing useful, educational, or otherwise noteworthy projects, hacks, or methods, for the rest of the community to read.
(And a poorly/un edited one at that. Honestly, if you can’t even respect your readers enough to spend 30 seconds to proofread and spell check a 4 paragraph post, why are we not allowed to cal you out on it?)
A site for community consumption means there needs to be a bar for what is, and what is not worthy. Not all gatekeeping is negative. HaD has the job of curation (among other things)
“This is an example of what NOT to use a 3d printer for” IS constructive criticism.
You don’t want constructive criticism.
You want a pat on the back for participation.
How about some constructive criticism for HaD as a whole?
If you don’t want people to complain when you post yet another article where someone 3d prints a box, or some ai garbage, then either don’t post it, or give us a way to filter it out.
And if HaD isn’t going to bother to edit articles, then give us a button to edit it for you.
now they nuked reddit posts. the beast is eating itself.
Are the comments FIFO or a circular array? When I first looked there were 110 comments, then it dropped to 53 now it says 66 but only the last few now show.
moderators gone berserk. dont like it when people resist the narrative.
What’s happening here? 125 comments, then 67 comments, of which just nine are visible.
And a “high-value comment” specifically mentioned in the post:
“[…] [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all […]”
is now also deleted.
It seems there’s more at play here than just editorial flexing. Is the backend broken somehow?
no, this is caused by the moderators doing damage control because their declaration of thought policing the community didn’t go down so well.
Hackaday just realizing they are on the internet. /s
Hahaha
Are we keeping awake somebody in Europe?
Keep deleting all the comments on this article with constructive criticism.
It’s definitely a good look…
Nah, let ’em cook. They can enjoy their new audience of five whole people.
hahahaha hackaday has identified the liability that threatens the future of this website: having a community.
B-but what will the advertisers think, if someone says a naughty word???
HaD: Everyone who isn’t our best buddy and pats on our shoulders is our enemy? Seriously?
All the other news media did this years ago. They’re just behind the curve.
you know i never posted on the site formerly known as twitter. even when it was still twitter. but here we are.
i am just genuinely in awe of this. the website has suddenly become interesting in a whole new and unexpected way. it’s gone from willfully discussing the “enshitification” of web services — which i take to mean the replacement of information and community resources with engagement farming for advertisers — to a forum where you literally are banned for bemoaning the clickbait nature of youtube videos. and so quickly!
i know this comment will be deleted but whoever deletes it should know: i am impressed! in an internet where we swim in shit every day, this moment stands out even so. i’ll always remember hackaday, because of this moment. this is an apex of something.
they haven’t clamped down on x yet, so keep up the good fight.
Good news is they can’t ban you lol. For a hacker website the fact that I can evade bans by typing in a different (fake) e-mail is wild. I guess incompetence and censorship go hand in hand after all.
im just using my real email. i have nothing to hide. call out censorship contrary to the values of the hacker/maker community and they delete your posts. even ones not related to the article in question.
In the context of this website, it genuinely is so. It feels like standing on a hilltop and looking around, seeing the valleys below flooded with effluent, and then looking up and realizing that there’s a big shower head above you that is starting to spew out brown chunky water and all you can do is stand there with your mouth open.
if a man preaches from a soapbox, and nobody is there to listen, is he really even saying anything?
This started at 7:53am and is now 6:03 and is still going strong. Congratulations!
i think the community is winning, they stopped deleting posts as fast.
Well, a lot of articles I’ve seen lately on yahoo etc. are just a regurgitation of old articles with different material. Like “My tiny little brains is (insert method here).
At the bottom of this page it says:
“This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.”
You can post a comment and AI decides if it is published or not.
The net and many comment sections have become the following:
You may post as long as AI “approves” of your comment, no human interaction
needed. I get reducing or eliminating spam, but when you silence the person
posting a comment because some algorithm “thinks” it’s whatever, there’s the problem.
What AI moderation does, is teach you how to write a better comment. If the BOT deleted your crappy comment, write a better one that its happy with. Its not rocket science, you do not have free speech in a private moderated space, you have the right to play by the rules offered a guest as offered by the host.
By all means, come party at my place, but you act like a moron, expect to be thrown out on your ear. Seems some people really need to learn that the comment section still requires decorum and manners, its not your very own play thing.
I thought it was a good post. It spoke to the reason I never read comments. I broke my own rule out of curiosity as to the sort of responses this article might bring. The comments just prove once more why it was a good idea to stop reading comments. Oh well. [shrug]
It’s pretty funny that folks (some HaD commenters) expect to have unyielding freedom of speech when writing things on other people’s (HaD’s) computers.
Go build your own site and it has YOUR rules.
Playing in someone else’s sandbox? Gotta learn what you can do with someone else’s sand.
You’re right, but you have to mind that it’s not that simple. HaD is a private platform and they’re entitled to apply whatever rules they wish, but some of the rules they might apply can be antithetical to the whole point of the “hacker community” in a sense, or against the people in general.
If they wish to be an exclusive club with strict rules of conduct, then they can state so and be explicit about it. If they wish to cater to the public in general and welcome people from all walks of life who happen to enjoy this topic, then they have to accommodate a variety of opinions and not just their own – or yours in particular.
If you want to be an open community that is shaped by the community, then you have to allow a diversity of opinions even when they’re against your personal wishes. If you want to enforce your personal wishes, then you should at least state so openly, so the people coming in from outside can know whether they’re welcome.
If you try to rally a community and then apply your personal standards on the community to shape the people to behave as you wish, you’ll run into problems. Some will agree, others won’t. Declaring that the people who don’t agree are wrong is misguided, because it’s arbitrary – because you never had the discussion about what it means to be in your community. You simply declared that you don’t want these people in after the fact. Worse still, you may be a latecomer trying to take over the community by re-defining what it’s supposed to be about.
Can you not see the problem with that? Did you build Hackaday? Do you define the rules?
Exactly this.
Even if I was the designer and builder of Hackaday, I would always have the doubt that I or you can define this community as a whole. I’m not so sure that our values and sensibilities define this place even if as a majority, because while they seem reasonable to you and me, they can be challenged by others.
What I’m saying is, I wish not to enforce an ideal of “the community” but to speak out about the reasons and logic of what makes the community for me, and hear how the people respond. If they disagree, I won’t shut up, yet I will recognize the opposing point and respect it. That to me is what being a community is about – not dominance but voicing your mind while respecting the minds of others. Not bowing down, and not pressing down, but standing as equals.
So I cannot comment on what the values of the hacker/maker community are as I don’t know everyone’s minds, but I can say what they should be and expect a like response. To have that voice arbitrarily moderated or silenced entirely is deeply offensive to me.
I agree that it’s unreasonable to shoehorn everyone into some collective ‘hacker community’ – I wouldn’t know where to begin with summarizing each person’s formulative viewpoint on what a hacker or a community of hackers are.
But, the concept that any webmaster / website OWES passerby readers / commenters a space that tailors to THEIR notion of what a hacker or hacker community should be, FOR FREE mind you, is absurd. Sure, there’s a symbiotic relationship between site and viewer, but at the end of the day, the site owner is footing the bill; it’s their call what’s on the site, including the comments. Moderating comment content is time consuming and mostly zero value add for a website owner.
If the Ts and Cs of being a contributing (read: commenting) member of THIS community don’t align with a person’s personal ‘hacker community manifesto’, then it seems clear that the community that’s being established or modified is different than their own and they’d be better off finding / building their own.
I stopped blogging because of the idiots in the comment section. I have also pretty much dropped out of all social media and rarely read the comment sections on websites because its nothing more than a tribal pantomime where the play actors and weekend wanna be’s who have never contributed a thing in their life get to act like they are published experts in the field with their PHD’s in forum commenting.
The less time I spend on people like this the better my mental health is. I certainly do not regret dropping out of the online stupidities and focusing on real life and real people instead.
Second post today. Jolly good show!
Some people look shabby in The Shroud of Anonymity.
Same reason I gave up on online gaming so many years ago. Whether you’re sitting on my couch or 2000 miles away, be nice please! Life’s too short to spent so much time being mean.
We must be getting closer to having more comments deleted in this thread than are left. The post counter can’t even keep up. Having read all of the posts back when the counter legitimately exceeded 120 I can say with good authority that a huge number of the posts that have now been deleted were not offensive in the least. Many offered really good suggestions for HaD to avoid some of the comments they deem unacceptable … one recurring post suggesting that HaD prioritize quality over quantity. All gone now.
How sad that censorship is based upon hurt feelings instead of actual constructive content.
I still choose to believe this is because of a glitch in the forum software instead of intentional effort, because the latter would break my heart.
Hey everyone – Hackaday is NOT deleting comments here. Someone is mass reporting comments, which kicks them back to pending. There are currently over 300 comments in pending due to this.
Thank you! Keep up the good work!
Nice excuse, but this always happens whenever people in the comments start criticizing the moderators here. If this were a problem with the report feature you’d have fixed it by now.
Everything has been put back and it read two hundred and seventy. After thirteen hours of activity, I think we just won.
Just rate stuff with an AI and make the size and brightness of a font (relative contrast) proportional to its apparent value. It is after all almost 2025, we are living in the future!