zlacker

You can just not read these stories? Or even hide them?

I wasn't really interested in all those Reddit stories last month either, mostly because they were all exactly the same wankfest. So I just hid them. Problem solved.

As long as the frontpage isn't overrun with these kind of stories every day I don't really see the problem. Even when restricted to purely technical topics – and HN is NOT for purely technical topics – there's will always be heaps of stories you won't be interested in for one reason or the other, and that's fine.

>>arp242+(OP)
The problem is that it’s not just limited to the stories; people in the comments frequently go on annoying or inflammatory tangents.

>>philwe+ud
I agree, but that's a bit of different thing, and not limited to these kind of topics.

>>philwe+ud
The “[–]” button is a Good Thing™.

>>philwe+ud
I'd prefer a block function, but the HN community (when searching old topics) seems very against it, and the one block extension I found is Chrome only. But In the meantime I guess I just minimize a topic when that happens.

>>johnny+mJ
Here's my HN block extension for Firefox: https://gist.github.com/arp242/3159b9cbbbe148c786e1ca10adaae...

Also includes some other things like changed styling and whatnot; it's not really "for publication" and some tweaking may be required, but here it is. Load it manually via about:debugging.

You need to load a post by clicking on the date, and then you can click "bozo" or "block": the "bozo" just marks the post as someone being a "bozo" but doesn't block it. This is useful because everyone can have a bad day or whatever, and that's fine. It's people who consistently seem to be having "bad days" that are the problem – unfortunately there's a small group of highly prolific posters that I find consistently unpleasant, and with just ~20-30 people hidden like this (some of whom really ought to be banned IMHO) I found HN becomes a significantly better experience.

The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/

>>arp242+Lz4
Oh, this is perfect. Thank you! (On a tangent: replies like these are why I wish we had ways to get notifications for responses. Another paradigm of HN I don't fully agree with but I digress).

I do like the distinguishing factor between marking a commenter and blocking. I don't like (and think it's dangerous) to feel like blocking any old bad commenter over one comment is the go-to option, so having a way to self-warn myself if this is the same user before going nuclear is a nice touch.

>The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/

True, it is indeed a macro issue. But at the same time I feel it's a micro problem and there's a point where I need to look out for myself as opposed to the site at large. Let sleeping dogs lie, for now.