A real Hacker News would provide nothing more than a malformed XML file, and require users to clean it, parse it, and display it in their own artisanally-handcrafted client if they wanted to read it.
It's not too hard to write your own extension for this.
I did this myself, but I'm hesitant to share it as I fear lots of people using it will result in everyone hiding the same band of assholes, their comments not getting flagged, leading to a sort of "broken staircase" effect.
That said, I would not be able to use HN without it. I find some prolific people on HN completely and utterly insufferable assholes. Currently the variable name is "bozo", but originally a different four letter word, and was written in a fit of "anger-driven development" after I decided I have zero interest in ever talking to a particular person ever again (the context was that they seriously straw-manned my "I think it's a complex trade-off with up- and downsides" opinion as "zomg you're saying it's impossible, you're stuck in the past!!11" over several threads even after I carefully tried explaining the nuance; I have no problem if people disagree with that, but this person is either not capable of reading the English language or is only interested in bullying their opinion on others – whatever the case, I have no interest in engaging with that).
"You're also posting good comments, so I won't ban you yet" is the policy I disagree with the most on HN. Especially for some prolific people it means at least one, and often several, bad comments per day. These people should be held to a higher bar, not a lower bar. I don't care if you also post good comments about other topics if you lose your shit every time {certain politics, religion, Go, systemd, X11, Google, JavaScript} gets mentioned and you shit up every fucking thread with the same stupid bullshit.
The occasional bad comment is normal; I probably have a few of those and no one is perfect. But I can name a few accounts from the top of my head and can virtually guarantee you there are going to be flagged shitty comments right on the first page. It baffles me some of these people aren't banned.
Some other people on my list shouldn't be banned necessarily, but I just don't enjoy talking to them for whatever reason. Easiest for everyone to just hide it.
I read a book once where one of the setting elements was the idea of spam filters combined with shared blacklists taken a few more logical steps.
Everyone had embedded AR right in their heads, and it was possible to basically edit someone entirely out of your reality.
People could and did subscribe to shared blocklists just like we already do for say ublock origin, and some lists were essentially defaults that practically everyone used, so anyone in one of those lists was invisible to essentially everyone.
And people got into these lists merely for being annoying or disliked for any reason, not necessarily for any actual wrongdoing.
Enemies of any sort like business or political rivals could get anyone they didn't like erased just by getting a few other people to decide they don't like them. Often the most correct people are the least liked by everyone else, because they say things no one else wants to hear.
And of course that's exactly what happens in the story. Someone knows about an impending disaster, it might have been aliens or AIs or currently in-power leaders corroborating with both of those, whatever it was, it was real and the protagonists knew about it, and could not tell anyone about it, because everyone had voluntarily given themselves this handicap.
I don't know what to tell you about the less dangerous normal limited sorts of filtering we have now. Obviously filtering out an individual on HN would harm no one, not even them. It would still not be actually dangerous even if there were popularity contest shared blocklists and they got filtered by everyone on HN, since it would still just be HN.
But every time I hear the idea of filtering out people rather than spam or ads or malware etc, but people, regardless of what they might say, I think it is a self-inflicted maiming like having no pain receptors.
There is something going on where this idea seems good because right now we can't actually do it very much, but what about next week when we can do it way way more effectively? If it's not still a good idea then, then I think that must mean it's not a good idea period.
There are people I would filter too. I'm not claiming to be any better. I just think there is a problem that needs to be thougt about.
Yes. "Mute words" would be great for comments and stories as well.
I often wonder how much of what makes HN HN is the lack of features though. Like it seems like a no brainer to add notifications for replies to your comments, but it would probably promote flamewars, and also reduce traffic to the homepage, since people wouldn't need to visit just to see if someone replied to their comment.
