Item — HN Reader

>To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors.

This reads as if you're confusing HN the site (and its goals) with HN the community (and the behaviors of those people). The ideal is that the site goals and the community behavior would be identical. We know that's not how things unfold in practice.

1 comments

I'm not confusing them. But I would say, for example, that the HN guidelines and moderation, which come from the top, are focused more on encouraging commenters to respect each other, much less so on encouraging commenters to respect the article authors, who I guess are assumed to be not reading the comments.

I agree that the moderation is more focused on the commenters' behavior toward each other, but I disagree about the guidelines being focused there. Many of the guidelines are written so they are equally applicable to HN discussions as they are to authors (and their works). For example,

>Edit out swipes.

>Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

>Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

>Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Even so, I haven't seen any basis for thinking article summaries would change those community behaviors.