alt Hacker NewsI’d encourage a change of labels away from “friend/foe”. It may seem minor but the subtle loaded nature of those paired terms encourages an adversarial stance rather than one of productive discourse. It’s not catchy so there’s probably better than this but, just as an example— “engage/ignore” could better signal to the user a neutral “do I want to bother with this person?”
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Agreed, independent of where the terminology came from, I think if you're trying to promote healthier engagement both for yourself and others using this extension, then not having such adversarial names it's probably a good idea. It should just end up being a sort of web of trust to help you decide what's worth engaging with — and sometimes perfectly valid people that you're not actually enemies with or anything just aren't worth your time engaging with because of fundamental axiological or positional differences.
That's just Slashdot's influence. They did the same thing at some point.
Bring back hot or not!
favorite / potato
Although there are some commenters I would want to follow because they are potato.
There is something so magical about some of the more delulu Take Havers around here.
That's such a friend thing to say!
I like friend and foe far more than engage and ignore. A foe isnt someone you ignore. Ignoring is what builds bubbles. A foe can often be right even if you disagree.
I'd suggest to move even beyond "engage/ignore".
This is HN. The focus should be "does this person provide interesting or thought provoking comments", not "relationships" or "engagement".
There are plenty of HN commenters whose opinions I absolutely dislike (I'm sure it's mutual ;), but I still read them - they are at least well reasoned or point out missing facts. I don't have to like them to learn from them.
That would imply a slightly different semantics than what the extension currently provides, though.
If you truly want certain users to be "ignored", then you probably want any of their comments (and the subtree of descendant comments) to be hidden/collapsed/made less legible, so that you don't accidentally read them, and thereby don't accidentally get rage-baited by them into wasting your day arguing with them. Same as e.g. kill files on Usenet.
Given that this comment collapsing/hiding/visibility-decreasing is something already built into HN (for comments/subtrees with strongly-negative score), it'd be really easy for the extension to hijack this functionality for its own purposes... if it actually wanted the red button to mean "ignore".
That the extension doesn't do that, implies to me that the extensions intended semantics for "foes" isn't "I don't want to engage with this person" but rather "I want to notice this person more." Perhaps "so that I can take the opportunity to actively antagonize them / argue with everything they say."
(I'm not saying that this is a good thing; just that insofar as "the purpose of a system is what it does", this is the purpose of a plain "foe" signal!)