Show HN: Hacker Smacker – spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

78 points - last Tuesday at 7:00 PM

Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).

Main website: https://hackersmacker.org

Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...

The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.

I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!

Source

Comments

ineedasername today at 6:27 PM

I’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?”

scrumper today at 6:31 PM

I wonder what the second order effects of this on the HN karma system will be. It'll create a graph of karmic supernodes perhaps. Say I green-blob someone with a big reputation here, say jacquesm; no doubt lots of other people will do the same. The friends-of-friends icon is going to appear widely but it'll all be a single edge away from Jacques' node. Is that much of a signal? I dunno. That's 30 seconds of thought about it. It's a fun idea though so I'll try it.

Version two: hide foes? Come to think of it, maybe the 'foe' aspect is the fun part...

EDIT: it's like I summoned him.

omoikane today at 6:37 PM

Related, there is already an extension that allows selected users to be highlighted, but without the shared server data for computing friend-of-a-friend relationships:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598

zzo38computer today at 9:03 PM

I would prefer to do the opposite, where everything is displayed in chronological order (with an option to display by threads or not; even if not you can still find what each one is a reply to) regardless of voting and regardless of who wrote them.

brodouevencode today at 8:51 PM

502 Bad Gateway

pavel_lishin today at 10:17 PM

Funny; I wrote a greasemonkey script to be able to highlight certain commenters here, but didn't even once consider adding a "networked" element to it.

ddtaylor today at 7:43 PM

I created and shared Ethos which is a sentiment and discourse analysis thing for HN and it's been plugging away. You're welcome to use its API if you want. Submit a PR for the CORS to be changed as needed.

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774

aendruk today at 9:43 PM

I just keep a custom stylesheet that annotates usernames with various emoji. Most of the time I update it as I read, but occasionally I’ll peruse the hidden comments to note e.g. uncharitable participation and revealed bigotry.

Reubachi today at 8:07 PM

A question, per your final comment on being available to answer questions:

What do you feel is the benefit to the community for this that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions?

I ask not out of malice, I ask because 2 reasons: 1. I imagine spending time on this/it's working well required you to see the value/benefit to it. 2. We must assume all hacker news commenting follows the rules, IE; good faith comment with relevant experience when required. This seems like a way to promote getting around that.

ZpJuUuNaQ5 today at 7:11 PM

Interesting. I'd love to have a browser extension that automatically blocks all comment sections on every site I visit, so I wouldn't feel the need to interact with anyone online.

waltbosz today at 8:01 PM

https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/blob/main/web/im...

How old is that icon set? I swear I used that same peppers icon for a Windows app that I published around 2002.

sebmellen today at 10:47 PM

Oh no… hugged to death!

cousinbryce today at 8:09 PM

Way down on my list of projects to vibe code is tags for HN users. I.e `Elon Stan` , `smart about aeronautics` , `grumpy` , `reasonable` etc etc. I like reading different opinion but if I formed an opinion about a user id like to record that without using my brain

istillcantcode today at 8:03 PM

I have a text file of commentors I normally disagree with and check in on them from time to time (about weekly). Its good fun and often I find there will be topics I do agree with them on. Reading the same opinions all the time is no fun.

titaniumtown today at 6:10 PM

Installed! Lets see how this goes. I'm going through previous interactions I've had with people.

deleted today at 6:27 PM

thinkingemote today at 9:44 PM

I used https://github.com/ToneyAlexander/HackerTagger for a bit almost a decade ago. Data locally stored, good but didn't transfer across machines, not so great.

It had a little text label next to names so you could manually add whatever you want. Recently I've thought about this extension and using it to tag the LLM users, or the humans who tend to pop up to fan the flames or who regularly post thought terminating comments - little tags to remind me to ignore the bots and trolls.

logicprog today at 7:19 PM

Hmm, I installed this in Waterfox for Android, and I don't appear to be able to tap on the bubbles next to people's usernames

Retr0id today at 7:31 PM

It'd be interesting to run pagerank over the trust graph

ImPostingOnHN today at 6:41 PM

this seems like it would increase tribalism and polarization

sickofparadox today at 9:38 PM

Another step towards the Redditification of hackernews. This is the exact opposite kind of functionality pages like HN need, we need ways to get people to engage with others' ideas more substantively rather than literally put someone on the "bad guy I won't talk to list".

jonathanstrange today at 7:35 PM

That's weird, I'm reading HN every day and never felt a need for something like that. In my experience, the quality of comments is very high and really bad ones tend to be downvoted or flagged fast. Could this be a time zone issue such that people in certain time zones are less fortunate than others?

goodpoint today at 7:37 PM

what about privacy?

slopinthebag today at 6:41 PM

[flagged]

elcapitan today at 7:27 PM

Finally someone brings this place the explicit toxicity it had been missing all those years. /s

SV_BubbleTime today at 6:33 PM

I would suggest categorizing the quality of comments by its content and not its creator. Oh, nevermind, that’s a silly thought.

Challenge my core belief? Well… I could rationally evaluate that, or, I could just use a tool to block it from my vision! Bubble thickener.