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Comment by ap22213 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting perspective. If that's the current common view, then in a way I feel really outdated. I clearly haven't been paying attention and honestly haven't been aware that 'down-voting' has changed in meaning over the past 10 years or so.

Thanks for pointing that out. It's good to learn new things.

Although I feel kind of aged at the moment, it also makes me feel good knowing that I can now suppress people much more liberally and not [care if their content was meant to be constructive or not]. Who knew?

edit from: give a shit

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You have 1400 karma, how did you not figure out what the downvote button is for up until now?

Who says that people "don't give a shit"? People disagreeing with your opinions, and down-voting your posts, is not necessarily a sign that things have changed or that the down-voters are cruel. Unpopular posts have been around a long time.

I'm not sure if it's the majority view, but it's certainly held by a decent percentage of people.

I think the change happened gradually; people saw what happened as the result of espousing populist "everyone has a voice and a downvote is only for trolling" policies, on sites like Slashdot and Digg and early pre-subreddits Reddit: a reversion-to-the-societal-mean of cat pictures and other "shallow content", and the complete inability to have a discussion on a topic of any controversy.

The reaction, as seen originally in MetaFilter and SomethingAwful, and lately in post-subreddits Reddit, Tumblr, Discourse, Slack, etc., is that attempting to create a community that contains people with diametrically-opposed viewpoints is silly, and the fundamental verb of community-building is moderation: banning people who don't fit in, so that what's left is a pleasant place to have a conversation without anyone needing to expend any effort in tolerating anyone else.

The group who believes in the early, populist systems, calls the second wave of systems "echo chambers"—but engaging with that idea at an object-level is silly, because I really believe there's a fundamental difference between the environment in which the two kinds of forums were built.

The first wave of forums were built from the ideas of Usenet, IRC, and ISP-hosted chatrooms: open-access "places" that served as Schelling points for anyone interested in a topic. There was no real possibility for moderation, and the sheer scale of the problem (the possibility of a 10000:1 user-to-moderator ratio) made "community-building" impossible. Also, it was, for many people, the only place online where they could express themselves—for anyone who wasn't enough of a wizard to put together HTML and a web-server, the shiny "POST" button on a forum somewhere was the only way to get their opinion out there.

The second wave of forums is being built in an environment where everyone has their own blog (or Twitter/Facebook feed), people can asymmetrically "follow" one-another's blogs in numerous ways and "unfollow" when they lose interest, and people each use many small forums to engage in their interests, where frequently these blog posts are shared (this being the usual way people's personal blogs get discovered.)

In this newer system, each forum is less like a "place", and more like a "group"—a circle of friends that happen to share a common interest, but who also share values that allow them to get along even when not talking about that interest. People bounce around between many small group-forums (HN being one of those) until they find a few forums compatible with their values, and then stay active in all of them, fully comfortable with the idea of participating in several non-overlapping spheres that could be connected and mixed together, but that aren't, for social rather than topical reasons.

One more interesting aspect of the newer Internet is that, when engaged in these group-forums, people naturally lean toward developing "faces": different presentations of aspects of themselves, tuned to the interests and values of the group. I would never talk about e.g. my weekends spent with my girlfriend with my online D&D group, because they're all single so it'd just annoy them. What I do on the weekend is an aspect of me, but it's not an aspect of "that guy that posts in that Slack team." And so on for each group-forum we engage with.

I can understand missing the old "place culture" of the Internet—the heady days where a forum was just everybody that happened to like something or be somewhere, where both heavy arguments and friendships could spring up. But I think I prefer the current culture: the one thing it's done for me, personally, is to remove some "perennial arguments" from most of the places I visit. Having a community means being able to have a culture, with cultural mores like "we know we don't agree about X, and at this point more ink spilled on the subject is just wasted"—and being able to teach that culture even to new members who weren't there for the original arguments. There's much less to roll my eyes at on the new Internet (though there is the whole concept of "hate-blogging", where people build communities based on a shared distaste for something, and then sometimes things leak out of those communities and it's quite painful.) It's also much simpler to make "real" friends (as opposed to acquaintances), since joining a group-forum is less like joining a society (which tells you nothing about how likely anyone there is to like you), and more like joining a club (where, if you liked the club enough to join, this greatly increases your chances you'll like the people in the club enough to become personal friends.)

Reddit's reddiquette advises users to use the downvote arrow only to indicate that a post is not constructive or off-topic. Further, users are told that it's best not to downvote just because they disagree with something.

The vast overwhelming majority of users on that site use downvotes to indicate disagreement, or dislike. That interpretation of downvoting has, like it or not, spread throughout the internet. Here? Yes, probably even here.

>The first wave of forums were built from the ideas of Usenet, IRC, and ISP-hosted chatrooms: open-access "places" that served as Schelling points for anyone interested in a topic. There was no real possibility for moderation, and the sheer scale of the problem (the possibility of a 10000:1 user-to-moderator ratio) made "community-building" impossible.

It's quite possible to create a community in an IRC channel. I was part of several quite vibrant communities in various IRC channels in the mid to late 1990s. It's also possible to moderate IRC channels. You can be kicked out of a channel for a period of time, banned from channels, or even entire networks. Operators in individual channels can even choose to grant "voice" to some people and then set a channel mode (+m, for moderated) so that only people with voice can even speak in the channel.

>One more interesting aspect of the newer Internet is that, when engaged in these group-forums, people naturally lean toward developing "faces": different presentations of aspects of themselves, tuned to the interests and values of the group.

Sociologists have long studied how people present different aspects of themselves to different groups depending on the norms of those groups. I would not call that a feature unique to the "newer" Internet, but the newer internet does allow for greater separation of whatever parts of your personality you feel like expressing.

I miss the old culture of the Internet because it was easier for me to find people who shared my interests but had viewpoints different enough from my own that it was possible to have very interesting conversations. Your definition of community sounds, quite frankly, rather boring to me. I fall solidly in the camp of "nothing interesting is happening without a little conflict". What has been lost on this "newer" Internet is the ability to have an ideological conflict remain purely ideological. There is a greater tendency for online conflict to veer into the realm of the personal, especially in these modern communities that you prefer, because there's a shortage of ideas that are "permissible" to argue about.

My $0.02, anyway.

> It's quite possible to create a community in an IRC channel.

Sure, but it didn't used to be the norm. The usage of IRC has shifted over time, from "channel-as-place" to "channel-as-community", with many of the original "channel-as-place" IRC networks now dead or virtual ghost-towns. The big reason everyone is in a love-fest for Slack but can't quite enunciate is that it's IRC but with multiple channels for each community, which encourages people to distinguish the two concepts further.

> I would not call that a feature unique to the "newer" Internet.

I didn't mean to imply it was, but rather that the first-wave of BBSes was a unique time because there was very little of that; everyone was their full self, in all their horrible glory.

It may have helped that many Internet users up through the early 90s were nerds without enough emotional intelligence to see the point in putting up a face; and that the great number of these made it easier to drop one's own face without being judged for it.

You can still see this effect on e.g. 4chan, where it's impossible to feel "excluded" in any ongoing sense, because of the lack of persistent identity. Anyone who says that "4chan's anonymity is valuable, because it generates a lot of Original Content" means specifically that people dropping face enables for some uniquely-interesting interactions.

> What has been lost on this "newer" Internet is the ability to have an ideological conflict remain purely ideological.

This still happens—but, instead of being an automatic result of everyone just sort of airing their views in the open and colliding (and then blocking everyone annoying enough until everyone who's left has this ability), you have to actively look for a community where "keeping ideological arguments ideological" is a cultural norm of that community.

http://slatestarcodex.com/ 's comments section (which has somehow become a vibrant community, despite the worst UX for community-building ever) is a pretty good example: there are people from everywhere on the political spectrum, of several religions and varying backgrounds, engaging with one-another on some decidedly controversial topics, where it's the culture of the community—and the desire not to lose it—that keeps everything civil.

>Sure, but it didn't used to be the norm. The usage of IRC has shifted over time, from "channel-as-place" to "channel-as-community."

Interesting. My experience is the opposite. The channels I am still involved with are much less communities now than I knew a couple of decades ago. Anecdotal so not intended as a refutation to your point, just a "hmm, that's interesting..."

>you have to actively look for a community where "keeping ideological arguments ideological" is a cultural norm of that community.

Which is one of the reasons why I like HN. Also the effective moderation here does help.

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