Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion. Yes, it benefits from being smaller and well-moderated, but it suffers from the same group-think, the same "circle-jerks" (har har Golang/Django/Theranos), etc. There are plenty of snarky and lazy comments, we just up-vote them because we agree with them.

It's amazing that a former executive of reddit thinks a) it's easy to build a large online community b) it'll be easy to monetize (the hardest part) community and c) it'll be easy to moderate (hey people will do that for free, right?).

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HN still has some groupthink, but it has less snark and laziness than any other online community I've seen.

Drive-by wit doesn't get upvotes, even when it reflects HN groupthink.

More importantly, on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation. Take ad blocking for example—you'll invariably see a lot of comments decrying advertising and associated upvotes. But you'll also see well-reasoned defenses of advertising that can also rise to the top.

HN has managed to allow different groups to interact somewhat civilly without resorting to tribalism.

>on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation

Maybe the problem is what you consider "contentious"? I certainly wouldn't put ad-blocking in that boat. I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat. How do they fair?

> I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat.

For the latter two, you see a diversity of perspectives. There are plenty on HN toeing the populist line (H1Bs = evil, HFT = evil), but also people willing to go into the nuance and give oppositional evidence. Well-substantiated comments rise to the top even when they defy the populist thinking.

I'll concede that the former doesn't have good discussions, but I'm not sure it's possible to have a quality discussion about "sexism in tech" in any online forum. Saying the wrong thing will lead to you losing your job, but full anonymity brings out the trolls and the sexists.

I'd put those in there. Also promoting old tech like Ada, criticizing popular things like Rust/Web/Cloud, shifting blame to women on sexism posts where it makes sense, discouraging use of VC tech for anything critical, countering pg on economic inequality, countering white privileged concept from angle of white minority in black-controlled areas, and countering mainstream security in general.

I'd say that's a nice collection of all the reasons my account would disappear somewhere else. As dang and tptacek described, there is an effect where they get hit with significant, sometimes massive, downvotes followed by more thoughtful people who valued a counterpoint that at least presented arguments or evidence. Plus a handful that agree with it probably. The sloooow upvote, but rapid downvotes, of some of those comments which would be popular elsewhere shows the site bias in action.

Critical to a parent's claim, though, is that those comments all survived with positive votes and sometimes continuing discussion. It's rare that I delete one for being totally ineffective. For me, high in dissent in contentious topics, I scrounged up 5000+ karma in a year without actually trying to get karma. That's clearly due to culture and moderation here that pushes for higher-quality discussions that are more tolerant of dissent than critics elsewhere say about HN.

> More importantly, on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation.

Describe 3 good arguments in favor of the NSA you've seen on HN.

Their contributions to crypto software, as controversial as they may be, would exceed 3 arguments alone.

And as much as a lot of us here (myself included) think they're a net negative on the world, that doesn't mean they don't come with positives. They may not catch all threats but it's highly doubtful they catch none.

I'd wager that if you broke it down to the core elements, people aren't against the NSA but against the techniques they use: lack of transparency, gag orders, mass surveillance, etc.

And just to give you an actual third separate argument, the NSA existing keeps security in check. The threat of an entity that turns theoretical attacks into actual attacks means you can't get away with the "it'll never happen" excuse when building a secure system.

I'm not asking you to generate arguments a hypothetical NSA proponent might use, from a person who assures us (s)he finds them unconvincing. Far from evidence against groupthink, that's evidence in favor of it.

I'm asking you to recount specific instances when an NSA proponent did make arguments here, that they themselves held, at the risk of their own social capital.

I didn't pull my reply out of thin air, these are arguments I have seen on HN.

I challenge you to write a negative comment about Snowden without instantly being downvoted to -4.

I agree that there is some group think at HN, but it is significantly better than most other sites. I believe it's impossible not to have group think as society is conditioned to favour certain beliefs and values, particularly through media, law and education.

As an example, I dislike prejudice and believe in a level playing field. This often puts me at odds with Political Correctness and feminism (eg. I disagree that sexism is a male behaviour (eg. The use of the term misogyny to reenforce this belief) and I condemn sexism by anyone). About 50% of the time I am modded down on HN. Challenging sexism from a feminist a guaranteed mod down at The Verge and a near certainty of being modded down at Ars Technica.

So, I consider HN to be more open minded than almost all other forums, save one. Many users on this other forum are mindful of the PC trap and discourage sexist terms like misogynist (instead of the more balanced, less political term - sexist)

>I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion.

I don't think anyone thinks that. The point isn't "HN is a utopia." It's "HN provides better discussion than most other places on the internet." On reddit, your comment probably would have been downvoted to hell by people who disagreed with you.

I think it's because HN has a single theme. Like you said there are many annoying cases on HN too. Let's say your chance of coming across one is 1%. On Reddit you have many of these communities, so the chance of coming across annoying posts become N% (depending on how many subreddits you read)

HN doesn't have a single theme, and if people think it does, we're doing something wrong. On the front page right now are posts about elephant brains, Nazi propaganda, and aphantasia, for example. That seems like thematic pluralism to me.

It's interesting comment coming from the moderator. I know what you mean, but it is "Hacker News" after all. That's why when sometimes people see irrelevant posts they say "why the hell is this on the front page of HN?". The reason I said "Theme" instead of "Topic" is exactly for the same reason. I think the theme of this site is something that would interest people with curiosity (which comes from the "Hacker" theme).

Ok, if intellectual curiosity counts as a theme, then I agree.

This goes back to the beginning of the site btw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

The single theme is that of intellectual stimulation, which attracts a certain crowd. We don't see any content in the entertainment space, or the politics space, for example, unless said content is stuff that hacker types find intellectually stimulating.

I like that categorization. The concept that it's all intellectually stimulating to at least a few types of "hackers" does capture most of what I see.

And yet people often complain that this site is becoming too mainstream, too inundated with content of low intellectual value, and that there are few actual "hacker types" here. To the point that accusing the site of turning into Reddit is specifically pointed out in the guidelines as something not to do.

Does a "hacker type" correlate strongly with a certain race, gender or nationality? Is one political point of view more valid for "hacker types" than another? The guidelines of the actual site uses the qualifier "a good hacker," implying one should not only be a hacker, but "good" Good at what? Programming, startups, or conforming to an archetype of a "hacker" personality?

Even "intellectual stimulation" tends to lead to the belief that only intellects of a certain type should be considered valid. Dang has to constantly correct people who assume that content which is intellectually stimulating, but not explicitly about startups or technology, is off topic or detrimental. Hacker News is not what some people assume it is. The "good hacker" archetype itself is the problem, as people differ wildly as to their interpretations of it, and by extension, in their belief in what the true theme and purpose of Hacker News is.

Yet what really separates the average Hacker News user from the average Reddit user? I don't know how many users HN has, but Reddit has tens if not hundreds of millions, so one can assume the average Reddit user is not necessarily less intelligent than HN. Reddit also has a number of high quality subreddits which are heavily moderated and used by experts in their field, so I'm not certain HN possesses more technical acumen than Reddit, either. Quality of articles? Many things posted here also appear on Reddit.

Why, then, do Hacker News users seem to detest Reddit so much? Because among the few commonalities in the various interpretations of the hacker archetype are elitism and a distaste for mainstream culture, and new users want to appear to be "good hackers" and hating the mainstream is what people think "good hackers" do. Yet read the comments here, especially in controversial, non-technical threads where posturing as a "good hacker" has less value. Most are no better than, or even worse than, comments in similar subthreads on Reddit.

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