Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I mostly stay here. The amount of political and economic discussion here is what I personally consider enough in my life; I don't think looking for more sources would improve SNR for me.

I sometimes like to peruse Reddit for some well-defined topics - the trick is to find an appropriate subreddit for it. So, for instance, when I want to follow SpaceX news, I'll tune in to /r/spacex, because quite a lot of people there are aerospace engineers (and some are SpaceX employees), so you can expect detailed, up-to-date and to-the-point news.

My general observation is that the more specialized a community is, and the further it is from ego-involving topics (politics, economy, religion), the more civil the discussions are there. So I'd focus on finding many specialized discussion places instead of one general.

View on HN

HN is where I follow the tech news. For discussions, if we take civility as politeness and elaboration of one's points, HN is quite good. But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good. Here there are some certain and strong biases and dogmas, and the moderation is oligarchic. I've learnt to not post on political stuff and philosophical questions about tech, as all you get is downvotes, flags, thread-detaching and whatnot. I believe any politics post is off-topic here, and for philosophical questions on tech, if the tech is liked, sceptics are lapidated.

Your comment under the thread I link below is a case in point. You make a reasonable counter argument, but it still got greyed out. In this case, Upton Sinclair best explains why: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330325

> But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good.

I agree. But how could it be made better?

As I suggest in another comment, Hacker News should be hackable. The only way to find a better solution is with a lot of experimentation. But because you need a large userbase to do a proper experiment, we've been limited to a dozen or so experiments to-date (HN, reddit, slashdot, etc).

Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. Look at the experimentaion that the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.

If making votes publically visible in the API is a no-go, there are other options, such as Y-combinator accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and produce alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.

By fixing the problems that I cite in the sentence after the one you quote. I doubt that it is possible though.

But those are the problems and I'm looking for solutions. What could change on the HN site or in the rules for its community to fix these problems?

I'm not sure anything can be done, which is why I ask.

We would need tools to vote negative content to be categorized as dissonant, circular reasoning, or speaking for other's feelings/blaming.

>>My general observation is that the more specialized a community is, and the further it is from ego-involving topics (politics, economy, religion), the more civil the discussions are there.

Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay on this: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. Or by an algorithm that systematically buries articles and users (whose accounts accrue ranking penalties) that generate any heated debate by challenging the slant. We're not talking trolls.

Check out the top comment under SF tech bro: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless’. It was at least generating some good debate, but HN decided to flag and bury it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896

See the dominant and buried comments for 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830

Why was Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems flagged to death? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414

Hell, even this post has been quickly taken off the front page despite having better numbers (70 votes in the last hour) than many items that are there now.

Politics and economics points of view are heavily filtered here. Rarely if ever does a challenge to the status quo make the front page. If one does it is then killed, ironically, for inspiring debate!

I'm late to this thread but this is definitely not factual:

> The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral.

There's a cognitive bias where everybody thinks the slant they disagree with is the one that dominates this site. If you held opposite views, you'd be arguing that HN is dominated by liberals or what have you. Perhaps that's not obvious to you, but it is to us whose job it is to oversee HN as a whole. HN's archives are full of people complaining about this from all sides.

The point of view you describe (or, to be fair, caricature) does exist on HN, of course. But the community is politically divided, most claims people make about who dominates it are just a rhetorical device, i.e. to score cheap points in arguments.

> The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant.

This is where I have to disagree. I feel the civility comes from swift and brutal downvotes of low effort contributions.

If there's a pattern that I see amongst grey/flagged/dead comments is that they are most often off-topic and/or low effort.

Not to say that groupthink doesn't exist or come into play, just that it's not the prevailing cause for burying comments.

Well to me at least. After all, I'm just a single user that reads arbitrary threads, I have no data to reinforce my opinion.

By "bury" I mean more than "grey/flagged/dead". I also mean in terms of order on the page. When looking at rank order, groupthink is a large if not prevailing determinant, especially since HN applies a penalty for contentiousness (defined as lots of upvotes AND downvotes) to both articles, comments and users.

> ...HN applies a penalty for contentiousness (defined as lots of upvotes AND downvotes) to both articles, comments and users.

Unless I've misunderstood what you're saying, this simply isn't true.

I believe you so my bad. But I got this impression from my erroneous understanding of the flamewar detector which you reference in another comment, but also because I know a penalty was put on my account even though I rarely make comments that go negative, though I often make comments that clearly get a lot of up AND down votes (obvious as I see the net go up and down, e.g. my comment at the top of this subthread, for which I give you permission to post the up and down totals in reply publicly). Daniel cleared that penalty but I obviously "earned" it back, as is evident from how my comments are ranked.

I suggested to Daniel back then that HN should let users with penalties know that they have them, and show them what earned those penalties so that they can adjust their behavior. Feedback loops only work when the user understands the feedback. He agreed.

It’s also important for transparency. It isn’t very honest to show us our positive karma scores but also keep a separate negative karma hidden.

I agree that vacuous comment are ruthless downvoted as they should be.

But observations, even with high grade citations that criticize the libertarian narrative are also regularly down voted to oblivion.

Likewise any criticism of Russia gets clobber very quickly no matter how much evidence is offered.

[edit] likewise pointing out either of those two problems

So yes, poor post are down voted very efficiently but there is still a genuine problem with downvoting to hide information that parties don't want spread.

I'm trying to figure out how "The city should be building affordable housing" is considered a libertarian ideal, and I can't get there from here. Can you help me understand why you feel that it is?

I'm having an equally hard time finding the libertarian angle in the top comments to the other threads you referenced.

It is not. Although the idea rent control benefits no one and that north American land ownership is unambiguously virtuous both are. Points I have objected to to his account's serious detriment. I can not fathom why you imply I make such claims about affordable housing although, even ridiculously untrue, it cleverly nullifies my complain doesn't it?

But whether I personally eat babies or not does not change the problem I have pointed out.

There is a problem that I and others have taken the time to point out, and rest assured if one person points it out, far more don't bother. So whether anyone wishes to address the problem or just downvote the complain itself is not really my concern.

In the end the site is an advertisement for ycombinator and in practice it's really a question of how they want their organization perceived. I had assumed having NY Times articles that point out Russian interference in Swedish politics swiftly whooshed from the front page does not serve that end.

> Likewise any criticism of Russia gets clobber very quickly no matter how much evidence is offered

That doesn't seem to be my experience - I've criticized Russia many times without any problem.

There's challenging and there's challenging. If you're starting discussion with "you're amoral white male so here shut up and listen I'll tell you what you have to do to redeem your sorry existence" (I'm not saying you do, it's just an example - but not too far from what I've seen done in other places) - it's a challenge all right, but not one that would lead to a good discussion.

Also, experience suggests there are topics that generate almost no useful discussion and very quickly descend into a shoutfest, outgroup shaming and virtue posturing. It is possible that this one discussion on the very topic will not follow the pattern that thousands before it did, but usually the risk is not worth it.

Not every debate is good. And so, generating debate by itself is not a virtue.

> Not every debate is good.

True. But why can't we just let not-good debates die on their own, instead of not giving them a chance at all?

People want to get in the last word. It takes some level of self-restraint to let people be wrong on the Internet, especially if they're wrong in a way that is plausible and/or popular.

I agree. I think most people come here for a business / political angle on tech, not just for tech itself. I also often notice that the best discussions disappear really fast here.

I think (hope) people come here to procrastinate as it is a perfect fit. The groundhog day of Internet forums where every day things reset so you can reiterate your opinion like nothing happened.

Civility does not imply that we have to discuss topics that are of interest to you.

If you want to discuss those things, you'll have to find some people who want to discuss them -- clearly, the majority here does not, and they have every right to downvote stuff they don't think belongs on the front page.

Not sure if the parent was trying to communicate this or not, but I think the core of the problem is really that alternative view points (ie. comments to discussion threads) get purposely buried, not necessarily the encompassing discussion thread. So sometimes it feels like we are missing out on varied and interesting comments because they aren't inline with the most prevalent viewpoint of the HN community.

Politics is specifically called out as mostly off-topic in the guidelines, and libertarian-leaning political posts are also flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12413342

HN needs fewer polemics, not more.

.. and it's back on the front page after a spell in the doghouse?!

"Inequality in tech" is a subject that's guaranteed to get flagged into invisibility.

> .. and it's back on the front page after a spell in the doghouse?!

This post hit the flamewar detector (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20penalty%20dang&sort...), and we removed the penalty when we noticed.

It is unclear whether you are making the argument that HN users flag posts based on political leanings or flag politically controversial topics.

The downvotes are most likely due to the negativeness of the post, coupled with an ambiguous argument.

"The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral." Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons.

> Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons.

Therefore there are are many IRC channels where OldSchoolJohnny could find those discussions.

Oh wait, did he say "for civil discussion"...

Silent downvotes right on schedule!

I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym.

I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.

So let's consider the alternative - forcing people to comment on downvoting.

Let's say I see a post that is clearly not contributing to the discussion (on my personal opinion of course, not that I have any other one :) or is too misguided to even argue with, or lacks any redeeming merit, etc. Now, I want less of this on HN, so I am going to downvote it.

Now, let's say I'm forced to comment on it. I can't really say anything useful about it, and maybe even if I could I don't want to bother - if it was worthy discussion-wide, I wouldn't want to -1 it in the first place - so I'd say something like "this is just stupid". Or "-1 for not presenting a sane argument" or something like that.

Now, what happens when the comment author sees it? He comments "no, your face is stupid!" of course. And so we get a whole mess we wanted to avoid.

And now people see this whole mess and want to bury it so it doesn't stink up their nice discussion. But they are forced to comment too, so instead of removing the mess they are making it worse and make people hate each other for no reason but disagreeing on who started this mess.

Does not look like an improvement to me.

You ignored the alternative that I suggested.

I wonder whether any of the Hacker News staff contributes back to the Arc Forum project?

Hacker News may be Arc's most successful implementation (may not be, I don't know) but it does seem as if there's potential being wasted in keeping it a black box.

I think it would be solved by requiring a comment with each downvote. The motivations for an upvote are obvious but a downvote should have to explain why, even if it something as simple as "citation needed" or "factually incorrect, here's why."

I often get the sense that anonymous and unexplained downvotes carry a sense of "this post is so obviously wrong it defies the need for explanation," which means that nobody learns anything from the exchange.

EDIT: I got downvoted for this comment and I have no idea why

I agree, but I think the comment should be a private message, seen by only the commenter (and perhaps the mods). I don't like seeing a comment thread cluttered up by debates about whether a comment deserves down votes.

1: Presumably, people won't post redundant downvote comments. One or two tends to get the point across.

2: You can still collapse threads.

That would result in too many redundant comments. Many people will down-vote for exactly the same reason.

Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

> I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

I would like having strong AI driving HN too. Because humans are very bad at distinguishing those two and confuse them all the time. Once we invent the AI that allows people to separate them I'd be all for using it here on HN.

How can HN distinguish when even its users cannot? "Objectivity" is so subjective.

> Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

We never hear complaints about people not distinguishing between "I subjectively like or agree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively sound or rests on good data".

Devil's Advocate: HN could then create a special category of comment - the downvote comment. Upvoting a downvote comment would downvote the parent, thus grouping similar sentiment.

I agree with you though, on both points.

In that case, it seems to me all of the value lies in the comment, and none in the downvote.

These are all "ego-involving topics" here, to borrow an excellent phrase from the parent comment. I'd say most of the time, predicting HN's reaction to a topic or even a specific comment is easy and almost makes the comments section superfluous at this point for certain topics.

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