HN comments are underrated | Hacker News Reader

HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

733 pointsingve359 comments

I second Dan's advice of blogging more.

I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest. But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case studies at best... So my comments certainly won't make anyone's "Best of HN" list.

Last week, after the news broke that Salesforce walked away from buying Twitter, I was about to write a HN comment about what Twitter could do. The text got long enough that I decided to expand it into a Medium post instead: https://medium.com/swlh/twitter-could-be-the-next-mozilla-e7...

To my surprise, the post has 28,000 views and 755 recommends so far. If I had written it as a HN comment, it would have got maybe 5-10 upvotes and perhaps spawned a short discussion thread about how unrealistic my idea was. (Please don't bother to criticize the content of the blog post in replies here -- I'm just using it as an example of blog vs. comment.)

I love reading HN discussions... But maybe there could be a site that slots between the HN and Medium formats, and lets you expand your comment into a blog post with minimal friction? Call it "HN Long-Form" or whatever. Ideally it would interface with the HN comment system so that you could mark your comment with something like "Promote to long-form" after you've written it. That would create an editable post on the long-form site. You could then later expand your comment there, and publish it on the long-form comment aggregator site. (Maybe I should just build this myself and see if it feels right.)

Yes, I have sometimes thought too that some of my longer comments on HN could be expanded into a blog entry quite easily. Unfortunately, I don't have a blog to publish it on and I don't consider it worth the hassle getting one.

I completely agree.

In 2009 I got a brief 15 minutes of internet fame through a incredibly badly written essay about... a thing (not relevant here). Seven years later it's still one of the most popular pages on my website, although luckily it's been eclipsed by better content.

If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read!

I have seen a tool which allows a HN thread to be used as a comment on a external blog post --- it came up a few weeks back. I don't know if this worked by screen-scraping HN itself or whether there's an API, but either way it suggests that your idea would work.

> If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read!

I think everyone feels like that sometimes when writing long comment, the problem is all the mental burden that comes with trying to structure a blog post. Another thing is that a blog needs to have a theme or be subject specific otherwise it drowns in the oceans of interwebs.

There's also the burden necessary to recontextualize. A comment on HN has at least an article's worth of context and possibly a thread of comments it is in reply to. Any attempt to sideline that into a longer blog post needs to spend "set up time" to contextualize the blog post. Certainly one can start such blog every time with HN links and big blockquotes of text that one is responding too, but such easy approaches tend to invite the question "Why wasn't this just a comment in HN?" To do things right you have to write a proper opening establishing the context through paraphrasing as much as linking/quoting, and that certainly can be a lot more effort than just commenting on HN.

One day, I intend to scrape all my HN comments, and turn the best ones into blog posts (if still relevant) :-)

> I'm a very average HN commenter.

An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator.

I think that you just used the best tool for the job. That doesn't really mean anything about comments. You read what I consider low level comments and high level comments on technical and social subjects from the SAME nickname all the time at HN.

> An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator.

I don't know if that is true. I had an equally high comment number and I reset it. My feeling is that there are others that do that as well.

You can get upvotes any number of ways [1] putting out correct and admirable info is only one of them.

Likewise you can loose karma by simply mentioning a third rail issue or not fawning when the community (on a particular post) [2] is fawning.

[1] For example I tend to upvote the parent threads of my comments. That way my comment has a better chance of being seen is my theory. (Doesn't matter if I am correct since I am pointing out what I do and it's reasonable to think that others might do the same.)

[2] And this is important. You can say the same type of thing on one comment thread and be downvoted but be upvoted on another.

I've been on the site since 2008 IIRC, so I've had plenty of time to accumulate karma.

As someone who has done this a few times, LongForm sounds like a great idea.

I want to start blogging, but I'm concerned about giving control of my content to a third party. At the same time, I can't be bothered to register my own domain (mainly due to the herculean task of finding a decent name).

One relatively easy option is to use Jekyll on GitHub Pages. You can eventually CNAME your own domain to it. The content is in a git repo you can easily clone and take with you somewhere else such as Netlify or other hosts that compete in this space, if/when your needs change.

Octopress!

hey this is a great blog post! I was around during those times and totally forgot how all those deals went down. And I wish you were an average HN commenter. Reality is probably more like top 5% :)

On second read, I'm not sure I agree with the first paragraphs of Dan's post at all. He seems to be saying that HN is terrible, but a handful of comments from star posters rise above the muck. I just don't think that's fair.

Yes, the cliché is that HN is a place full of mean, entitled semi-autists who will criticize your site's CSS whitespace formatting when you ask for business feedback... And of course there's a grain of truth to that (persistent stereotypes usually don't come out of thin air), but it misses the mark on two dimensions.

The first is that the criticism you get on HN is no worse than what other aspiring creative professionals suffer. I went to an art and design college, and the critique you'd get from students and even teachers was 99% of the time harsher than the HN style, yet no more guaranteed to be useful.

Consider a first-time novelist who spent years on a book. One day it gets critiqued in a newspaper. The professional critic might find that the author has a clumsy style, poor research, paper-thin characters, and seems to lack the life experience to even write about the topic. What do you do after that kind of criticism? You suck it up and go back to work on the next novel.

Making use of feedback is all about filtering and reducing multiple sources into something actionable. Nobody is right all the time. Your parents were wrong. Your teachers were wrong. Your peers were wrong. Your professors were wrong. Your boss was wrong. Your cofounders were wrong. Your investors were wrong. HN commenters were wrong. Still it's worth taking in all these inputs as much as you can.

The other dimension of HN comments is that they can be surprisingly deep. When an arts or culture topic makes it to the front page, it seems like someone comes out of the woods with the perfect personal anecdote. Whether it's Mondrian, Messiaen or Modiano, there's always someone on HN who happens to have a passion for it.

HN comments are underrated, but it's not just because of star power: it's everyone's contributions that make it consistently worthwhile for me.

Comment moved, per request.

Is there any reason why you replied to a comment instead of responding to the article? Because as a sub it has little added value to the parent, but as a top level comment I would have liked to see it as the #1 comment.

Edit: for the record, it moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775905

Another note: A valid criticism mean the author actually took the time to read, understand and respond to your work.

When I worked with the HN post data, I noticed that some years ago HN users had correctly predicted the "Show HN" projects that later got funding. Those projects had more upvotes.

The more recent data has no such connection. It seems that the influx of users reduced the quality of judgement.

So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the user's tenure on HN.

I also suspect that early comments dominate late comments by the time factor alone. The sorting algo gives a brief advantage to new comments, but old comments are more visible. A post on the front page gets 30+ comments in the first hour, and latecomers can only post into the void. To address that, long branches could be collapsed by default, leaving only 2-4 visible messages per branch.

Cool. And sad.

But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is.

(One particularly shameless fellow just copied the primary link Wikipedia used -- and lied about the content. :-( )

EDIT: I wrote without any references of their own -- i.e. dismissed with hand waving. Wikipedia won't always be correct, but it has references and is whetted by quite a lot of people.

My dad likes to dismiss Wikipedia, and he used to be an admin. They may just know how the sausage is made.

His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors". His favorite example is that of an article about an ancient persian poet, which says that there's only 2 of his poems known, and only 1 remains. Next to that line, there's a picture of the other poem.

Eh, who knows.

I didn't argue that Wikipedia always was correct (no source is that, I'd guess), just that it smelled really bad to dismiss it with just hand waving. It do have sources and have been whetted (for reasonably popular subjects.)

Wasn't trying to imply you meant that. It's more that I could see where someone like that could come from, dismissing the Wikipedia article out of habit, especially if they've been involved with the project. Not backing it up with additional sources is of course bad form, but finding and linking extra sources is additional work.

Minor nitpick, vetting is someone checking something and approving it, whereas whetting is grinding away metal to sharpen a blade.

OK, you more or less agree with my argument. Enough about that, then.

I am curious about something else.

Do you have non anecdotal information about Wikipedia's general dependability?

How is the dependability for large subjects? For subjects like a poet where less than a hundred people even recognize the name?

(The last I saw on this was years ago, when Wikipedia edged out the Encyclopædia Britannica. It would be strange to be less dependable now?!)

It seems I was trolled, but in a funny way.

I discuss how you can see bad behaviour from even old accounts at HN, dismissing serious references with just hand waving.

This got a well written answer about how non serious my example reference was, arguing with a family anecdote.

When I ask for better sources (I don't know the writer or his/her family from Adam/Eve) -- then I get no answer. :-)

You can see Wikipedia as a mixture of different "subpedias". I find articles on technical and mathematical topics to generally be extremely accurate, content rich, and surprisingly bias free (so not very, but still). Protocols, theorems, proofs, even very advanced topics (way over my head, so perhaps I can't tell...). You could do much worse than take everything Wikipedia says about mathematics at face value.*

On the other hand, everything about currently living people, or worse, companies, you can essentially dismiss out of hand.

* Please don't. I'm just making a point.

"I find articles on technical and mathematical topics to generally be extremely accurate, content rich, and surprisingly bias free (so not very, but still)."

Same here. I usually just link the Wikipedia article because it's either totally accurate or accurate enough for what I'm trying to accomplish. I added a bunch of stuff to it as a result from my domain. I do spot marketing BS on occasion in there but the baseline makes it really stand out. Most people doing IT work are going to say, "Wait, that looks like a fan or advertiser wrote it" then dismiss that specific point.

> His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors"

...and if it is a major article, there are definitely errors, some likely introduced on purpose[1] (since major articles are the juiciest targets)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ravpapa/Tilt

I always find it strange when people do that. I mean, it's a wiki - if there's an obvious, glaring error - just fix it? Then that particular article will be more correct?

Wikipedia is absolutely useless as a dead book - the level of (professional) work that goes into vetting "real" encyclopedia articles is much higher - and the errors that slip through much more permanent.

The great thing about Wikipedia is the potential steady improvement. When people complain about its accuracy it often just sounds like whining.

Granted, there are a few articles that are "contested", and I understand why people don't have the time or energy to fix all of Wikipedia.

No, your fix will often be reverted by those one or two authors who consider the article "theirs".

If you fix it a second time, including a clear explanation in the commit message, you'll be accused of vandalism.

Do you know if anyone's done quantitative research on that? Should be pretty straightforward to sample some articles and see if that pattern is common? (I'm not trying to passive - aggressively suggest you're wrong, I'm honestly curious)

[ed: I should add that I've started to form a habit of looking at the revision history and talk pages of wp articles - in addition to references. And I really do think the added transparency is a very real added value over dead tree encyclopedia. ]

I referenced this earlier, but got no answer. It is from 2005. I haven't seen anything after that.

"Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."

https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...

(Please Google a better source for that paper. :-) )

I am willing to believe that "sensitive" information about living (and relative unknown) people along with companies/political parties is being more gamed in Wikipedia today, than ten years ago.

I'd just see some good references for that...

Another factor might be the abuse of the bookmark feature. I tend to upvote stories that seem interesting when I am at a hurry just as a way to save them in the upvoted stories section for a later time.

About the comments, pretty sure the sorting algorithm still takes into account a user's avg score. I usually make late comments but they show up well above other threads.

I use the bookmark feature for articles that I want to keep, not read later. For instance, I seldom bookmark news. (I would, without data, guess your way is more popular.)

Otoh, I often bookmark an article just to keep a reference to the comments.

> So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the user's tenure on HN.

I've been on this website for quite some time and I don't honestly care about "Show HN" links. I mean, I wish the submitters all the best in the world, it's just that I'm not visiting HN in order to see who is gonna get funding or not in a year or two, I visit HN for interesting links and some interesting comments.

Interesting, but when I upvote Shown HN posts, it's because it contributed to my enjoyment of reading HN. That's largely orthogonal to whether it would be a good product, and often times is directly contradictory towards it (fun tech demos -> upvotes, products -> meh). I don't think that's a decline in the quality of HN, it's just a different focus. I use HN as entertainment rather than as a prediction market. But I can see that others would not like the shift.

Yes. And the analysis could be improved by coding each submission according to its intended status as a cool toy or a side project. I bet that as HN has grown we're seeing more toys and less startup projects on Show HN.

You raise an interesting point; in comparison, Product Hunt is essentially the opposite.

One consideration I'd like to point out is how the audience changed over time. I'm not saying anything like "HN is getting worse every year", but rather that it started at a startup accelerator, before startup accelerators were popular and at a time when startups weren't as popular as they are now. The crowd was more insiders at the beginning, and insiders may have more insight into what will / won't succeed from their experience.

Another point, and I wish I had data but this is purely anecdotal, is that it seems like the side project --> startup transition is happening less. People are content making small side projects, doing hackathons, etc but not making that business their life (upsides and downsides to this).

HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too.

It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer than me.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

> blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too.

I've seen plenty of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" in the comments and complaints about engineers always trying to use the newest technology.

Yes, using any tool or language that came out after the commenter started programming is "hipster".

And you see a lot of xkcd 927 and "I can't help thinking effort would have been better spent on an existing project" when someone writes any program of any type where other examples exist.

I only post a 927 when there are >6 different standards in the field, and there's no way a new one will catch on. As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those. Instead post about how great emacs is compared to vim: you're more likely to spawn useful discussion.

And if you post the xkcd link to a discussion about a piece of software and not a new standard for which many already exist, (and I see that post,) I will proudly downvote you no matter how many examples exist.

Just be glad I don't have the magic ability to force anyone to use QED to program their next project in Fortran on a CTSS box.

Yeah, just don't post 927 on software: that's dumb.

Note I said when a new one won't catch on, or is unlikely to do so, particularly of it doesn't have any significant benefits over what's already there.

I think that it's interesting that there is an etiquette developing on when which XKCD is appropriate.

XKCD is always appropriate when it's relevant, pretty much. There's only etiquette for 927.

Well, here. It's still popular on Reddit to be the first to post an "obligatory" link to a vaguely relevant xkcd. Here, that usually gets downvoted fast.

I do it sometimes, but only if the XKCD is actually highly relevant. As a result, I've actually never gotten downed for it.

> As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those.

Except, the issue is when there’s already dozens of standards in the field, and someone decides to make yet another one, and publish factually wrong articles about existing standards to get an advantage.

>Yes, using any tool or language that came out after the commenter started programming is "hipster".

I see this a lot, and I don't think it's a valid criticism of the issue.

It assumes either that all periods in IT are equally good, or that there's monotonic progress (both of which are wrong), and that there's no such thing as a fad, so anybody pointing one is clearly a "get off my lawn" person.

I'm with Alan Kay on this: computer science is a pop culture.

It's not a "criticism" of an "issue", it's a description of a behavior that may in some cases and out of some mouths have a point, but is not necessarily rooted in anything worthwhile.

The behavior is frequently ad hominem in use and often seems to express insecurity of some form, mixed with the conservative bias towards freaking out about flaws in new things while brushing them off in existing things.

I did say tendency!

I still get surprised the way opinion goes for some posts. I won't be betting on the likely sentiment any time soon! Whichever way opinion leans it rarely stifles discussion.

It depends on the subject. Take Mars colonization or self-driving cars. There's recently been a few posts (with a large number of upvotes) that were more or less press releases from companies, with the majority of the comments being very positive and the most up-voted comment in each post complaining about the existence of a few comments that were skeptical.

Yep it seems anything by Elon is sacrosanct with much of the HN crew.

I'm pretty critical of technology and modernity in general, and this Cult of Elon is a large part of the reason I dislike the man and his endeavors.

It has nothing to do with his intelligence or person. He's clearly intelligent, and I'm not quite sure he's a person (ha) but I don't know the dude.

It's just that he has revived so much technological optimism in a time when skepticism is pretty important, at least imo. He seems to bandy about these technical solutions that are dazzling, for sure --- and extremely interesting --- but just don't cut it, or come with a slew of potentially unintended consequences, or simply aren't putting the focus in the right place.

For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?

It's infuriating because when I say things like, "I'm not convinced that collapse or technical decline would be a bad thing," people can immediately see the criticisms, chief among them being "Won't a lot of people die?" Which is fair.

But there is little to no skepticism when Musk presents his idea, when there certainly should be. How many people do you think will make it on those spaceships, and who do you think those people will be? At least in a case of economic or technical decline, many people will have a fighting chance at it not being totally awful.

> For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?

To be fair, that's not a good characterization of why he's into Mars colonization. He's not advocating colonization so we can disregard life on Earth. He seems very much into preserving life on Earth. Mars colonization is a backup plan (or the initial stage of a backup plan) for the inevitable moment when Earth will have to be abandoned regardless of how well we behave.

Regarding “a lot of people dying” angle: the difference is in magnitude of “a lot of people”, and choice. However many people die on SpaceX spaceships, the number can never reach millions or even billions that would result from the collapse or technical decline. People also, in general, will choose to get on a spaceship and dwell on Mars, but they neither choose to be involved in dying from civilization collapsing, nor to have to fight for survival in such a situation — it would be completely forced upon them.

Thanks for clarifying his position. I didn't mean to suggest that he intended it to be anything other than a backup plan, but my wording might have been ambiguous because others, like Martin Rees, have suggested similar things and tend to regard them as one of the more likely outcomes of humanity's future, if the species is to survive.

> However many people die on SpaceX spaceships,

Maybe you misunderstood me. I mean that the people who don't go on SpaceX spaceships would die in a situation where that is critical to the survival of civilization.

Your choice thing doesn't convince me, but I do understand and think it is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

I've also seen a fair amount of people actually cognizant of the dangers our technological society poses. It's not the majority, but there are far more people here than most discussion-centered places on the internet.

>It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer than me

This is pretty much why I use HN at all: it doesn't make me feel smart, but I learn new, exciting things constantly.

> This is pretty much why I use HN at all: it doesn't make me feel smart, but I learn new, exciting things constantly.

Thanks for articulating it so well.

...okay. You're welcome, I guess, but I'm not sure what's so hard about articulating it that makes doing so praiseworthy.

Or were you just being nice? If so, that's totally fine, never mind.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between the right phrasing and the almost right phrasing is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. We're here for the lightning.

...And that was totally the right phrasing.

Thanks for explaning so well.

^ Very similar for me. A good criticism that invites me to better understand a different viewpoint is worth a lot.

It's worth more than any other type of comment, IMHO, save maybe construtive criticism. All that's left if you take those out is banal agreement, something some of the more aggressively PC communities out there don't realize, IMHO.

>I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic

If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go so far as to say that it's the smartest place on the internet (except for maybe places like MathOverflow and some other specialty blogs/forums). They do have a natural advantage because of their huge userbase.

Reddit is the new Usenet with all the good, the bad and the silly.

The advantage of small subreddits over HN is that links don't get buried.

> Reddit is the new Usenet with all the good, the bad and the silly.

And none of the decentralization that was Usenet unfortunately.

Reddit a crossroads of the usenet and 4chan cultures: it's where they meet. However, Reddit actually doesn't totally adopt the common-carrier approach, and aren't decentralized: they try to take responsibility for their users to a greater degree than either of the previous sites ever did, resulting in things like hateful subreddits getting taken down, and the voat split.

You also find a whole lot of echo chambers, fanboys and wannabe-intellectualism. This because anyone can set up a sub-reddit, and thus also moderate them.

On most things that aren't programming (and some things that are) HN can be the same way

The game of life meets the Dunning Kruger effect.

Business startup ideas are essentially experiments in economic theory.

Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics.

It didn't used to be this way, and I kind of miss the HN of old... where logic and fearlessness were valued more than affiliation or keeping up of brand appearances. I've been finding it increasingly disconcerting that the incentive here lately has been to discredit or silence (bury) comments from anybody whose opinion points out something like: yeah -- Airbnb's "business model" might be creating way more more problems than it's claiming to solve. Or that collusion in and among YC-funded companies might (or maybe should) yield some Antitrust issues. The tech commentary can be pretty good, and there are plenty of active HNers whose opinions I respect. However, it is leaning heavy on becoming selection-biased and just plain mean to anybody with an original idea.

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments.

Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment.

I think you can extend the same judgement out to entire threads --- the best Reddit threads being so much better than HN's that it's hard to even imagine what HN could do differently to compete, and the median HN thread being better than the median Reddit thread.

Another interesting thing is that the comparison would probably fall apart completely if not for the heavily-moderated subreddits that produce the best comments. If the Reddit comment cohorts included only the lightly moderated subreddits, HN would probably win on all metrics other than volume and diversity of topics.

While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more.

Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always struck me as odd to treat reddit like it's a single website with a single experience for all users. Yes, there's a base, universal experience, but it's truly up to the user to tailor that experience into what they want. You want memes and fart jokes? There are subs for that. You want to look at breathtaking photos? There are (poorly named) subs for that. You want to discuss why obscure Warcraft character A is behaving so oddly toward Warcraft character B? There's a sub for that. To me, that will always be Reddit's strength.

No matter what reputation it gets, no matter how much shit goes on in the defaults, there's always my little specialty subreddits filled with meaningful content to consume.

So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough to keep the comparison tricky).

But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming, crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only starts crushing HN when you broaden out into topics that aren't really in HN's bailiwick.

I find /r/crypto much better than HN for crypto discussions; you have more than one crypto person there ( as opposed to essentially just you).

AFAIK HN has more than one qualified crypto persons.

> Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more.

Honest question: What are some actual techniques to effectively find these gem subreddits?

I see this sentiment expressed regularly, but nobody explains how actual effective discovery works. If the answer is spending hours wading through a bunch of noise only to find one or two gems, it's a completely rational response to just give up on Reddit itself, because the reward/time spent tradeoff is too low.

The problem with this analysis is that each Reddit subreddit is its own community. So "median Reddit {comment,thread}" is largely useless and misleading for purposes of the comparison.

I sense that you know this, though.

I find it hard to agree with you, but I don't go on reddit much. Can you supply a few reddit threads you feel are exceptionally high caliber? I mostly consume /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. One of the problems I have with reddit (and this might come from not working hard enough at it) is not knowing how to find active, high quality, specialty subreddits.

You want to find the niche expert subreddits. The ones you named are good. So is /r/badhistory, /r/badeconomics [1] which are generally hangouts of experts to make fun of people claiming things. /r/netsec is generally good, so is /r/machinelearning. Even niche job-specific subreddits (like meddit or /r/protectandserve) are interesting to observe.

Because economics gets politicized so much, it's very rare to find sound discussion in popular forums. It's a ton of people cheering for their "team's" policies.

[1] Full disclosure: I'm recently been made a mod there. /r/badeconomics is probably the highest signal/noise economics place on the internet at the moment though. I learned more there than in school in the years I've spent there.

I didn't know about badeconomics, and I'm enjoying a lot, but I can already see ways in which its moderation reduces the average comment quality. For instance: there's a whole lot of insubstantial snark. A lot of it is funny, but you have to pick through it to find the actual information.

That's not a criticism of badeconomics! Just an observation on how moderation choices can affect total thread quality in different ways. It is also totally legitimate to optimize for highest-possible-highs.

Yeah it's going through reforms in the next week or so, to improve overall quality.

The subreddit has tripled in subscriber base over the last year, and growth like that can be harmful if you're aiming for a higher signal/noise ratio.

Snark is not frowned upon as long as it's based on something meaningful. I'm guilty of snark, but I try to craft high quality posts. Making fun of people because they disagree with your viewpoint is not fine if you don't explain why in an objective manner, though.

But the subreddit is such that a lot of people bring their personal ideology and hope for the regulars of that subreddit to back them up. So there's a balance to be struck.

/r/boardgames is pretty much always a positive community, unless you proclaim your love of Munchkin. Anything interesting news or links about board games tends to get posted there too. But there's also people asking the same questions over and over again (I like blah and blah, and don't like blah, what should I buy next?), but I don't mind that personally.

I remember specifically when GamerGate discussion was poisoning just about every video game community and someone tried to bring it to the board games subreddit and tie it in with board games, and the admins made an executive decision to squash it. Probably one of the best things they ever did, because the board has remained very civil and friendly since.

I've had good experiences with /r/keto too. I almost never check anything else there anymore.

But yeah, niche subreddits.

What's an example of a pure economics discussion?

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/58tf3h/the_go...

> Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful.

You probably mean "Basically all the subreddits related to economics except ..."

> they have a really hard time reigning in

Reigning monarchs have it hard these days.

Not that reining stubborn mules is much better.

(Pet peeve, but really paying forward a good correction someone gifted me a few weeks ago. Otherwise quit, really ;)

Regarding /r/economics, if you find it bad now you should have seen it before. I for one doesn't miss the Austrian bullshit that used to be very common there.

> /r/badeconomics

The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments?

No thanks.

This is a non-negotiable requirement, no non-democratic entity should have power over the highest democratic entity.

That’s the fundamental issue that makes traditional ISDS problematic, and why ICS and the new ISDS alternative in CETA were created in the first place.

But /r/badeconomics ignores that entire political problematic.

This:

> The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments

Is a massive strawman if you're referring to ISDS (which is what it seems). If you want a trade agreement, the terms need enforcement to be unilateral. But political actors in each respective countries will be incentivized not to respect that by internal pressures.

So there needs to be a way to settle those disputes, or else you might as well not have any trade agreement. You can dispute the merits of the current court system; I won't, I'm not an expert in that.

But saying that this means "companies have power over democratic countries" is absurd. Go look at supreme court cases in any country. How many are "[person] vs [state]" or "entity vs country"?

Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity; that's why the president doesn't have control over, say, what is constitutional or get to control monetary policy.

> Go look at supreme court cases

The supreme courts are democratically determined and justified.

For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing.

For ICS courts, all the judges are appointed by the nations taking part.

That’s why ICS is acceptable, but ISDS is not.

> Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity

Correct, but democratically elected governments are put under checks and balances to prevent them from doing so, foreign companies are not.

For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing.

The ISDS provision in NAFTA uses a panel of three arbitrators; one appointed by each of the nations involved, and one which is appointed either by consensus or from the third NAFTA nation if consensus cannot be reached. Investors don't get to appoint any arbitrators.

That's then closer to CETAs solution, too.

Classical ISDS trials have 1 determined by the suing company, 1 by the nation sued, and one both have to agree on.

"Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics."

I find that HN is pretty weak on economics. But it's a tech blog, so ...

And I'm not so sure that 'business ideas' are about economics. Usually, they are simply about doing things using newly available technology, in ways that are obvious in hindsight.

I don't think that AirBnB conceptually is rocket science - it's the great experience they provide for everyone. It's really well put together. AirBnB done by a lesser team of people would be something you never heard of.

I beg to differ!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556160

I agree there are some smart Econ things here, but when there's a tech article that wavers into Econ elements, I find it all to be lacking, generally.

My point: HN folks are not thinking about market power, value chains, supply chains, forms of financing, currency markets - they're thinking about tech.

At the risk of getting 100 down-votes - this is best exemplified by Bitcoin. It's a very powerful, cool technology - but almost nobody seems to grasp what it means from a financial perspective, i.e. as a currency, as a store of value etc. etc.. HN readers see it in 'techno-social' terms, i.e. 'cool tech' and 'free from big banks' 'decentralization' etc..

"I don't think that AirBnB conceptually is rocket science "

People have been doing what they're doing on individual or household level on ad hoc basis for decades. The problem persisted all the way up to AirBnB's time. There was no efficient, integrated, widely-available solution to the problem. They provided that. They exploded in growth followed by other founders looking for similar problems in unrelated markets like business trips. Several markets forming as a result.

Basic concept is simple and was always there, though. Just needed someone to solve it in an economical way. :)

> only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits

Any recommendations?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ is unrivaled in its signal-to-noise ratio.

Great comment, though I'm not sure 'naive political opinion' even exists. If a topic is political then it's controversial and sophisticated expert opinions count just as little as naive layman opinions.

It's also full of people who readily classify deviating opinions under naive political opinions, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new.

I do agree with you second statement though, often before forwarding a link to colleagues I read the comments and see if my enthusiasm is not easily killed, it often is (and rightly so, in most of the cases).

that's because you generally agree with those political opinions and groupthink

I keep meaning to scrape my comments over the years, collate the most upvoted ones, then publish in a blog/ebook somewhere with a bit of commentary on what it appears that HN "likes". The API doesn't quite facilitate this, unlike most sites which will just let you sort your comments by votes.

On HN politics, while the comments often have a substantial presence of doctrinaire libertarians, I feel that the voters skew much more liberal/social democrat. Unless there's a bout of "anti-SJW" downvoting and flagging on e.g. "discrimination in tech" stories.

(Provisional title "Silicon Valley on ten upvotes a day")

I've also had this idea.

Long ago, someone wrote a little app that did this. I can't seem to find it now. The premise was something like "you've probably already written a book's worth of HN comments".

> unlike most sites which will just let you sort your comments by votes.

If you just want to see your comments sorted by net upvotes, use this link: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:pjc50&sort=byPopularity&pre...

You can get all of your comments as JSON via this URL using a site I built: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/pjc50/json/ You can then run that data through a sort and filter to get what you want.

Thanks, that looks extremely useful.

I took a shot at this here https://hn.icymi.email/

What you see as "groupthink" is really your bias attempting to dismiss any number of people for disagreeing with you. I understand the point of your post, I just don't find that particular bias funny enough to let it pass uncommemted.

Or, it could actually be groupthink, and your bias is acting to prevent you from having to admit that a group you identify with expresses positions that are wrong.

There's actually no way to prove that either case is true. However, you expressed a position as a certainty -- "what you see as groupthink is really..." -- that is in reality just another opinion. Therefore, your comment is equally as ill informed and myopic as OP's.

I was going to write a similar comment, but you said it better in every way. HN comments are a frighteningly important part of my day.

I think HN needs a way to easily find the top comments. There are absolute gems deep in discussion threads, but you'll need to spend a lot of time reading to find them. Hence, it's very nice of Dan Luu to list some of his favorites.

The top root-level comment for each comment page is obviously easy to see, but good comments deeper in the comment tree are easily lost. Would be great if e.g. the top 5% voted comments on a page were highlighted in some way.

Perhaps a workable solution would be to just follow the comments listing of smart people. Guess I'll at least try that.

I swear there was a way to show top voted comments but I can't find it now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

The problem with /bestcomments is that it's based on votes, and thus does not in fact track the best comments.

Dan and Scott recently added a "favorites" feature that you can see if you click the timestamp for a comment. Saving a comment to your favorites publishes it in a list of favorites on your profile.

I think they're not especially happy with how this feature is working out.

But I also think they're very close to a version of the feature that would work quite well:

* The "lists" page on the site should include a list of users that have "favorite" comments (at least until the site has so many users with favorites that the list is too long to make sense) with links to their "favorite" pages. This seems trivially easy, and would help bootstrap the feature.

* There should be a master list, linked perhaps on the top of the page (maybe replacing the useless "comments" link) to a list of the most-favorited comments.

> maybe replacing the useless "comments" link

I've found the comments link useful for finding the newest comment activity. That said, it's been useful only because I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on HN as I get started. There's likely a better way of accomplishing the same thing.

>I think HN needs a way to easily find the top comments. There are absolute gems deep in discussion threads, but you'll need to spend a lot of time reading to find them. Hence, it's very nice of Dan Luu to list some of his favorites.

An idea: A full 24 hours after the submission, the top N comments on a given submission should be displayed.

Waiting 24 hours will discourage people who are looking for instant highs, and will reward patient people. Seeing the top comments while the threads are still evolving can be very misleading.

Great idea. This would also give a longer lifecycle to submissions. Now most tend to die quite fast, so you don't get answers to comments any more if you're late to the party.

Removing the vote count was a step back.

You end up with highly positioned comments that are factually wrong and no way to weigh the corrections made in replies.

If you saw that a comment had 20 votes, but a reply had 500, you'd have something to go by. If nothing else, they could show the relative score of a reply to its parent.

How about just reading and evaluating what the damn words say instead of relying on a "score"?

Because there are a lot of topics, even in my professional field, where I don't have the necessary foundation.

Because sometimes a comment reaffirms or conflicts with my evaluation and it's useful to have a weight assigned to that.

Because the world has enough people who make their own evaluation and refuse to change their opinion regardless of overwhelming evidence.

>Because there are a lot of topics, even in my professional field, that I simply don't have the necessary foundation.

And what makes you think that the "majority vote" on them will be correct?

Most often, it's the majority that doesn't have the necessary foundation.

Well, if we had the vote counts, we could test your conjecture.

We have them in other forums -- e.g. Reddit if I am not mistaken.

Do they work that well there, or do they make the forums a competition for points and popular comments, in other words a popularity contest?

WEB 2.0 turned online discussions into popularity contests. Period. I preferred the older, smaller communities sans likes & upvotes where you knew most in the community and had the ability to 'ignore' MUs. Of course, that had it's drawbacks and is much more difficult to scale as the site gains popularity & evolves. I do not have the answer other than self-moderation, yet, most(including myself) fail sometimes in the heat of emotional impulse... and personal investments, paid actors, other reasons.

As sad as Slahdot is these days, I still think they have a superior moderation system. I like that every vote comes with a reason and that you can use that information to do things like filter out the jokes.

It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information.

There might be valid reasons to remove it (it hurts the community, it leads to negative behavior, .... I forget why they took it off).

But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than less. Then you have the option to weigh it as you see fit, including ignoring it.

>It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information...But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than less.

It could be an extra piece of disinformation, which can make it more difficult to evaluate.

I suppose I'd like it if there was no way to sort. What happens on Reddit is that such comments easily bubble to the top, and they're often wrong, or just making a silly joke rather than being informative.

But points don't equal expertise.

You can be an ignoramus in an echo chamber, or be the world expert who doesn't come here too often

Some expressions cannot be evaluated without knowing what people think about them. The truth is not determined by popularity, except from the perspective of the person who chooses to believe in the falsehood. I think it's relevant, but not sufficient, to know what other people believe if you want to understand the world.

Of course, the whole problem is that this reflects back on itself. Such that a highly upvoted comment will be upvoted by a person who values popularity too much, whereby he thus alters the very property he used to judge whether or not he should alter the property in the first place. So some people's over-reliance on popularity destroys the usefulness of the reading for everyone else.

Classic observer effect.

Not everyone have the time.

The vote counts weren't removed to make the comments more comprehensible or the threads easier to mentally rank. Their removal may very well have made those tasks harder.

Vote counts were struck because they were causing fights.

Paul Graham decided to risk sacrificing a little bit of comprehensibility in exchange for some extra civility. I think the tradeoff has worked very well --- especially because incivility crowds out comprehensibility anyways, so that almost anything you do to make a thread more civil will have the knock-on benefit of making it easier to read.

It would be good if the vote counts became visible after a time period, say 7 days. That way when people re-visit a topic the most appreciated comments are visible.

You can get the scores on old comments through search. Since, to a first approximation, the average 7 day old thread gets zero viewers, it seems unlikely to be worth the energy to add new features just for them. But if you think it's worth doing, you should mail Dan and Scott at hn@ycombinator.com.

This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back.

Please also provide a new view that lists all top 20% of highest commented and highest voted news stories per day (disregarding any downvotes/flags !!). I really hate to miss stories that received a lot of traffic but got buried on page 200+ just because a vocal minority decided to hide it.

Please let me vote on old comments. "Voting is closed on that comment, but you can add it to your favorites if you like." Why have you recently changed that?

> This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back.

Your wish has been granted, you have a "karma: 4406" line

I meant the karma ratio (or what it was called) that was on the profil page, a percentage value as far as I remember - ...maybe dang can explain it?

Yeah, that had a major drawback: it discouraged helpful replies deep in the thread. I'm glad they removed it.

It was also buggy. On several occasions, I'd post a comment that got voted several points higher than my average, but the average went down; or vice-versa.

It may have been a moving average of the last N items.

It was, at least from my observation

Here are the comments he made in reference to removing average karma [1][2][3]:

> dang 781 days ago

> It's based on comment scores only. My sense is that it's an irrelevant distraction and we should get rid of it.

> For example, we caught a bunch of users who were gaming it by deleting any comments that brought their average down. We fixed that by treating deleted comments as comments of score 0 for average-computing purposes. It's an example of how, once you publish a metric, people start to care about it and do things based on it, regardless of how meaningful it is.

> Comment average used to be used by a few algorithms (like comment ranking) but we turned that off as an experiment a while ago and nothing seemed to get worse. If anything, I think it may have helped a little.

---

> dang 572 days ago

> What brudgers said is correct, but I'll add that we're probably going to get rid of comment averages. We've looked at the data extensively and it hasn't proven to have much value. We've phased out the code that used to rely on it, and what's left (which is only for display) is probably not worth the cost.

---

> dang 567 days ago

> ... We got rid of average because (a) after looking extensively at the data we didn't see any value in it, (b) we had evidence of people gaming the metric, (c) its implementation was complicated, and most importantly (d) we think upvotes are wrong thing to optimize for. Optimize for saying substantive things.

---

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9297678

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264220

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322256

I'll add to this that statisticians taught me averages are actually meaningless when applied to individuals. The number is tied to a data set but that data set can be all over the place in terms of what it contains. You can't know where you're at relative to others in a data set just by comparing to an average. Unless it's the median where you know you're above or below the middle person without further data on what that means. Pretty useless.

From what I was taught, averages are mainly (or solely?) there to measure trends in sets of data. Basically, where it's collectively going over time. Applying it to individuals is meaningless. So, that feature should never exist unless you're intentionally exploiting psychology & common misinformation for personal gain. Example: showing players how they compare to an "average" so at least half of them think they're better than average and keep playing to get number higher. Another example: differentiating a software company with terrible defect rate by comparing it to the industry average, which is worse, in an industry full of shoddy software. The software looking good is still crap but "better than average." ;)

There is Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that has internet comments with two boxes: "agree/disagree" and "well argumented/poorly argumented".

So far it seems to actually work. There are differences in the scores and lazy but popular comments get punished.

I really think the author is onto something here.

Recently I've been thinking about doing a couple blog posts that summarize the HN thread for a given article* in perhaps ~1500 words. I think of it like the approach that r/tabled uses for AMAs on Reddit (example: [1]).

Would others find this interesting, or would you rather just read the comments yourself?

A second idea is — a daily / weekly update of comments from all of the people you're interested in "following" on HN. You can do this very manually right now. I think it could be an interesting proof of concept.

*When I say one article, I really mean the aggregate of recent links around that topic as discussions are often merged or commenters bring information from other sources into the commentary for whichever link takes off on that topic. Often that is the most original source, but not always.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/4lh4t1/table_iama_i...

I did this once:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-sell-your-company

It's still one of the most visited pages.

This looks excellent, and very thorough. Thanks for sharing.

I absolutely love comments on HN and they are probably the main reason I read this site a lot. Some times, the posts themselves are quite self-explanatory from the title and I just go straight to the discussions.

I created a little site called HackerNews Club

http://hackernews.club

Where you can easily search for user's submissions and comments. FYI, here's Dan's comments :)

http://hackernews.club/luu#search/52e35e01f172df6d183c59633c...

And HN users ordered by the number of comments they have made.

http://hackernews.club/#search/39a2159841122c713bf4324d6f9de...

Seconded. I too love HN comments. Overall, my perception is that HN has reasonably non-clickbaity articles with a good blend of tech and non-tech. The comments I find largely pertinent, overwhelmingly constructively critical, with FAR fewer trolls, flames and biased voting than any other public forum on the internet I've ever come across since the original Usenet days. In fact, it reminds me very much of good ol' Compuserve (there's nothing like having to pay REAL money for a subscription to curb bad behaviour).

To be honest, I practically never read posts beyond titles. If there is no tldr in comments, post was not worth it anyway.

It may seem funny, but it is a great mechanism to selectively widen knowledge without going into details everywhere.

You post a list of the best comments on HN without putting The Wisdom of Bane on the list?

Seriously, how did The Wisdom of Bane not make it one here? That is one of the best comments on all of HN.

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

Heh, I prefer to refer to that whole comment as Bane's Rule. I have had many interesting discussions with IT managers face to face after having them read that, especially regarding the idea of having vendors show that their product beats out the current system.

For programmers, I think one of the key takeaways from that comment is not the clever coding, but the direct tie into business results from the coding. Not just immediate business results, but also how the system was set up for growth and improvement easily too.

It's about some of core principles of software: Keep it simple, use the minimal code (if it's not there, it can't slow you down), see where speed problems are before optimizing, optimize before scaling up.

It's common sense, but it's rare to actually follow it.

Actually, I'm guilty of this myself. I was finishing last year's Advent of Code, and was given a problem which I tried to optimize, as I assumed the naive approach would be too slow. Then I realized I was trying to optimize Travelling Salesman, so I bit the bullet and went for the O(n!) solution. And it ran in less than a second. In interpreted scheme, no less.

I felt kind of silly later.

Thanks for the link. That was an amazing comment that should be required reading for all these people thinking about throwing datacenters at their problem of choice. It's actually about the same as the advice and methods used in the Beowulf clusters back when all this crap was starting. They did come up with creative ways to scale out while NUMA vendors (esp SGI) kept scaling further up. However, they also identified bottlenecks in their algorithms from transport all the way up to application layers. Active Messages vs TCP/IP, BLAS libraries, hand-tuned MPI, careful choice of interconnects, offloading I/O onto dedicated workstations w/ clustered filesystes... always improving efficiency of each component in the stack to get max ROI out of those expensive clusters.

As bane notes, it seems that third part of doing HPC right was lost in translation to modern crowd. Not entirely sure why. Prior conversations indicated strong separation between HPC and business/cloud crowds in terms of knowledge sharing. Plus, there's marketing hype and VC money involved riding the waves of whatever is massively popular. Bigger IT budgets, too, if your proposal doesn't involve using one, mid-range Dell. I'm sure such things have more impact than the technical arguments in many places. ;)

There's a reason it's a classic. The best summation I heard of it was, "If you can't get the solution to a problem to fit on one machine, you probably don't understand the problem well enough."

This is probably one of my favorite quotes in software. I'm probably slightly misquoting it here, but I don't care.

It's been formalized past that into the COST methodology of assessing distribution solutions: Configuration that Outperforms a Single Thread. If that configuration doesn't exist, just ditch the solution in favor of a single thread. :)

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...

It just gets more hilarious the more you read the measurements of all these tech vs a single thread.

A single thread frequently has less code: less code means less code being executed. This is a contributing factor to speed. The less instructions you have to execute, the faster it runs, give or take. Not that instructions executed do not necessarily correlate to code size (a loop is only written once, but executed many times).

By the way, bane responded to my original post: it's worth reading.

His response just loaded on my end for some reason. Yeah, that's the points I was getting from his longer write-up. If you see him redo it & I'm not there, definitely ping me so I can see the future copy.

We were actually both in the best example I've seen of this effect on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12472905

It's the kind of title that, if proven in resulting article, should make many people pause to think about how effectively they're solving business problems.

Ah, I remember that. To paraphrase myself at the time, "never send a 747 to do a racecar's job."

Yeah, as it turns out, it's not a good idea to use a piece of software optimized for workloads to large to even be handled by a single machine on large quantities of data, and maybe you should use tools designed for small workloads (Gigabytes, or even Terabytes, is pretty small, nowadays) for small workloads. This should be obvious.

Besides, things like Manta exist, so you can scale up your small workload scripts to larger workloads in the future. Mind, I don't know if I trust Manta yet (I don't know the perf, and I haven't tried it personally), so maybe exercise a little bit of caution about going that route.

Aww shucks. Thanks for the shout out.

I realize reading this again that I owe a more significant writeup -- I started one not long after this and wasn't happy with how it was shaping up. Maybe I'll have another go at it.

Since writing that comment two years ago I've added a couple more examples consistent with the ones in the original post.

One thing I keep seeing is how teams seem to think that the planning stage of this kind of work involves figuring out how to shove the problem into the big-data platform du jour instead of figuring out how to solve the problem that has the business need. When they're working with the platform, and hitting the inevitable and unplanned for performance issues (because, you know, just shove the node to the hadoop cluster and it'll magically take care of that), the solutions never tackle the algorithmic bottlenecks but instead seem to focus on messing with the platform or changing platforms, or changing run-time languages or throwing more hardware at it.

If you are having trouble taking the nuts off your wheel to change a tire, using a bigger hammer or a blow torth isn't going to help. Take the time to find the wrench, of the right size, and then things will work much better.

I mean, you get shoutouts every day. Thanks for responding to this one.

>One thing I keep seeing is how teams seem to think that the planning stage of this kind of work involves figuring out how to shove the problem into the big-data platform du jour instead of figuring out how to solve the problem that has the business need.

Ahhh yes. The "when X is your hammer" problem.

In this context, I think the appropriate incarnation is, "When Hadoop is your hammer, everything looks like 1000 nails to be hit very quickly, using brute force."

These criticisms, when phrased in the manner of the post ("HN is full of mean and rude people"), suggest by omission that there's some kind of internet forum Nirvana out there where everyone's nice all the time and nobody every says mean things or is rude. ("HN is full of mean and rude people [... unlike place X, which is always great all the time]")

But the thing is, once a community reaches a mid-to-large size, certain kinds of people will always going to think it's full of jerks and trolls, and that its golden age has long passed--regardless of the community's age or actual composition.

I run one of the largest online writing communities online, Scribophile. We've been around going on 9 years and I personally pride myself on the reputation we've earned as being a friendly and supportive community. By and large people seem to agree. And yet every now and then we still get people complaining that Scrib members are out to get them, that everyone is mean, that Scrib's golden age has passed. (I started hearing that same golden age comment about 6 months in, by the way).

I think the truth is more like the faceless, voiceless, anonymous internet makes it really easy for people to both a) be jerks, and b) misinterpret harmless posts as people being jerks. I think this phenomenon happens in every mid-to-large sized community, ever. And I don't think it's really helpful to criticize any community of that size as having nothing but mean people, or trending towards meanness.

Uh, did you read his second paragraph?

> And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary.

I don't think they're mutually exclusive opinions. HN could be seen as mean or rude just as it can be technically correct -- and sometimes at the same time. The original post also acknowledges that there's been an effort to reduce negative comments in the past few years.

I read danluu's first two paragraphs as making the argument that "comments on HN are bad, but better than comments on any other online community", instead of as trying to distinguish between meanness and technical correctness.

I was looking for a writing community for so long. Thank you for pointing me to Scribophile :)

I often find my self searching through old HN comments for all kinds of things. Just off the top of my head I've searched for comments on: Redis, ZFS, Raft, SQS, ZMQ, message queue, RDS, connection pools, ECS in the last few days. I've learned quite a lot of things from reading comments by people with way more experience in these matters than I have. And that's probably less than half of my searches. A google search might give me some good stuff, and Stack Exchange too, but HN comments are indeed underrated.

Indeed. Searching on https://hn.algolia.com is an integral part of my workflow. When I read an article I often want to see:

a) What did people say about it on HN? Because the comments there are often superior to the comments on the site itself. If there are multiple threads on it separated by years, it's often interesting to read them all and reflect on how opinions of reasonable people have drifted over time.

b) Did I upvote any of the threads? (i.e. Have I read this before?) Did I, perchance, leave a comment?

Often this process adds a few more favorites to my list (https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik&comments=...), which is also growing to be an integral part of my workflow.

I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major effect on the signal/noise ratio.

Maybe have a [jokular] tag and let readers flag a comment as such, then allow [jokular] comments to be hidden for the people who find them noisy.

Edit: this comment deservers the [overengineering] tag...

Slashdot has something similar. Moderators' points have to be tagged with "Funny", "Interesting", etc, and users can choose how to weigh each type of point.

That's a decent idea. The HN client could also have settings to turn them off entirely or just disable them for a specific thread with too much noise.

Agreed. The quality-death of many forums I've been a part of came from the onset of users posting joke responses becoming the norm. One joke amid 100 comments can be funny. One quality comment amid 100 attempted jokes is banal and mind numbing.

Regrettably it makes the comments read like the minutes from an accountancy standards institute. There is also a 'wikipedia editor' or 'stack overflow mod' effect, where because someone said jokes are bad a whole bunch of people jump on them to kill them dead. Dead!

I'm reminded of a Robin Williams gag:

German talk show host: Why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?

Robin Williams: Did you ever think that you killed all the funny people?

From my own experience, you can get jokes through the filter if you go against the rules of comedy and explain the joke / provide a serious version of the point in the same post.

Same if it's obscure enough that it's not obviously a joke on the surface.

I prefer cynicism over unthoughtful, inconsequential comments that floods several discussion forums that I have come across. "Nice article", "Great write-up" and the next thing you know, you have created a place where people are only interested in submitting their articles and getting it upvoted rather than make meaningful contributions.

People want to make good contributions here and that's something that differentiates HN from other news aggregators.

Sometimes really good articles don't have lots of comments. In these circumstances, I post an "excellent article!" comment just to give the author some feedback that someone somewhere actually read the article, and they really liked it! Humans writing articles appreciate that.

I am denying importance of compliments but they lose their lustre if the whole culture of forum is to "appear too nice"; it just gives an impression of everyone making comments for the sake of it. Besides that, the entire point of a forum doesn't bode well if there aren't any strong comments touching the subject, even if they are cynical or scornful. Take a look at OP's example of the "Should you leave a bad job?" thread [1].

The first comment is surely harsh and questions the entire thought process of hating a mundane job. Some people would disagree with it; some would not but I would be disappointed if the comment didn't exist.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789014

Indeed. When my comments or articles hit the frontpage/top of the thread, I don't really care. What excites me is when I get a ton of responses from more experienced people. Because that gives me an opportunity to learn something.

I second this. I watched the votes for a while to gauge what style, topics, or counterpoints had impact. Then, I mostly just ignored them. The real value is learning from people that know better than me on numerous topics. On top of helping out others with whatever I've learned. I've learned a ton, though, from other commenters with some things might have lasting significance in business or software developments I participate in.

I mean, yeah. I learned about security, how deoptimization works, why CPU cache misses matter, how to program better, and a bunch of other stuff.

So thanks to the lot of you, in no small part for putting up with me being an idiot. And yes, thank you Nick P, (author of parent, if you couldn't tell), as you taught me a good bit of it.

And I just looked at my account info page: I'm ~30 days off from 1 year on HN. Funny how that worked out...

Yeah, it's been quite the experience. I appreciated you comments as well as I learned from many I agreed and disagreed with. Still have the Scheme ones bookmarked for when I have time to start on it. :)

It's always good to know you've helped someone out.

Who knows, by the time you get started on Scheme, I may have finished one of may many side projects. Did I mention I tend to get distracted a lot?

Speaking of which, DFHack is unbelievably impressive. I mean, jeez. This has nothing to do with scheme, I've just been trying to work with it the past few days.

And with that, I think I've made my point.

".. the measure of a healthy organization is probably the degree to which negative thoughts are allowed. In places where great work is being done, the attitude always seems to be critical and sarcastic, not "positive" and "supportive". The people I know who do great work think that they suck, but that everyone else sucks even more." -- Paul Graham

This may very well be true in organizations where the sarcasm exists in an established context of mutual respect (or at least, the knowledge that you'll have to keep working with the other person).

But it's very different when total strangers communicate by text over the internet: sarcastic comments breed aggressive replies, and threads degenerate into arguments very rapidly. I think good conversations online need more restraint and empathic effort than good conversations IRL.

I have noticed in HN that well justified critical comments without hostile tone are faced with aggressive tone if the subject is some new hot technology.

The underdone seems to be "say positive things", not say intelligent or insightful things.

I've noticed that too. However, since any criticisms I might have usually do not entirely detract from the... whatever, you can just preface it with something positive. "This is great! But, I wonder about X..."

You get your criticism, they get their happy feelings.

I followed by doing it even more on more topics containing bullshit. I had a steady following of people that respected that I continued counterpoints to fads while linking to evidence justifying it. I have opponents, too, that prefer I cancel my Internet service or end my unrelenting, evidence-driven "attacks" on certain things.

Anyway, the trend exists but can just be ignored. There is a huge crowd of people here that appreciate thoughtful, civil counterpoints. I'll add that quite a few are also professionals in industry worth having in one's network for people that use HN that way.

The first bit is true, but the second is pretty much the opposite of what Google found: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn...

In particular, Google found that psychological safety is a key component of successful teams.

Indeed, I think in an environment where rudeness is the norm, it's much harder to get people to share negative thoughts. Sure, you'll have a few alpha-dicks who will say whatever shitty thing that comes to mind. But most other people will just keep their lips buttoned because they don't want to deal with critical, sarcastic comments.

If you want real, long-term organizational improvement, you have to create an environment were people are willing to share problems and concerns without fear that they'll get insulted or blamed.

One great example is Toyota's culture of continuous improvement, which helped them go from post-WWII decimation of Japan to the world's dominant carmaker. They're explicit that "respect for people" is foundational. A good book here is Rother's "Toyota Kata", which goes into Toyota's culture and people-management practices.

Another is airplane safety. For its ubiquity and technological complexity, flight is amazingly safe. But this requires a culture of deep, thoughtful honesty. Sidney Dekker's "Field Guide to Human Error" explains how much this depends on creating blame-free contexts, how much it requires a deep respect for people. Without that, people will a) blame others, and b) cover their own asses in an effort to avoid getting blame. That muddies the waters enough that you can never find and fix the systemic problems that caused bad outcomes.

TL;DR: If you really want people to share negative thoughts, you need positive, supportive environments.

Nope. Seen both many times. The positive enforcement causes no one to share any negative thoughts after a while and the company smiles it's way out of business.

Unfortunately people who will not speak up out of fear are toxic to company culture. The creative process is immediately destroyed when people need to second guess everything they say or do since it is impossible to know if you are about to say the wrong thing.

If someone can not tolerate cynical and sarcastic comments they need to be removed quickly. This is very different from mean spirited put downs and intentionally hurtful comments.

Stuff like "idk that button looks like it was mad in 2002" or "I swear we have the shittiest parser ever right here". Is good and fine.

"You talk to much", "why did you write it like that? It doesn't make any sense" Are bad.

Notice how the first like says "we" or talks about a specific feature and the others talk about specific people.

First your anecdotes are not persuasive compared to two incredibly successful companies and one incredibly successful industry.

Second, you missed the point. It isn't about prohibiting anyone from expressing a negative opinion or sugar-coating things. That's a false dichotomy. It's about not attacking the messenger and not looking to place blame. It also means accepting valid criticism. You can be 100% honest without being an asshole.

Why do so many people (especially in tech) try to link "being a raging asshole" with telling the truth? The two are unrelated.

This brings to mind the three whys, and why it is important to ask them for both positive and negative situations.

Blame culture is extremely toxic, but negative feedback can have as much benefit as positive if approached from the correct angle.

The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and place their own concerns way above those of the team.

I wonder if there is a language barrier but cynical and sarcastic is very very different from putting people down.

"The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and place their own concerns way above those of the team."

Please give evidence supporting that claim. What I've seen is a lot of people are just non-confrontational by nature. They'll do a lot to avoid being in a fight. However, they may want to discuss things even with criticisms. It just becomes harmful to them after the conversational style crosses a certain line. Knowing this, groups like Toyota put a line down that allows the negative information to come in without the personal attacks or circumstances that shut many people down. Continuous innovations resulted that dwarfed the competition doing what you suggest. This is not an isolated incident as many innovative companies create similarly respectful environments where everyone tries to improve, either positively or negatively, the process or products without attacking each other.

Lots of good discussion in this whole thread. Another thing to keep in mind is that good, effective communication involves both/all parties.

That involves the speaker communicating in a way that will be effectively received by the listener, and the listener actively participating to try to hear what the speaker is trying to communicate. So it's context dependent as well.

There very well can be mismatches and miscommunication, but if the goal is effective communication, I think in a lot of cases these can be tolerated and worked around. Takes both sides.

"That involves the speaker communicating in a way that will be effectively received by the listener, and the listener actively participating to try to hear what the speaker is trying to communicate. So it's context dependent as well."

That's a good point. In my classes on it, they called it active listening. Anyone interested in following up on your point should type that phrase into Google to find all kinds of interesting resources appear. Another angle I found interesting was "dang" linking to Principle of Charity:

http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

I think that would've stopped a lot of arguments. I was against enforcing it totally at moderation level as I'm for empirical approach where we do dismiss bad information if it clearly fits the pattern. It's good as a general principle in discussions, though, when one's instinct is to think other party is an idiot on specific topic. A combination of active listening, charitable approach, and follow-up questions can make that discussion much better for both parties. I even learn from people who are clearly wrong about an issue when I see what things matter to such people & can fine-tune my solutions or arguments to reach more people. Other times I'm wrong with similar effect of fine-tuning ideas or beliefs as long as I suck it up. :)

Thanks for the Principle of Charity link! It calls to mind Anotol's Rapoport's rules, summarized by Daniel Dennett as:

> How to compose a successful critical commentary:

> * You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

> * You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

> * You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

> * Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...

Might be too much for every comment response, but good to keep in mind.

I think I've been particularly fascinated by this whole area recently in part because I know it's something I need to improve on. Your point I even learn ... suck it up. :) is spot on.

Thanks again for your thoughtful remarks and contributions. Much appreciated. Off to dig into the Principle of Charity and its references.

Yes, Rapoport's rules seem comparable. Succinct too. Bookmarked. :)

You can be critical without sounding cynical and sarcastic. When you say something sarcastically, you're implying that you consider yourself better than that person.

Do you think it's healthy to speak to a child in a cynical way? It shouldn't be any different when relating to an adult.

"Do you think it's healthy to speak to a child in a cynical way?"

Absolutely not. I don't think I would look to fill my team with people who wish to be spoken to as children.

This strikes me as a willful misunderstanding.

One speaks to a child with kindness, politeness, and respect. If you're looking to fill your team with people who don't want to be treated in those ways, that sounds to me like a pretty broken team.

You are conflating respect with a lack of conflict. This mistake allows you to pretend that "respect" consists solely of being nice, never putting anything down, and generally being ineffective.

> If someone can not tolerate cynical and sarcastic comments they need to be removed quickly. This is very different from mean spirited put downs and intentionally hurtful comments.

If somebody belives that cynical comments are valuable that person needs to be removed immediately. Cynicism is never the most effective position. Anybody who thinks it is is an asshole. If they can't realize this, they'll become a cancer.

Cut out the cancer. Get rid of the cynics. If you hire somebody who says that being cynical is a must, then admit your mistake quickly. Fire them. They're worse than useless. An empty chair is more valuable than such a beast.

Isn't this essentially a tone argument?

It's just the opposite. It's a context of respect that expands the useful ranges of tone.

If a stranger shouts at me, I'll instantly ignore them. If a person who I don't trust shouts at me, I'll be planning my escape, or possibly shout back. If a person with whom I have a respectful relationship shouts at me, I'll immediately move to deescalate the situation, calm them down, and get us back to the sort of discussion where we can jointly discuss and solve whatever has put them in such pain.

Long-term, large-scale problems require creative team-oriented approaches. Jerks eat away at social and cultural structures that make that possible. A book that covers the details is "The No-Asshole Rule": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OT8GV2/

Yup. My team has vigorous disagreements about architecture and design. We all take an "engineer's mindset" - "I'm not married to this idea, just throwing it out there because a, b, and c - what do you guys think?" - and debate the ideas separately from (and usually without harm to) the egos of the people who generated them.

> you need positive, supportive environments

Google's research doesn't conclude that at all. Safe place to speak up is not necessarily a positive, supportive environment.

Yes it does. Positive and supportive of people doesn't require being positive and supportive of every idea.

I'm having a severe case of cognitive dissonance here.

A positive, supportive environment is one that allows people to speak up, supports people to be critical and allows both success and failures but doesn't perpetuate failures - meaning the initiative or product is separate from the person.

A negative, unsupportive environment generally makes people feel like shit until they quit or are fired, perpetuates failed initiatives out of ego or spite, or otherwise tosses out people along with a failed initiative, etc.

Obviously, positive and supportive mean different things to different people. I, for example, don't see how you can be positive, supportive, but criticize other people's ideas and work they are doing at the same time. So, at best it's a neutral place, leaning towards negativity, since expressing criticism substantially is a lot of effort, it's easier to simply call bad ideas as bad and move on.

The research is actually about two things, safe place to speak up and empathy.

> I, for example, don't see how you can be positive, supportive, but criticize other people's ideas and work they are doing at the same time.

I think the key is to consider your motivation. Do you want the person to succeed? Do you have their best interests in mind? Assuming you do and your actions are congruent with that, you're being supportive.

If you see a way they can do something better, or want to point out a mistake, you should do that, because you believe it's in their best interest to improve and learn. And you'll want to do that in a way that is receptive to them.

Generally that's going to be a more positive experience than a negative one. I think we'd agree that ripping into them for making a mistake or telling them they're stupid is unlikely to be effective in the long term. I don't know you, but I'm happy to give you the benefit of the doubt that that's not how you interact anyway :) I'm using it as an example of something I'm sure we've all experienced or at least heard of.

You might argue I'm just reframing it, and yeah, I am, but I do think it's a fair and useful reframe.

Your point about the cost of expressing criticism has validity. Thinking deeply and critically in general takes a lot of effort, and there is a cost in empathy as well. After all, you're now thinking about the problem and the other person. I think the empathy part gets easier over time and can become a habit. In a team setting, once there's a common understanding of support and constructive criticism, you've got some slack to give people the benefit of the doubt in everyday interactions. Think of it as a social lubricant, or insurance that pays out when things aren't going so well.

Think of it from the point of view of the recipient. If you've been working hard on a problem and it's not working out, you might not be feeling so great. Or maybe the work's just fine but your blood sugar's low and you're feeling a little irritated.

Someone comes along and points out problems in your work. You're already at a deficit, so it's extra effort to be empathetic towards them as well. Are they actually being supportive with constructive criticism? Or tearing you down? If that social lubricant hasn't been applied in a while, it might be harder to give them then benefit of the doubt.

No one needs to be malicious or overly sensitive for this to lead to a more negative situation, nor do you need to be overly upbeat and cheery all the time. (I'm certainly not and try to keep myself from being critical of people who are :)

I might have read a lot more into what you wrote than you intended. It's not my intent to misrepresent what you've said, so please feel free to point out anything I may have unfairly assumed or misread.

What do you think?

...I find myself telling this anecodote more or less at weekly intervals, but:

Where I work all code is reviewed. Like, it has to be reviewed before it gets checked in. Everyone does reviews, everyone has their code reviewed.

One of the people I work with has an amazing talent which is that you go through a review with them, and at the far end you feel enthusiastic and pumped and really keen to throw all your code away and rewrite it from scratch, because they've just pointed out all the incredibly stupid stuff they've done wrong, but they've done it in such a way that you feel really good about all the stuff you've just learned.

Meanwhile I've gone through much less severe reviews from other people that have left me depressed and completely unenthusiastic, even though they thought my code was fine.

Positive, supportive, constructive, and critical: it's totally possible (and I need to learn how to do it).

> I, for example, don't see how you can be positive, supportive, but criticize other people's ideas and work they are doing at the same time.

I think it's the only way you can really criticize usefully. Negative feedback is always difficult to hear, much more so from somebody you don't trust. And trust is built up over time through positive interaction.

I am just back from my nephew's soccer game, the last game of the season. The coach gave each kid a card congratulating them on the great season. Each card had detailed, specific praise, as well as a couple of things they need to work on. It's clear he's been doing this all season: gobs of positive feedback, plus actionable negative feedback. And that's appropriate. What they're doing is mostly right, and what they don't do right they generally notice themselves. The small amount of negative feedback they need to hear is about the things they can't see. And for them to believe they are really missing something, it helps if it comes from somebody they really trust.

I should also mention that there are other ways to get improvement than critique. E.g., there's a technique called appreciative inquiry which is mainly about focusing on the things in a situation that are going well. Or you can just discuss someone's work and ask people what they see in it. Often they'll provide plenty of criticism on their own; you can then agree with the parts they should work on soon. Or you can set up feedback loops so that they experience quality issues sooner.

It's not, by the way, that I'm opposed to critique as a technique. But I think it's a dangerous one, in that a lot of people do it not because it really helps, but because it lets them feel smart and powerful at a colleague's expense.

You can be supportive of the person while criticizing something they did. Also, when you criticize, you can do it with arrogance or with kindness.

As a signal of good feedback, I would use the number of adjectives in your feedback. Instead of saying that something is bad, stupid, lazy, you can say that a function has too many lines or too many branches, or that 2 modules are too tightly coupled.

An underlying question is whether the organization treats differing and possibly contrarian views as a positive or a negative. All of your points follow from that.

>In places where great work is being done, the attitude always seems to be critical and sarcastic

It can be tricky, though, to be critical and sarcastic without using a jeering tone.[1]

[1]https://twitter.com/paulg/status/789066303566929920

Critical and sarcastic seem to be two rather different things to me.

Constructive criticism is certainly important in all sorts of contexts. You don't want to be all "Oh that's perfect" when in fact it's fundamentally flawed in some way.

Sarcastic is more a matter of style than substance. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard." Which doesn't seem necessary or necessarily positive.

That's not sarcasm.

Sarcasm does not need to be ironic. From Wikipedia: Sarcasm is "a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although sarcasm is not necessarily ironic.

In any case, saying instead: "Oh yeah, that's a fucking brilliant idea" doesn't seem clearly better in my book.

And this is where the "Gospel of Paul" fails, as some commenters here recognized: while being able to nurture healthy criticism is fundamental for quality, sarcasm shouldn't be recognized as necessary, even if it makes some positive effect in some specific situations.

It's important to distinguish between cynicism/negativity and terseness. Good comments are just that: comments. They contain no emotional content at all and make a technical point. Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, some flavor of tone is unavoidable in written or spoken language, but if terseness or conciseness is labeled as mean or cynical, then I think that's fine (and irrelevant).

> I prefer cynicism over unthoughtful, inconsequential comments

Reminds me of the episode from latest black mirror episode where the truck driver falls from 4.6 rating to 1.8 because she is critical of other people, thoughts.

I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course, but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images.

Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin) really helped. There were no 'likes' or 'vote' buttons. But there was the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain authors by adding them to a user's 'killfile', leading to the wonderfully pithy permanent downvote reply:

<plonk>

Preach it ;-) Even the raging assholes had a more interesting command of invective, the food tasted better and the air was fresher ... well ... one out of three ain't bad ...

"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise..."

Me, too. My presence there began in 1987.

Part of what helped its signal-to-noise ratio was that participants tended to be in industry or academia, resulting in both better-informed contributors and a sense of community.

There was, of course, the odd flamewar here and troll there, but they were the exception, not the rule. Even passionate arguments were mostly civil (ah, comp.lang.c was quite a lively place as the ANSI standard was being discussed... even just the NOALIAS debate alone).

Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming text unrelated to the context you were discussing (interleaved posting, as Wiki calls it).

As the AOL bridge and the top-posting mongrel horde of Outlook posters flooded in, there went the neighborhood... damn neighbor kids messing up our lawn!

And now top posting is the norm in email! It's so anti-electronic to do it that way, as if we were exchanging _letters_.

> Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming text unrelated to the context you were discussing

I get confusion these days if I use [snip], people think I am mutilating their email through spite or something.

I never really got into usenet (proper news clients) - but I still read (and occasionally participate) on email lists.

Just in case there are some readers here with an interest in news, but unaware - the d-lang forum software is open source, and built around usenet technology:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

I have often thought it's be great to do a "best comments of the week" email list the same way "Kernel Traffic" did for a number of years with Linux kernel development: http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/archives.html

Condensing comments down to the 5-10 gems would be very interesting. And, perhaps with the voting system, not that difficult.

I like that idea! The only problem I see is that great comments are often embedded within an extensive discussion - how do you give readers of such a digest the necessary context without too much bloat?

I can think of two options:

* Embed enough to give the reader context (maybe a link to the original article or quoting the parent or grandparent is enough)

* Only include those comments that are stand-alone.

It'd be quite a lot of work, but even if you highlighted 10% of the great comments, you'd provide a great service.

Absolutely! If you do it, I might just subscribe :-)

Same to you :)

YC has something like this in the Monday Morning Macro newsletter [1] called "Top Posts on Hacker News". I think it's a combination of highly voted comments and ones referred by other users that found them insightful.

Interestingly the links to comments don't seem to be published anywhere on the website, unlike everything else in the email.

[1]: http://www.themacro.com/

Thanks for the link, unfortunately, I was unable to find the section you mention...

It's not actually listed on the website anywhere, but it is in the email newsletter every Monday.

For example, this is what they chose for last week's:

> Top Posts on Hacker News

• How I built a keyboard by hand

• The Hard Raise

• Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?

• Statistical Machine Learning, Spring 2016

• Yarn – A new package manager for JavaScript

• Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

• Windows 93 (2014)

• Say Cheese: a snapshot of the massive DDoS attacks coming from IoT cameras

• Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

• So You Want to Learn Physics

• Most drivers who own cars with built-in GPS systems use phones for directions

• Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

• It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

• Taking PHP Seriously

• Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

• Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?

• Be Kind

• A Man Who Stood Up To Facebook

• Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?

• Becoming a CTO

• Books Programmers Don't Really Read (2008)

• Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?

• Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 10: New boards, running programs, mouse problems

• Walmart Paid Its People More to Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales

• What has happened down here is the winds have changed

• Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013)

• Programming books you might want to consider reading

I just dug a little into the HN API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API). Unfortunately, they don't publish comment ratings... :-( Unless that is changed, implementing an automatic "best comment finder" would become rather more tedious... (And perhaps even turn out to be AI complete ;-) )

Another thing I've noticed about HN comments is that everything is hyped beyond what it deserves.

For example, the recent DDoS attacks were just a bunch of skids with Mirai, but it was discussed as if it was the end of the internet.

There's also the issue of self-censorship, where users will refrain from posting their opinion in case they get downvotes and negative karma.

The things people post here are fascinating, but the comments, in my honest opinion, aren't.

To be fair those two things aren't HN specific. They seem to be human nature as they've happened in ever forum I've been part of.

> For example, the recent DDoS attacks were just a bunch of skids with Mirai, but it was discussed as if it was the end of the internet.

Couldn't it be both? What's your proposal for stopping DDoS from skids with Mirai?

> There's also the issue of self-censorship, where users will refrain from posting their opinion in case they get downvotes and negative karma.

This is the price for shadow-banning which some blogs use to censor freedom of speech. The hosters may consider it super smart to silence unwelcome messengers. Actually they just expose their own intolerance.

> The things people post here are fascinating, but the comments, in my honest opinion, aren't.

Truth can be inconvenient and offending, causing downvotes. People often try to silence offenders as "hate speakers" these days just because of (justified) criticism. It is evidence of increasing intolerance.

> For example, the recent DDoS attacks were just a bunch of skids with Mirai, but it was discussed as if it was the end of the internet.

As far as I'm aware it was the biggest DDoS attack on DNS ever. Whatever the cause, the effect was massive. The potential to effectively blackout major parts of the Internet for more than several hours is pretty concerning to me.

I miss the deep expertise often on display on forums like slashdot in the past which is conspicious by its absence here.

In many ways this is more of a professional board than a personal board. A lot of folks here are in the profession and don't seem to speak their mind, lest they lose career opportunities. This also seems to promote an affection of expertise and authoritative tone even on subjects commentators may not know much about.

There is offhand dismissal of dissent as 'resistant to change' and a serious lack of scrutiny that often allows broken technologies and services to be hyped endlessly untill people come back months or years later to report deficiencies but by then the train has left the station.

And any forum that promotes downvotes to signal dissent cannot by design promote diverse discussion and will naturally coalesce around a 'socially acceptable' consensus.

Reading this article and thinking back on the users on HN that I do enjoy reading comments from I think that a neat feature may be the ability for a logged in user to "favorite/mark" specific authors. Those authors only get some particular character in front of their name (or a different color) so that they stand out more. I do agree with this post about seeing certain names and knowing that the signal ratio will be higher is nice. May just need a better way to discern those when scanning a comments section.

A simple userscript would help you with this.

On Firefox, you can use extension "Favorite Users - Hacker News".

I wish there was more research in moderation systems. I think it is a fascinating topic, because it can make or break an online forum. And perhaps it even has applications in political decision making.

Moderation systems and community guidelines on how to use them. (You likely implied that, I think making it explicit is important.)

> And perhaps it even has applications in political decision making.

You might find Rules of Order useful to learn. Running an efficient meeting is a skill that is relatively simple to learn.

With an organised way of passing around the sound wave lock and a common process for deciding what to discuss, what not to discuss and how to make decisions, stuff can get done pretty quickly.

I agree. I don't know of any such research but this article posted on HN was one of best summaries on the subject I've seen:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato...

> 1838 days ago

Trivial improvement to HN: after more than 30 days, render time in number of years and months instead of just days.

Even better: actual time and date of submission

HN comments need a vertical bar on the left side to indicate indent level. i find it hard to skim conversations in narrow screens.

Agree. But I am just happy that they added collapsible comments.

> i find it hard to skim conversations in narrow screens.

It's practically impossible to read comments nested more than one level deep on mobile and keep track of what level of nesting you're at. In contrast, Reddit handles this pretty well.

The comments on that "Lenovo is blocking Linux on some new laptops" story a while back were truly abysmal. I think that's the only time where I was really disappointed by HN comments. Now obviously (and as many of the more thoughtful commenters pointed out) this was just a case of missing support in the Linux kernel. There was no "secret deal" between Lenovo and Microsoft that the customer service rep on that forum revealed. Intel posted some patches to fix this a few days ago: http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=147709610621480&w=2

The thread I question, with over 1000 points and 500 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12545878

There was more to it than missing support in Linux.

These SSDs have two modes of operation: AHCI (supported by any OS) and proprietary (requiring special drivers). Lenovo chose to hide the corresponding menu in UEFI setup and hacked the firmware to revert changes made through UEFI variables so that the SSD was permanently stuck in proprietary RAID mode, at that time supported only by Lenovo's modified Windows 10.

Ultimately Lenovo said they did it because RAID mode performs better, but they only published this explanation after the outbreak of Internet drama.

I didn't argue that Lenovo did everything right - but there was no conspiracy. No secret deal with Microsoft. There were lazy decisions on Lenovo's side and missing driver support in Linux.

But regardless of what the actual technical reasons where, when you look at that thread now, wouldn't you agree that many of the comments were sub-par and didn't meet the quality guidelines of HN?

I'm around a quarter through that thread which I missed previously cuz this dude bought an Ubuntu Dell that lasted 8 years. So, the situation seems to be they intentionally changed BIOS setting to not allow alternatives to their proprietary image or something like that. A lock-in technique in an industry that's had one after another exposed going back over a decade. So, what is going on the thread posits. Let me go through the top-ranked comments.

vanderZwan quotes a reference about companies that take away users' freedoms using proprietary extensions or changes that cripple or lock you into the product somehow. Biggest PC manufacturers do that when they can. Lenovo appears to. It fits. That subthread includes at least two good ones with the rest "blah."

Next is paulintrognon sayings they locked the thread. DanBC countered that. Quality of this subthread & that original got upvoted is best evidence of your position so far. Then SamBam references a history of shady inclusions while some others show alternative products for Linux. Remember some upvote a shoddy, top-level comment if it contains useful information.

Getting to your original point is deviate_X saying it doesn't have Linux drivers. dagaci points out Microsoft wouldn't block other MS products. Sounds good but subpoints win me over from a3n, the throwaway, and nowprovision. This is already probably the answer based on prior experience that showed up by 2nd top-level comment with some shoddy one-liners and such that are easy to skim since they likely greyed out quickly & rapid-fire, small responses are often flamewars.

You might be thinking, "Hold on! You agreed with what?!" Microsoft's riches started with monopolistic partnerships with OEM's that preloaded what they wanted on the system with ways to knockout competition. This evolved into big manufacturers preloading garbage for competitive advantage plus controlling images. Sold it as convenience and recovery. I got bit by that with HP when I got my first computer that had a recovery CD but not a Windows install and license (wth!?). With Vista, Microsoft convinced manufacturers to help it trick the public about the value of a huge, bloated OS with hardware upgrades that generated revenues for the manufacturer. That one backlashed with resulting Windows 7 being awesome. Then, they tried to push Windows 8 on people with a discount then try forced moves to Windows 10. The commenters indicate this Lenovo scheme forces a move to recent Windows as a side effect of its operation. That's exactly what Microsoft, who controls Windows licensing at OEM level, wants along with their prior preference they executed in many ways with corrupt OEM's cooperating.

So, that's my theory after just two high-level comments and skimming past some garbage ones in the sub-threads of the second one. Got to what I needed to know in minutes. Overall thread might be full of garbage comments with the eye rolling implications of that. However, if BIOS was changed & for an OEM image of latest Windows, then the voting scheme worked since I got to the likely scenario in just a minute or two. That's if those premises were true. If they're not, then the thread would be an example of something else entirely.

I'm not arguing about the voting scheme, and it's impossible to reconstruct what that thread looked like while it was active. It's also not about Microsoft's shady business deals, as the whole thing was about crazy (and dumb) firmware things that Lenovo did. The claim was that the whole thing was due to a secret deal with Microsoft, and the only evidence (apart from historical crap that MS pulled) was a community support guy's post.

I believe (and the patches posted by Intel seem to confirm) that the whole thing is a mix of incompetence and missing drivers. The usual test procedure for laptops is "Does it boot the latest Windows? Then ship it!". They probably never even tested whether it can boot Linux. Lenovo has nothing to gain from ruining their reputation with something like this. They do have lots of money to gain by not testing and fixing their stuff to work with Linux, because that would require effort and time of skilled people and the whole thing would be rather expensive. With the margins in the PC business, I can't blame them for deciding against it, although of course I wish they wouldn't.

Let me list some of the less than stellar top-level comments from that thread. After a day or so the comment ranking seems to have brought the more considerate comments to the top, it wasn't that way when the thread was a few hours old. Its early hours were quite disgraceful, and I stand by my position that it was one of, if not the worst thread on here in the nearly three years I've been reading this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546291

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546499

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546096 - this one is particularly absurd, comparing Lenovo's behaviour to the Holocaust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546306

"Let me list some of the less than stellar top-level comments from that thread. "

Most of those suck but two are OK since they indicate a history of sneaky behavior. This could help readers wondering if this is merely a hiccup or part of a recurring problem that justifies switching vendors. This particular company puts quite a bit of effort into things that negatively impact some of its users to boost profits. Some companies do less of that. For those users, at least two of these comments like a few I found before would justify switching away from Lenovo regardless of what their motivations were.

"The claim was that the whole thing was due to a secret deal with Microsoft, and the only evidence (apart from historical crap that MS pulled) was a community support guy's post."

What I saw was a claim that the problem effectively blocked an install of anything but the OEM version of Windows. Microsoft negotiated secret deals to do that in the past. They also publicly pulled it with Vista and a recent one. So, that's how you partly test the Microsoft hypothesis. Was the only working image available only the latest version of Windows that Microsoft was pushing? Did it lock you in?

If deal is secret, how you know?

Because you can now boot Linux on these machines. If there had been a deal, it would have failed its purpose. Occam's Razor leads me to conclude that almost certainly, there was no conspiracy. Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

> Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

Nobody said it was secret, besides you. I think it was parent's point that you are strawmanning here.

This was also the sole reason I responded to your initial post. You misrepresent people's position and then complain that what you presented is "abysmal" and "disappointing".

That wasn't my impression reading the original submission or the comment thread. Lots of things that would adequately be explained by lack of Linux drivers and stupidity on Lenovo's side were attributed to malice and purported as fact.

Also, the source of the entire story seems to have a background of baseless accusations about vendors maliciously preventing Linux: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/778680150812536833

But we also know that MicroSoft bribe officials for looong time. See link[1] for example. MS can just bribe someone in Lenovo directly. Or, maybe, someone in Lenovo is a huge fan of MS, so he can act against Linux just in case (I saw this in my own company).

[1]: http://techrights.org/2016/02/15/microsoft-bribing-officials...

This article and its comments are surprisingly negative. I've long held the opinion that HN is the best aggregator out there, and the comments are top notch as well. Far better than Reddit, subreddits like /r/programming+sysadmin+netsec etc, /g/, Slashdot, and the list goes on.

My feeling is that a large enough part of Hacker News has been any time within the last 10 years actively contributing in Stack Overflow. From my own experience, I learned how to ask/answer technical questions and participate in a technical discussion there while trying not to keep it political, and I totally feel that has helped me to provide good comments in HN from time to time.

So I would challenge the sentences:

> And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary.

I have, it's StackOverflow. Even though it is not a public internet forum properly, I've found there some awesome technical commentaries there and I think it might have helped HN a lot on that side.

> when people make comments that aren’t just reasonable sounding but are actually correct, those comments tend to get upvoted

For a while, I found that on pages with lots of comments the most interesting ones were to be found at the top––and, buried between actual dross, at the bottom.

That might have changed, I don't see it that much anymore. But that could be a side effect of something even less desirable. I think some people may have started flagging whole articles when the discussion has "too many" comments they dislike. I can't prove this, of course.

I have the opposite experience. I never found the most interesting comments at the top on popular posts. They usually just reflect a public opinion or come from "famous" HNers. I even reconsider my opinions, when my comments are upvoted too much. Because it means that public shares the same opinion and it is likely to be influenced by PR/marketing/politics.

Coming from a certain frame, context and worldview given to someone by his/her parents, many comments are not ill-intendend but come off as unhelpful or negative. A problem with moderation on the web is that for willing people it is hard to grasp why you have been given the mdoeration you got.

An idea I'm toying with is to allow meta-comment reactions to comments. They would extend horizontally (as opposed to vertically for non-meta comments) and allow medium-to-high experienced users to provde meta-comments (feedback).

> ...many comments are not ill-intendend but come off as unhelpful or negative.

Unhelpful to whom? Pointing out bad examples as bad examples is helpful to the inexperienced; they may learn to avoid some pitfalls.

People who publicly push back against popular bad schools of thought provide encouragement to others in the minority who might give up the fight out of fatigue instead of conceding on the merits.

I'm trying to point out that meta-comments (feedback) can help guide the discussion in the correct direction. It's generally unwanted to mix meta and non-meta discussion. So it may be practical to do allow for meta-commenting on comments, but display it horizontally. This would allow users to focus more and better on the matter at hand.

This article and the (currently) highest rated comment with the Medium article is making me want to write more.

I've always considered a simple blog where I just write short commentary on articles I've read that I feel are incorrect or incomplete. One thing that has held me back is knowing I'm not a brilliant writer. However am going to try and keep in mind the great blog post by Paul Graham that stresses to always write in short sentences. Good luck me!

> comments are often gratuitously mean, and people will often defend gratuitously mean comments by claiming that it’s either impossible or inefficient to convey information without being mean.

> Most of the negative things you hear about HN comments are true.

I think it is interesting how the relatively anonymised nature of the internet has a similar effect on people of all stripes. HN readers, I believe, are among the more intelligent, or at least curious, in our species. The same is true of another popular internet forum, Stackoverflow. Yet there exists an air of negativity that is of much higher ubiquity than in "real" life where people are not anonymous. And this is true of most other internet forums as well where more of the general popular participates. I think it shows in a strange way that people just have a lot of negativity to vent, and the internet has made that really easy and without consequence to the rest of one's life, and that this remains true regardless of one's interests and general intelligence.

I've found my negative tendencies curbed quickly when I started using my real name, or accounts directly linked to my real name (such as this one). For me, it just forces an extra second of thought - whatever I type next affects people's perception of me as a person.

At first this was just in the form of considering my reply more, but over time it shifted to occurring as a part of reaching my initial conclusions.

I use my main account as "nickpsecurity" for the same reason. I've posted as "Nick P" in security field for a long time. It's close to my real name. I do controversial posts and generate plenty of material that could be used for smears but tying it to my real identity does filter out some foolish, reckless or smearing comments I might otherwise make with zero accountability.

So, I post everything here under that name or don't post it at all. The results have overall been positive with a very low amount of bad reactions in moderation or downvotes vs an aggressive throwaway I might create to write comments of dubious value.

I think it shows in a strange way that people just have a lot of negativity to vent

Is it venting, or is it just a reversion to the indifference that we hide in face-to-face interactions with manners and artificial civility?

Yet another human bemoaning the fact that when myriad humans randomly get together on the internet, some folks are clueless, some folks are not nice, some folks write poorly, etc. There are things that can be done to improve online discussion. But expecting everyone to be equally knowledgeable, savvy, etc is simply not a reasonable expectation.

Well, you can't have both that and "open", at least...

I admit that I usually read the comments first and then go to article.

> For the last couple years (ish?), the moderation regime has been really active in trying to get a good mix of stories on the front page and in tamping down on gratuitously mean comments. But there was a period of years where the moderation could be described as sparse, arbitrary, and capricious, and while there are fewer “bad” comments now, it doesn’t seem like good moderation actually generates more “good” comments.

I agree that there was a major change in moderation 1-2 years ago. But I think it's worse rather than better. The moderation is more arbitrary and capricious now (in particular it's a lot more active during the hours when the US is awake), and there are a lot of positive-but-contentless fluff comments and even humour, both of which are inimical to what made HN great.

So true. I often jump to the comments before I read the linked article. The comments a very often of better quality and more informed than the article it self. HN is unique in today's internet it's a great community and I hope it stays that way.

HN comments are moderated (not the moderators which are completely fine and, in my case, always clear of what was off-topic and in need of flagging, but the community that flags) by the hive-mind that is like any hive-mind against diversity.

Of the dozens of accounts I had, some have reached karma levels of awe, and some were met with extreme flagging and disapproval.

The most pleasant and interesting discussions are mostly in the technical, scientific themes.

When it comes to diet, lifestyle issues, comments are overflooded with bunch of anecdotal claims, unscientific babbling and extreme boasting.

I stay away from these threads after I've realized this was the case.

I come here for the content. Before I started frequently coming here, I used solely reddit. I didn't "get" HN at the time. But at some point it started growing on me, I started coming here more and more often, and right now it's my primary source of random information. I still reddit, but more for leisure and time wasting than anything else.

I don't check comment much, thought.

As a side effect, it had also changed my browsing customs; before it wasn't difficult for me to go down to the 10th page on reddit.

Nowadays I'm barely past the 2nd page.

From my point of view, which is biased relatively to the HN target audience because I'm not so much interested in the startup things, reddit is overall superior to HN, either concerning the posts or the comment thread. concerning the technological news feed, my best source of content is definitely https://lobste.rs/

I feel the same. Most often, the comments are way more interesting than the links they're commenting. This led me to calm down on commenting all the time, coz I felt like I needed to try to make good quality comments in order to compare favorably to the rest of the discussion, and to contribute to the community. I wonder if others feel like this and decided to restrain on commenting?

> HN comments are terrible.

The truth is that more articles than comments are waste of time (as comments are often a lot shorter or simpler to grasp) so I have to disagree here: I often find myself reading the comments before clicking on the article to save me time. And I'm not the only one.

Of course the top comment can sometimes be positive. For example when the article is about HN itself.

On a more serious note, I guess most people in the tech crowd can make a 5-item list of why HN comments suck and that is exactly the power of HN comments.

Zero criticism here - I love danluu.com posts[1], but ...

Who is he? And why does all of his posts get massively up-voted?

Thanks in advance, from an ignorant chimp. :)

[1] However, a little bit of CSS sprinkled on them wouldn't go amiss - even just 'max-width' would help a lot.

I upvote danluu.com because I consistently like the posts; at some point, the domain name becomes a marker of quality.

Dan Luu has an about page and a LinkedIn page, but he's not a mega-celebrity or Chief Architect of Google or some such - he's mostly a guy with an uncommon-but-useful mix of backgrounds who writes well.

One thing I dont like about HN is that I do not have time to read everything and explore each new technology. It's like throwing away good food when you're hungry.

The bellwether of a bad but possibly technically interesting HN comment is one that begins with a humblebrag: "One time a Fortune 500 company hired me to re-write their entire web tier using Django" or "last year, for fun, I wrote a fully-functioning TLS implementation in node".

Such nonsense (or at best, unneeded information) is intended to provide credentials so that the reader will take what follows more seriously. But ironically it only serves to erode confidence.

More and more I'm trying to take those at face value - a statement that translates as: "I have opinions on this, but before I give them let me explain why I think I am qualified to do so.

For most, perhaps it's a bit of both. And is that a bad thing? Is there something wrong with asserting your right to wield a technical opinion while also showing off a thing that you're proud of having done?

On the other hand, if I had prefaced that opinion with the following , it would be been a bit over the top:

I've been reading comments for years. Not just on HN, but all over the Internet. In fact, once I spent 60 hours in a week, just reading comments.

A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one karma point.

Down-voting should be for disruption, not ignorance. Ignorant comments are fine. Get them out there so they can be aired and corrected. Laymen get to know what they think. Experts get to know what laymen think. Occasionally there's a good idea.

Talk is cheap and we should do more of it. The alternative is people being far more ignorant than they already are. But silently, in private, with more potential for harm.

Silent ignorance is fine. It's the loudly wrong people that are the problem. Wrong comments take more effort to rebut than they do to post; get enough of them and the SNR drops too low, because often the rebuttal is also "noise" - most people don't need a comment reminding them that global warming exists, for example.

My assumption is that commenting has the effect of reducing ignorance, even where ignorant comments are plentiful i.e. silent ignorance is more deadly than mostly-ignorant noise. This is because the very act of writing a comment, be it laden with misconceptions, causes its author to think, at least a little. Also reading different points of view helps people to identify common misconceptions and to make up their minds.

(This doesn't include disruptive comments like fluff, complaining and gratuitous humour.)

"My assumption is that commenting has the effect of reducing ignorance, even where ignorant comments are plentiful i.e. silent ignorance is more deadly than mostly-ignorant noise."

What little, empirical evidence we have on these things shows the opposite: misinformation spreads more rapidly with less likelihood of being countered than accurate information. Facebook and others have done studies to show that. It would probably take a bit of time to go into the components of that but people (a) make spot judgments more than they do solid research; (b) prefer stuff compatible with their existing beliefs; (c) get those beliefs from biased sources; and (d) often attack people more as accountability goes down. This combo, which oversimplifies things but captures quite a bit, will create and reinforce echo chambers quite naturally if it's both easy to comment and vote.

And we see it everywhere from HN to Reddit to political discussions about U.S. election. People presenting or voting in a balanced way giving disagreeing parties a chance are a tiny minority in overall discourse. Reputation and moderation systems should probably be designed with that as an assumption built-in.

"[M]isinformation spreads more rapidly with less likelihood of being countered than accurate information. Facebook and others have done studies to show that."

Ouch. As much as I'd like to imagine this isn't the case, my gut tells me it's true.

If you happen to have references to such studies at hand, would you mind providing them? If not, no big deal. I'm sure I can find them with a little searching.

"Reputation and moderation systems should probably be designed with that as an assumption built-in."

I agree. There are two pieces to this as well: (a) discouraging undesirable behavior and (b) encouraging desirable behavior. Reputation systems are harder to implement as well if you allow for anonymous behavior, which I think there is a place for. What does reputation mean if it's not something that sticks with an individual?

Here is Facebook's that I still have from earlier conversation:

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/facebook-echo-chambers-...

Far as your Googling, cross-reference the words study or empirical with "echo chamber," "filter bubble," and "misinformation." That should get you best results.

Thanks!

I don't think 'doing solid research' is what comments are about or should be about: that's what the articles are for. Comments are more like what goes on with coffee after the research presentation. They're about saying what you think, asking questions, correcting other comments, correcting the article, pointing to other articles. The mere act of writing causes ideas to be clarified.

The increasing majority of us don't expect any but a fraction of comments to be good. (This applies to research articles too. Sturgeon's Law.) They are like unrefined ore. Which is why we need as many as possible. Misconceptions are dangerous but they are less dangerous when brought into the light where they can be identified and corrected.

It's true that misinformation and conspiracy theories spread rapidly but, crucially, so does the correction of error, especially older and more parochial errors, which may even need to spread a bit before this can happen.

Look at places where people don't have access to the internet and you won't find an abundance of true information. Rather you'll find much less information together with cruder and more parochial misinformation such as ideas about witches and evil spirits.

So I don't think we need to worry too much about the quality of information in the comment section or any frontier of knowledge. It's mostly wrong. What is of more concern is how to guard and improve the conditions under which knowledge grows, beyond what we've already learnt (such as expelling trolls, discouraging politics, fluff).

" Comments are more like what goes on with coffee after the research presentation. They're about saying what you think, asking questions, correcting other comments, correcting the article, pointing to other articles. "

I would like that to be the default approach to how comments are handled. It's pretty much what we're doing here. On a lot of social media especially, it's done differently where they're spreading what they believe is the truth to get others to believe it. It's often reposted by many of those others. Further, I've seen polls showing most people on left and right are getting their news from social media and websites these days. These comments and shares reinforce the echo chambers they're in where they hit them before the corporate media does.

"It's true that misinformation and conspiracy theories spread rapidly but, crucially, so does the correction of error, especially older and more parochial errors, which may even need to spread a bit before this can happen."

Facebook's studies found the opposite: misinformation spreads far and wide while retractions happened for under half of it. I think it was in 30-40% range. Misinformation outperforms corrections on the Internet. That wasn't as much a problem in the early days but not people are trusting misinformation more because it often looks legit and comes from friends. Instead of lies, it's often just selective presentation of the truth where other information is filtered out. That's why it's more effective.

> A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one karma point.

That is such a good idea it has actually been integral to HN for, oh, I don't know, a pretty long time... From the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html):

''' How is a user's karma calculated?

Roughly, the number of upvotes on their stories and comments minus the number of downvotes. The numbers don't match up exactly, because some votes aren't counted to prevent abuse. '''

I think the downvotes referred to here is the number received, not given.

No, I mean downvoting costs both the downvoter and the downvotee one point each. People won't downvote comments they merely disagree with but they will still try to correct injustice and disruption. I'm no game theorist but that's my guess. It also reflects human psychology where righteous anger comes with a personal cost.

Ah, OK, now I get you ;-) An interesting hypothesis, I honestly don't know whether that would work. The biggest problem then is that there is a large percentage of HNers who see downvoting as a legitimate way of showing disagreement. One of them happens to be dang, so you would have some convincing to do...

(While I don't subscribe to their view, they do have some arguments in their favour. And what is more, this is an issue that gets debated at least once a month on HN, so good luck trying to push the balance :D )

Yeah I think it could only be implemented on a new forum, right at the start. No doubt it would bring a different set of problems for moderators.

To those people (not you) "who see downvoting as a legitimate way of showing disagreement" I would say that it's too lazy. Better instead to try to explain why something is wrong. Then we can look carefully and objectively at the explanation rather than at the score or the expert/layman status of the author. Also many disagreers would find themselves unable to explain why they don't like some idea and might even change their minds.

This is what Stack Overflow does. Since it "hurts" their own karma, people downvote less. One implication of that is that when threads stay at zero, it can be hard to differentiate the reason why. Sometimes it's just that the question is well written but obscure.

> Since it "hurts" their own karma, people downvote less.

Yes, so they just vote to close the question instead.

>This is what Stack Overflow does.

Thanks. Didn't know that.

>Sometimes it's just that the question is well written but obscure.

Could be that people regard the question as dishonourable.

"Some downsides of immutability" ...

The first and second paragraphs seem to contradict each other.

Comments (and previously blogs, but not so much anymore) can have more insight than news articles because they're based on first hand experience. Journalists don't have that, and the organization they work for often has problematic incentives which they push onto the writer.

HN comments are indeed very terse, to the point of being unfriendly. It bothered me at first but now I'm used to the style and sort of like it.

I'm guessing the author tried to convey a stereotype about the comments in the first paragraph. Then tried to debunk that stereotype in the rest of the post.

There definitely could of been a sentence or two to help transition between the two as it felt odd to me as well.

The post is dismissive of the value of the majority of the comments, it just thinks there are some that are worthwhile.

It also suggests moving that content off of HN (or at least replicating it elsewhere).

> The first and second paragraphs seem to contradict each other.

The assertions that "HN comments are terrible" and "I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary" don't seem contradictory to me if you allow the implication that all other (known-to-Dan) public internet forums have technical commentary that's at best also terrible.

I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started. California can not even replicate 40 years old TGV, but somehow it will build space-like technology for fraction of price.

And than there are politics. Entire world should accept millions of refugees. But SF is different, and should not even host 400 homeless who arrive every year.

"Not in my backyard"

But it should build lots of housing for tech workers for whom life just isn't worth living if they have to be anywhere else on the planet.

Yes, because otherwise they'll just take all the other housing, since tech workers are paid more.

I agree - the Musk delirium is strong with these ones.

You have to take HN with a dose of salty optimism.

The Valley depends on a little bit of irrational koolaid thinking.

It shouldn't be about faith. Every "crowd" has all kinds of people, and even the very smartest people aren't always right. By reading critically (and following up with research if necessary), you can decide what's right and what's wrong.

In my experience, H.N. comments have a lot of wrong. But when the content is good, it can be truly great.

"Faith" that HN comments is relevant source of information, sifting through hundreds of post to find one relevant is not worth it.

I get better results from Twitter, Reddit...

>I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started.

HackerNews flies off the rails when it comes to anything Elon Musk related, or anything banking/finance related. Musk invented everything and is infallible; the bankers are ruining everything and are irredeemable.

Funnily enough, i find hn a lot more balanced than any other forum I've seen when it comes to finance in general and HFT in particular.

I can't argue with that. I think the population's general level of financial knowledge is low, which is sad considering the influence it wields.

I suppose my expectations of this place is higher because...it is a great comment section. But the financial discussion is heavily conspiracy laden.

The articles I read have everything from people with a passing knowledge of finance to finance professionals to people apparently involved in HFT shilling for it. Just as an anecdote, most sites I see on the topics are more polarized in one direction or another. I won't say it's the most diverse crowd here but all the counterpointing brought my attention to many different aspects of the finance and HFT problems.

Curious, what discussion site(s) in finance would you recommend that has more diverse opinions from known experts or veterans whose writing is accessible to non-experts?

Honestly, just stick to the tech threads. The SV nonsense is where the worst of this shows up.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773066 and marked it off-topic.

I would like to propose wikipedia edit history and comment deletion milestones for the hn comment system, and in addition, a comment redaction facility that works like redaction of classified documents.

Honestly, I come here just for the comments. I rarely read the articles unless a comment is excited about something arcane.

I follow many people on twitter who dislike HN. Reason for this is opinions here are alsmost entirely from white males with money.

If this were true, it would merit study. How can a forum that is open to all and used in mostly anonymous fashion, so effectively police the race of users? And how could other less open less anonymous activities hope to succeed in diversity?

It probably works like strong acid, destroying anything unfortunate enough to not be strong acid on contact.

>How can a forum that is open to all and used in mostly anonymous fashion, so effectively police the race of users?

By being targeted at programmers and startup founders, that is, two predominantly white (ok, and asian) fields?

It's not that HN does anything special, it's the actual world that does.

Most programmers are middle class (so could afford university in the first place), most founders are upper middle class, and most of both groups are white. There are of course exceptions, but not enough to skew the majority.

The most open and diverse "forum" in the world is YouTube -- you can find everybody there under a cat video or some such (which is also why it has the nastier comments, but that's life outside an echo bubble).

With regards to the gender aspect, see any of the threads related to 'women in computing' and the horrible posts therein.

Only if you assume women cannot be successful in technology without needing a special interest group mooching off the entire enterprise.

It's a vicious cycle based on a kafkatrap. If you don't agree that women are discriminated against in tech, you're discriminating against women. Culture committees, diversity consultants and women-only groups are set up to "address" this problem, yet all they do is create more division and alienation, holding up the most stereotypical fragile princess as representative for every woman on the planet.

They keep throwing all sorts of accusations and aspersions on every single guy in the field, shriek and pearl clutch when they receive blowback, and have the gall to call this empathy, in a field where the average worker is an undersocialized and overworked code janitor. Whose preferred communication styles, hobbies and accomplishments are fair game to ignore or bulldoze over.

Pointing this out gets you labeled as "horrible". Fine, then. Yet another word to add to the pile that has lost all meaning. Misogyny used to mean "hatred of women", now it just means "something a woman hates". Which appears to include the average mid-rung nerd.

A perfect example of my point.

This is certainly true. The "race of users" isn't being "police[d]". It is just a reflection of the subject matter of HN and a reflection of the tech field in general.

Because that's the demographic that dominates tech. If you go to any other tech forum that's not a SIG for some other demographic, you'll find the same thing.

I don't understand what's dislikeable about opinions from people who are white with money.

Nothing, but it certainly limits perspectives.

If that is an issue you find, why not comment and offer views from other walks of life? I certainly do at times.

I'm legally white - but depending on the amount of sun I have, am not always viewed as such in the common world. I'm female, not exactly rich, and have blue hair. Naturally, my viewpoints can be different.

There are others like me - folks from other countries, not rich, not male.

At the same time, knowing that the crowd has that bias should help you vet out some of the comments.

same with me, legally white latino from a 3rd world country that works remotely. i would say i'm different from the usual hn user and i'm happy to share my opinions (sometimes)

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