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Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

Side point: and understand if I get trashed here as maybe I am doing what I am about to criticise.... is it just me or are HN comments increasingly glib, political and of little informational value? This post is interesitng information with great potential for interesting discussion but the comments so far seem dominated by a style I would not normally expect on HN, something that has been happening over time but seems sharply more common these days.

When I came to HN, I did so because it was not Reddit. It was dominated by 2 things; information that I didn't understand (too technical) or 2) something that improved my knowledge about the world and business, the discussions often more so than the post.

From this I wonder (assuming people agree...) what can we do to hold the values of old HN discussion/posts, or is this the anthem of progress/popularity I have to accept?

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I've been on HN for 7-8 years and there is a difference in the last two years. I've seen a lot more one line comments with sarcastic, jokey, snarky, or flippant content.

Some were always made, but they were very consistently downvoted years ago. The solution I think is to implore those with downvote powers to do a lot more downvoting. In a way it is all custodial duty that cannot be automated.

It can feel mean to downvoted a lot, but there are no shortage of sites where peanut gallery comments are the norm, and I think we should continue to discourage them here as much as possible.

Note: I do not think political or contentious comments are a problem, only the glib.

The guy that replied to you with: "Everything dies or turns to shit in the end." is a good example of what to downvote.

It would be better just to add an ability to flag comments and moderators could take further action. Enhancing downvote ability while it could work in this context it could wreak havoc in heated arguments.

I don't think it's even a case of enhancing anything. It's more to encourage users that do have the feature to actually use it and guidance on when. That would be enough.

I know I hesitate to downvote anything that isn't obviously a troll or blatantly destructive. But that's too low a standard if we want to keep the comment quality from slipping.

Could HN let comments be tagged, let users confirm tags and viewers filter (to either hide or deemphasize) comments by tags and personalized confirmation thresholds?

That would enable users to remove the junk on their own and would be more scalable than a moderation team as well as making HN comments an interesting ML dataset.

You can flag comments. Click the timestamp of the comment and then you have the option to. Not sure why it's hidden away, though.

Seven years in here and I hadn't noticed that.

Yeah, I can imagine that hiding it would prevent excessive flagging, but when veteran users aren't even aware of the option, something is wrong.

This supposed separation between the technical and the social/political is illusory, and shows a very blinkered and sheltered view of the world.

In actuality the technical and the social are deeply enmeshed, the society we live in shapes the tools we have, and the tools we have shape the society we live in. In this case we see a technology being developed and deployed to serve the interests of one group of people with little regard for how it affects the livelihoods of the other group. This is an ideological act, and (contrary to the whinging of so many technological determinists) an ideological deployment of technology.

If you've detected a change in the tone around here it's possible that more and more techies are waking up to the fact that politics is more than just dinner-party conversation and affiliation signalling.

For more on the topic I'd recommend picking up some Andrew Feenberg, his book "Transforming Technology" in particular.

I don't think the issue it with "political", but rather with "glib [...] and of little informational value".

There's a comment in this thread saying "Welcome to late stage capitalism, folks" with a follow up asserting slavery. Both are dead, but presumably weren't when GP wrote their side point, and anecdotally that kind of commentary feels like it's in the ascendency.

> I don't think the issue it with "political", but rather with "glib [...] and of little informational value".

Full agreement on that one, but those labels are sometimes applied unfairly to any comment which doesn't toe the valley-culture-technological-determinism line too :)

I believe that politics is a cancer. It demands attention, refuses to relinquish control of conversations it becomes a part of, and only very rarely does it contribute anything beyond a lot of yelling back and forth. Once you have brought up Politics, you can rest assured that friends will become enemies, and the conversation will never turn back to the topic at hand.

I understand the urge to bring politics in; the world around us seems to be falling apart because of political schemes. I simply do not care. If you really want to throw fits about capitalism and communism, or throw up a pithy quip about Trump et al., do so in a separate thread, possibly an Ask HN ("Who's your favorite liar?"). I'm going to go enjoy the fact that someone's working on mass-producing a powered exoskeleton.

This is amongst the silliest things I have ever read.

> I simply do not care.

Right, so you live in the kind of comfort and privilege that allows you to detach from society and the political process. Acknowledge that the vast majority of people don't have the same privilege.

Is it really that silly to want to do things for the sake of enjoyment or benefiting others, instead of doing things to spite a talking head on the TV who says mean things?

It's a real problem that the political systems of the world are broken at best, but quite frankly I haven't got time or money enough to fix it, and my resources are better spent trying to build interesting things and watching others build interesting things. I cannot save the World; I can absolutely make my own life better, and help others around me.

>Is it really that silly to want to do things for the sake of enjoyment or benefiting others,

No, but for many of us, that road can be blocked because of politics.

How is it blocked? Programming is not illegal. Neither is art. Unless your aspirations are politics, political decisions only rarely enter into the equation.

That isn't to say it never comes into play, or that it never becomes a big enough problem to interrupt your actual goals. However, in my (~20 years) of experience in this world, what the President is saying has nothing to do with me. Indeed, the vast, vast majority of 'politics' (i.e., the things that catch your attention in news shows and blog posts) is pointless yelling, and has nothing to do with either of us, or any of the people who angrily demand action and strut back and forth in the comments.

Recently, the same people who wage war in comment sections started warring in the streets, and it has only gotten worse.

These are all reasons why I dislike politics, and why I advocate for separating politics from everything else. There is no point in trying to find a political statement in the games I'm trying to create. At best, you'd get to feel like a hero because you trashed someone's work over some supposed connection to Hitler. Similarly, I have no reason to go around waving guns and demanding that Hacker News ban all commies, or declaring anybody who doesn't use my exact combination of pronouns to be part of the new Reich. I would have nothing but a false sense of purpose to gain from these things, and I'd rather have the real sense of purpose from creating something people enjoy.

>How is it blocked? Programming is not illegal. Neither is art. Unless your aspirations are politics, political decisions only rarely enter into the equation.

I have friends who are graduate students, and I used to be one. Doubling taxes on everyone working in a specific field is... well, it's cutting off people's livelihood out of pure political spite.

As it is, labor law has a daily effect on all of us who work for a living, and recent Congressional efforts in healthcare policy have basically constituted stochastic terrorism against the population at large. Threats of war, loss of healthcare, loss of Social Security, doublings of taxes -- these things affect people's lives.

Almost everyone has that privilege. We aren't required to vote in the United States and never have been, and detaching ones-self from society in some ways is part of the fabric of the US - the journey west is one such example, but the idea of the nuclear family is actually another.

Unfortunately, if you don't discuss politics, then politics comes to you.

The social power structure of the USA implies that politics is in the hands of the people. At very least, that's the aspiration of the US Political system (even if its got some issues in practice). So convincing other people on a day-to-day basis is one of the more effective ways of causing political change.

If politics is ignored, then you begin to lose in politics. Not only do people affect laws, but laws also affect people. Ignoring this fact will cause the laws to potentially shift away from your favor.

the thing is, the rift between your average Republican and Democrat is wide enough that most will barely see each other, let alone interact on such a politically skewed site as HN. The urban/rural split is part of it but it seems in every other way Americans are divided into 2 nations - there was an interesting article that talked about it the other week.

>most will barely see each other, let alone interact on such a politically skewed site as HN

Or whoever is less represented (local to a given site/subsite) will just shut up because they don't want to fight a 10:1 losing battle with people who can't be convinced to see their side of things (subreddits are a good example).

There's also probably a bunch of people from rural areas in your downtown office who think you're crazy. The foreigners probably think the same thing. Neither group will tell you about it though. It's just not worth saying anything in those settings.

  There's also probably a bunch of people from rural areas in your downtown office who think you're crazy. The foreigners probably think the same thing.

I have found this to be true. Two disparate groups reject the narratives that dominate North American media: Male foreigners from arab and poorer countries, and whites from rural North America. The whites don't voice their opinions, because they get viciously attacked; the Arabs and immigrants from poorer areas just laugh at us.

And as you drill down and enumerate more and more distinct narratives you have enough stuff that basically everyone disagrees with something but nobody says anything because the penalty for disagreeing is too high.

This is very true too, the "shy Tory effect" in action. I'm British and often find myself in the more conservative end of places I work (being a classical liberal of sorts) so I'm familiar with the implicit suppression you're talking about.

One of the other reasons I hate politics is the mentality that the only losing move is not to play...which is often followed by "vote for me". It's a cheap, underhanded tactic that tales advantage of First Past The Post's greatest weakness as a voting system, and it is the reason why we have to put up with the "lesser" of two evils instead of a decent human being at the reins.

To quote the old song: "I won't be fooled again".

The reason why we put up with the "lesser of two evils" is because the 3rd and 4th evils are the Libertarian Party and Green party respectively.

Which I don't believe represent the people's interest in the slightest. Anti-vax and "What is Aleppo" stain those two.

Its more legitimate to attempt to usurp the parties from within (ie: Trump / Bernie) to represent another option. And lo and behold: 16 of the 17 "standard" Republicans were defeated by Trump.

Now, I don't like Trump myself, but the last election was not standard by any stretch of the imagination. Clinton narrowly defeated Bernie in the primaries (but Bernie did far better than expected), and Trump of course beat all standard Republicans.

In any case, if you want a "3rd option", participate in the primaries. There were 17 Republicans to support (with ~5 very serious contenders: Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Cruz, and Trump) and something like 4 Democrats to support (with ~2 very serious contenders: Bernie and Clinton, although I was partial to Jim Webb).

I personally managed to find someone in both parties that spoke to my viewpoints: Both Bush and Kasich from the Republicans, and Jim Webb in the Democrats. Lawrence Lessig didn't seem to be running a serious Democrat campaign, but if he were more serious I probably would have supported him. Its a shame that "The Wire" was so popular, because it stained Martin O'Malley (who otherwise looked like a solid candidate).

There was a lot of choice actually.

> The reason why we put up with the "lesser of two evils" is because the 3rd and 4th evils are the Libertarian Party and Green party respectively.

> Which I don't believe represent the people's interest in the slightest. Anti-vax and "What is Aleppo" stain those two.

This isn't the reason we put up with the lesser of two evils; it's simply a symptom. The real reason is that, time and time again, the majority votes for a loud extremist instead of picking a quiet and reasonable candidate, and the majority has shown time and time again that once they have chosen a political stance they will happily overlook anything their candidate does, because their candidate is the lesser evil.

> Its more legitimate to attempt to usurp the parties from within (ie: Trump / Bernie) to represent another option. And lo and behold: 16 of the 17 "standard" Republicans were defeated by Trump.

Theoretically correct. It's theoretically easier to convince a majority to vote for me as a "Republican" or a "Democrat" than it is to convince everyone to stop voting for the lesser of two evils, or to implement an alternative vote. However, all three of these options would require that I dedicate my life to a topic which infuriates me, instead of going about my own business.

> In any case, if you want a "3rd option", participate in the primaries. There were 17 Republicans to support (with ~5 very serious contenders: Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Cruz, and Trump) and something like 4 Democrats to support (with ~2 very serious contenders: Bernie and Clinton, although I was partial to Jim Webb).

But again, the issue of the majority comes up--because the vast majority of people would rather vote for the lesser of two evils, and guarantee a tyrant they agree with, instead of voting for a decent leader, and risking a tyrant they don't agree with getting voted in by people who think that tyrant is the lesser of two evils.

> I personally managed to find someone in both parties that spoke to my viewpoints: Both Bush and Kasich from the Republicans, and Jim Webb in the Democrats. Lawrence Lessig didn't seem to be running a serious Democrat campaign, but if he were more serious I probably would have supported him. Its a shame that "The Wire" was so popular, because it stained Martin O'Malley (who otherwise looked like a solid candidate).

It also doesn't help that 90% of the coverage of an election is focused on the two most questionable candidates. It really doesn't help that most people are expected to vote even if their only understanding of the political climate is from flawed news.

> There was a lot of choice actually.

There was a lot of choice, but as of right now, none of these choices are going to end well. I am stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma in which I know the other party is always choosing A. I am now choosing not to play, because I am frustrated and have better things to do with my time than play a game of Prisoner's Dilemma every four years.

>the world around us seems to be falling apart because of political schemes. I simply do not care.

Then maybe go to a forum for people who don't care whether or not the world is falling apart. The rest of us, well, we live in the world, so we kinda care.

Except at some point, if you are an engineer, you need to do actual engineering. I see more interesting stuff in my Twitter feed now than shows up on HN.

This story has 74 comments, none of them actually mention the company that makes the product the story is about ( Ekso Bionics ) Most, including this thread of comments, are completely off topic.

> the society we live in shapes the tools we have, and the tools we have shape the society we live in

Incidentally, that's (my understanding of) what "the medium is the message" was about. Basically, changing the profile of which actions/habits/business models are feasible has a far more powerful effect on society and culture than do the specific decisions made within that profile.

HN often feels to me like like are two intermixed sites: the HN with good deep technical and business discussion and a site of web developers arguing politics.

There is no good solution from a service's side, paid community, closed community, they all bring their side effects.

Even these voting systems will only surface the popular opinion and not necessarily the right opinion.

Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards.

> Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards

The community of actively participating submitters and commentators is surprisingly small. This is true for nearly all communities.

If HN had a really rich ignore feature, it would take a very short time to create a personal ignore list that pruned the glib or polarising political commentators.

I would say though, that whilst this has proven to be a good thing on the communities I run, I personally prefer not to use ignore features.

I meant a 'client side' ignore feature. :)

Service side content filtering only creates bubbles.

> There is no good solution from a service's side

I can't believe that. Nothing will be perfect but there must be some combination of options that can improve things significantly.

Maybe it is volunteer mods. Or HN require new members to pass a 'best use' rules questionnaire before posting (or exiting offenders). Or they run algorithms to find users that vote inline with the spirit of HN and ninja ban people they downvote.

I dont profess to know the answer but there must be improving options available. And further someone solving this is a quite important concept (and potentially a great business too), as while here I want a better conversation, the recent US elections showed us what bot armies and paid shills can do, there are probably options that can be employed in the wider internet encourage genuine conversation in general.

but is there an objectively "right" opinion? Surely that in itself is determined by the group's average opinion.

Flippancy, and sarcasm bother me far less than when people form very strong opinions and feel the need to express them based on the title of the article alone.

The problem is that creating spoof accounts are an unlimited resource, but moderators are limited.

They should fix this by preventing new sign ups. When the culture returns to something that people like, open a limited number of sign ups per month (perhaps you need to be "vetted" by an active account to sign up).

The problem is purely that of endless summer, and websites just copying broken social commenting features and systems from each other instead of setting up the incentive structure correctly.

Agreed. See the current #1 and post about the FBI agents who stole BTC from a Silk Road wallet for a more extreme example of trash posting on HN.

Yeah, but any post that involves bitcoin, the FBI/CIA/NSA/DOD and the darknet is bound to bring people out of the woodwork. The most interesting articles tend to have more...thoughtful comments.

I've also noticed a huge spike in really hardcore anti-capitalism comments. I'm all for UBI and adding other strong social safety net features, but I'm seeing more anger/revolutionary sentiment. Maybe it's just a reflection of a shift in population sentiment, but it seems almost like we're getting brigaded by some group.

I haven't seen signs that it's brigading, and since the same trends are showing up everywhere else, I think the default hypothesis is more likely: it's a macro change in social sentiment or segments thereof. HN isn't immune from any of that.

Thanks for the insight!

This concerns me as well. I would downvote such comments if I could but I don't have downvote powers yet, and don't know how to get them. Can anyone shed light on that?

I think the threshold is 500 points/karma/whatever?

I've been on Hacker News for a while now and it's always been Reddit with a thesaurus, this feeling isn't that new as I see it.

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