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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

This kind of stuff (both sides) is why politics should be kept as far as possible away from Hacker News.

Unfortunately there's no way this site or Slashdot or any of the tech sites will be free of similar problems. There may be far less seen with conservative/liberal issues, but there will be others biasing the rankings for stories/comments about OSes, phones, and other things.

Politics isn't just about elections. It's the science of influencing people. That definition doesn't exclude unethical means.

There are a lot of lies and distortion thrown around in political ads through regulated media outlets. Obviously the potential for abuse on the net is much greater, and cheaper too...

Anybody can bias what's out there. Sometimes it'll happen directly, sometime people are paid to do it. It reminds me of the propositions that get on the ballot in California. Some interests used paid signature gatherers (in some cases using criminals to do the work) to get something on the ballot, then follow up with a heavily funded misleading ad campaign.

Here's an example of even a relatively small company abusing what appeared to be posts from average people:

http://thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins-d... [thedailybackground.com]

http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/21/flash-second-hi... [thedailybackground.com]

http://i.gizmodo.com/5134652/belkin-employee-sheds-light-on-... [gizmodo.com]

Maybe... At least I've got the impression that on HN reactions are way more professional, I see people here actually listening to the arguments of others and that's the least you need to keep things quiet.

Most people here keep extremism out here anyway. Emotional arguments don't succeed to gain traction, you have to be factual and nuanced to gain respect here, and as far as I see blind extremism doesn't get that far.

Yeah, reddit started that way too. It doesn't last long.

On HN the fear is "Are we turning into Reddit?".

On Reddit the comparison used to be Digg. (I left three years ago, so I don't know what happened in the mean time.)

It's to 4chan now. With pride, usually.

I'm considering starting my own shadow conspiracy to downmod every comparison to, or mention of, reddit.

Is the point not valid? If you want to avoid mentioning... "it", you could simply say that without imposing some rules/order, random internet discussion of politics degrades fairly rapidly.

Yeah, it's not valid, because it's an appeal-to-reverse-authority. And to top it off, that authority is rooted in snootiness, which is my least favorite form of bogus authority.

If you have something to say, say it. Reddit's probably irrelevant, and for the record, for any population, there's a lot of people smarter than you and me. Particularly if you and I are engaging in lazy categorization.

It's not an appeal to anything: it's an observation of my years on the internet: politics discussions on the internet go downhill quickly. Where do you think "Godwin's Law" came from?

After all, this whole discussion is attached to a story about how a group of people took the time, because of their political motivations, to attempt to "attack" another group of people on a web site. Seems like pretty lame behavior to me.

Sorry, as a Flash supporter I've often encountered the opposite experience on HN. Logical arguments supporting Flash are pushed down into the neg, while profanity-laden anti-Flash rants score high.

I'd argue that HN's professionalism is due to the fact that most of us use our real names (or at least make it easy for people to identify us) and most of the other commenters here are potential future colleagues.

I'm just as guilty as the next person of saying something rude on HN every now and then, but for the most part I and I suspect most others do our best to make substantive contributions to the discussions here.

I sometimes wonder if the same thing goes on here, just on a smaller scale. It would be easy to set up... even to automate.

Tangentially, I think it would be awesome to get a data-dump of all voting records for, say, 2009, of HN.

Something that shows every story and comment (with parent/child relationship) and timestamped voting records.

Assign a random id to every account that actually voted to protect privacy and preclude any chilling effect on future votes.

That would be fun to mine.

I agree. Reddit&Digg have their own (what I can only describe as troll sites) such as DailyKos.

IRL, that is generally what I like about Europeans (or at least my impression of them) - they have more mild beliefs. A lot of Americans seem to have very strong predetermined beliefs.

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