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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments,” he said

I wish it was possible to disable showing points in HN for this exact same reason. Both in stories and my comments. I'm sure Greasemonkey could help but I'd like this embraced by HN, if possible.

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I've read that again and again, but my personal experience is just the opposite. I haven't felt "positive reinforcement" or "dopamine hits" for quite some time on Facebook. Since it shifted from social network to social media, it doesn't "give" me anything anymore. It is tedious, and I don't check it because I feel compelled, or even enjoy it, but I have to make a concious effort to login and check every now and then, like you check mail or your bank website.

Back when it was more about the profile, about "stalking" friends and connecting with real-life acquaintances, it was much more addictive. Features like "you know this person via these two steps", poking, but also subtle clues like the timing of when somebody visited your page, or that they commented on an old photo (meaning they browsed your gallery)... that is all missing now. Facebook was so addictive because it enabled you to obsess about social connections. Friends, crushes, people with common hobbies, and so on.

I hadn't fully realized this, but I think you nailed it. I stopped using Facebook regularly well over 5 years ago, and the only reason I have an account is because many people in my neighborhood are on a Facebook Messenger thread together (kind of an informal thing).

When I did use Facebook daily, it was for all the reasons you mention. If I ever log onto the site now I'm immediately driven away, it's just a bunch of advertising and nothing I care to see.

> I haven't felt "positive reinforcement" or "dopamine hits" for quite some time on Facebook.

A 'feed' does not have to be overtly social to have addictive potential.

Suppose you visit a news site, not a social one, no likes, hearts or any feedback from other users.

The stories appear in a feed that you can refresh. 80% of the stories are of no interest to you, but 20% are great.

You can't predict when an interesting story will appear.

This configuration is enough to create "positive reinforcement" and the unpredictability can foster addictive behaviour.

When you encounter an article you like, it's a bit like sifting through sand and finding a gold nugget, you get a dopamine hit for that.

The fact that the nuggets only come up randomly and are hard to predict is called an "intermittent reinforcement schedule" and is known to elicit a high rate of response from the subject.

Perfect explanation for my first Usenet experiences, then slashdot, the Reddit and HN.

Wasn’t there another one in there called “ko”-something or other during the slashdot days? It’s funny how in all my years of internet, I’ve probably been reading comments by people I first read when I was much younger.

>Wasn’t there another one in there called “ko”-something or other during the slashdot days?

Maybe you mean kuro5hin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin

Related: Chimpanzees have higher dopamine release when the peanut dispenser only gives out peanuts "sometimes" instead of "every time" and can also explain (behaviorally) why some human become very addicted to the unpredictable nature of slots.

The term for that is variable-ratio positive reinforcement [2] which leads to habits that are resistant to "extinction" [3]. I just learned this the other day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber#C....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Simple_schedules

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)

Nice. I will be sure to only upvote you sometimes so you stay on HN a long while.

My only use of Facebook is one of my friends occasionally messages me or I need to ask my network something occasionally.

Facebook news feed for me is utter garbage!

Timing plays a role into this too. If you're interested in getting into a discussion on a submission, you need to check the site frequently because after a few hours the discussion is going to be dead. Likewise, you need to make the comment fairly quickly instead of waiting a day or two to chime in. And after making a comment, there's pressure to check frequently to see if you got replies - again, if you wait for too long nobody is going to notice your reply back to them.

With the old web forums you could wait a day or two to respond or a day or two to check for replies. But the timing dynamic here (and on many other sites) encourages much more frequent checks and much more rapid-fire conversations.

I usually come here from Hacker Newsletter, i.e. a few days late and leave a comment that no-one will ever read.

Your points still stand but in case you haven’t heard about it, someone around here created hnreplies.com to help mitigate the “frequent checking” problem. Its awesome and free. (I have nothing to do with it, just an appreciative fan)

I don't often comment on HN and this (the short-timed nature of discussions) is one of the main reasons. The other main reason is that I have a high threshold for considering my participation is worthy of other people's attention.

More often then not, when that threshold is crossed, I realize I'm too late and my post will just sit there, unread.

Aren't there others who think it'd be great to have a "sticky" or "follow" button, in essence signalling "I'm going to follow this discussion for a few days / weeks, because I'm genuinely interested"?

Also if there was a way to easily "suscribe" to a thread (email alerts) that'd help. (Someone mentioned hnreplies.com in a sibling comment, never tried it, but I'll check it out)

> The other main reason is that I have a high threshold for considering my participation is worthy of other people's attention.

This is one of the problems with online conversations in general. Person A makes a lot of low effort comments without putting much thought into it and without bothering to check the accuracy of what they're writing. Person B thinks about whether or not they have anything to add to the conversation, spends time thinking about other people's comments, checks any claims they make to see if they're accurate, rewrites their comment so that it flows better, etc. Person A is going to end up making many, many more comments than Person B. The conversation will look more and more like Person A's posts, even when those people are in the minority.

There are some places that suffer more from this than others, but I think it affects just about every online conversation to some extent. It would be interesting to see what effect posting limits would have.

You're right about that. It might be that I suffer from a "person B" problem :)

However I still think that the "short-lived" nature of discussions here is a relatively independent problem. I think integrating a way to "subscribe to a story" with email alerts on HN itself (rather than independent apps like hnreplies.com), and _displaying_ the number of people who did subscribe, would pave the way for longer-lived discussions. By seeing the number of people who did "subscribe to the story" you'd know whether or not it's still worth posting a comment even though it's been a day or two.

Maybe that's the reason forums have longer-lived discussions. You can easily get alerts when there are new posts in a discussion where you've posted.

It would be interesting if someone started a HN News discussion forum where people could continue the conversations that start here. That would at least help alleviate the problem of feeling pressure to respond to stories and comments rapidly, even if the other issues involved in online discussions (like the "Person A/Person B" one) remain.

In general I wish there was more attention paid to the way different platforms shape our conversations, and more interest in exploring alternative platforms.

I like the idea of a "discussion forum where people could continue the conversations that start here" (at HN).

Some discussions (not all :) that arise on HN are rich and deep, with intelligent people exploring the topic, often someone with expertise/experience/domain knowledge will pitch in to inform the rest - and I haven't found many places on the Web where such discussions happen regularly.

It's a pity sometimes when such a discussion gets swept away in the timeline, simply archived, rather than continuing it over a longer-term, to really have a chance to think deeply and collectively.

You could have a greasemonkey script that puts a 'continue this discussion on [site]' button and then auto-cross post on a click. Even also put auto put a comment in that says 'I'd like to continue this on [site], please join me there'.

For all that G+ is a horrible service, the fact that commenting on a post is effectively a subscription to that post has been among its more attractive elements. If the moderator of that post kicks crap (spam, shitposts) to the curb.

It's lead to the convention of "/sub" (or as I prefer, "/surveil") as an indicator of interest.

But a good conversation can remain alive for days, weeks, months, or even years.

I find this frustrating as well. Occasionally a good back and forth does develop and then just... dies. No way to actually reach out to anyone just pray they keep checking the 'threads' link until that thread gets too far down.

I have no idea how anyone manages to follow conversations beyond their first visit to a story on vanilla HN - I can only manage it with a Greasemonkey script [1] which shows which previously-viewed stories have new comments, highlighting new comments and collapsing trees without new comments when you revisit them.

[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees

It would be nice if the site maintainers took notice of people using scripts like this and incorporate those improvements, but I suppose that will always be the nature of free but non-advertising-driven websites. Be careful what you wish for I suppose.

I made an account just to comment on this post. I’ve been a lurker for a little while, just getting the feel of HN. I never planned on making an account so I don’t see upvotes like I do on reddit. I will legitimately log out of my account after this comment because I have enjoyed the experience so much more.

Thanks for being a awesome HN, keep it up.

I've written a dumb extension to do this on Chrome [0]. All points disappear and all shades of grey become black.

[0] https://github.com/fapjacks/antihnbs

This would have been a great bookmarklet, no need for a browser extension.

Unfortunately, bookmarklets no longer work as easily and as reliably as they used to work.

Not sure, but is it not that bookmarklets need to be clicked by user on every page visit, whereas Extension can auto process every page visit without user intervention?

Good point. Although a bookmarklet can also ignore the current site and just open a new tab, it can't embed custom JavaScript into that new tab.

But at least it can open a new tab with a full-page iframe, which was just enough for me to implement my autoreload bookmarklet. [1]

Apart from that, I believe there are meta-extensions which provide a generic way to inject JavaScript into every page. This is just one extension, but manages multiple bookmarklets (or whatever they call these snippets).

[1] https://vog.github.io/autoreload/

tampermonkey's good

bookmarklet to make all text black, no exception.

    javascript:(function(){var%20i,x;for(i=0;=document.getElementsByTagName("*")i];++i)x.style.color="#000000";})();

No need for a bookmarklet. It can be easily done with CSS.

What's the difference in this specific case? How do I automatically apply a custom CSS onto an external website? Is this somehow simpler than injecting JS into an external website?

FYI: You can publish Chrome extensions on addons.mozilla.org as well. They usually work without any changes.

Ah, good to know! Thanks. Yet another cool little feature from Mozilla.

That's a bad idea disguised as good one. Comments aren't born in a vacuum, there is a story and a pattern to people that helps put things into perspective when reading a string of comments.

I'm not suggesting points shouldn't exist, just that they shouldn't be prominently showed (to people who don't want to see them).

idea: Give points randomly: When an up-vote is given, a random member gets the point. Seeing your comment or submission on the front page is a reward on itself, no need to get extra points too. This can be developed further by randomly selecting only from those who has up-voted the submission, so there would be a higher chance of getting negative points by up-voting "flame-bait" topics.

> When an up-vote is given, a random member gets the point.

Eh, what? How is the pool of admissible members chosen? Surely you don't mean "any member gets a point"?

> Seeing your comment or submission on the front page is a reward on itself

Comments don't show up on the front page, and you don't get points when your submissions are upvoted.

>you don't get points when your submissions are upvoted

Points are awarded but it is not 1-to-1 with upvotes.

Agree. Delay showing pts for a few days maybe the other option.

The points do help in surfacing articles and comments. Nobody needs to see them instantly.

Why showing them then? If it's useful to not have them the first few days, why is it useful after?

I don't have any numbers, but I'd bet 99% of visits to comment pages are made in the first day of the article being submitted (i.e. when it's in the front page or second page).

I don't know how many people need the 'micro dopamine high' to contribute and engage. If that number is high engagement might drop off as they may go elsewhere to get the fix.

The flip side is that those of us who tend to have controversial opinions get negative dopamine hits (downvotes, often with no response or retort) and participate less.

I mostly just don't participate in upvoting or downvoting at all (here or on reddit), unless something really catches my attention.

Personally, I still think this is one thing slashdot had right. Random selection of certain established users as "moderator" who could not only give a comment a point rating between 0-5, but also a descriptor (funny, offtopic, etc).

Honestly I miss the slashdot days of old.

Yes but then how will I know which comments are valid and acceptable.... We must have points for I am unable to think for myself and need the points system to tell me which views are correct /s

Because the points system replaces online the offline signals you, and we all, use for just that non-thinking - signals like facial disgust, like if a restaurant is full or empty, like other people in a room taking notice of one person.

we need social signals to determine how the society we are in is functioning. points, likes, follows are very poor proxies - but we need something. if those proxies are making billions for some people that's not the fault of our need for social alignment.

Or maybe the "signals" are thoughtful responses to comments...

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