Hacker News Reader

Comment by stochastic_monk | Hacker News Reader

I think people leaving facebook en masse would be a good thing (TM) for society, not a doomsday. Fewer echo chambers, less disinformation, and people forced to make effort to contact each other.

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It will only be replaced with another echo chamber.

Hopefully multiple smaller ones.

Already there - whatsapp, instagram oops...

Hacker news....

This effect is partially muted by the fact that one can only see the vote status of one’s own post. There is still a tendency toward conformity, but at least the suggestion to vote with other readers isn’t apparent like it is on many content aggregators/discussion media.

Except downvoted posts here turn gray.

Which is why I make a point of logging in and upvoting the non-egregious ones.

Yeah but I can predict pretty accurately which of my posts will get downvoted and they all have the same thing in common; they challenge the left-leaning groupthink common here.

Some might claim they get downvoted because they are "low quality" to which I'd retort why spend a lot of time crafting a "quality" reply when you know it's going to be suppressed?

While it might just be me, I find myself downvoting your comments purely because I find them low-quality noise (or worse) that I'd rather not see more of.

I even tagged you as 'shitty commenter', which I don't do this too often. But with some commenters I'm just amazed at how they can consistently keep this up without tiring of it.

Hacker News is at least somewhat informative in the tech sphere. It tends to favor more esoteric technology like Lisp in lieu of things like Java & JavaScript which is far more favored on Reddit/Programming. Politics are mostly left leaning mixed with some Libertarian views. There is a good splattering of non tech stuff as well (music, art, literature, linguistics...etc). I'd say it's a far cry from fake news and cat videos.

Its cause of the people. The more popular something is the worse it gets until eventually its all cats and outrage-culture "fake news". The medium is irrelevant.

Media sucks because you* suck.

*The collective societal you, not the particular individual you.

I think some studies have shown that the same set of people (or, let's say, people randomly assigned to one group or the other) can have very different behavior depending on the situation they're in. It seems at least possible that a forum could maintain its rules and norms while people join... though received wisdom says that if too many join at once, then the norms can be broken.

Yea, but HackerNews is really only going to appeal to a select group of people. Computer illiterate folk aren't going to be talking about compilers, lisp, APL, Smalltalk, blockchain, or the other 1000 compsci things that come up on here daily.

Oh, look at them rush to White Knight their own bubble. "Not OUR echo chamber, no! We're different, you see, because reasons."

Scuttlebutt, mastodon, Riot, gab, stack overflow, d.tube, the list goes on

Some crtical thinking would be good for a society. Tools are just tools.

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