Hacker News Reader

To expand a bit: I think we need to embrace the fact that often times we have posts that don't have a "right" response --- i.e., where you can get a good view of exactly the right way to feel about something given the first few comments. Lots of these issues have many angles you can come from, and I hope people are

(a) willing to keep themselves to a high-enough standard to think for themselves and see that it's a grey area (that they might have a bias for one side or another). You can't just assume the top post is definitely the right thing, even with a good number of upvotes.

(b) willing to read more posts further down, giving them plenty of respect, and contribute to the conversation.

Maybe a better way to rank comments is something more probabilistic rather than just ranking by (num_upvotes - num_downvotes). (Actually, how is it done now?)

> I think we need to embrace the fact that often times we have posts that don't have a "right" response

Indeed. I know I keep seeing during the immigration debate (of which is recent). Liberal-leaning say that we should provide due process and let in refugees. This is argument in good faith.

Conservatives say that we have a body of law that must be adhered to regarding immigration. This too is a valid argument. I may disagree with its interpretation, but I believe it too is in good faith.

"Womp womp", "I dont really care do u" is the style of discourse we're seeing. If the administration comments were on here with HN, dang would likely make the comment dead and leave a message of a ban.

Back to the main point - it feels like society as a whole (and HN within that) is lowering the accuracy and persuasive qualities of language to something I saw elsewhere. Idiocracy. Who can shout the loudest; Who can rapid-fire lies and half-truths; who can redirect hatred and bile - these people seem to be the ones on top dictating properness these days.

But even Dang is just a single person. We really need to design systems (social networks) that encourage this type of thoughtful debate. Right now, all the incentives in social media are around "engagement" (upvotes, likes, retweets, large amounts of comments)

Thank you for the resource you’ve created on github. Love seeing using that platform for non-code related projects.

> and people often respond when they see the opposing view (this is why conservatives and liberals in the US so often take the most extreme statements on the other side, and critique/retweet them; better engagement and an easier way to caricature the opposing side)

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07

This is great! Added to my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/commit/3d8091960e...