Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

So, what if I disagree with the mob, and what if I’m right?

Exercise your freedom to go somewhere else, some not-privately-run-webiste?

Why, if you dislike the site so much, come back and post emo whiny vitriol?

This is slightly meta, but I find it interesting that the person you're attacking is questioning the utility of a point-based system and yet that very system is trying to silence your speech rather than theirs. The mob wants you to know that refusing to question the mob is against the rules.

The mob wants to think it's self-critical when asked directly.

But I dare the mob to be self-critical of some popularly held belief without the pretext of this meta commentary. HN can be very one sided, and it shows in lots of discussions, from ads to piracy to language choices.

Or the mob simply didn't like their tone or phrasing.

I don't think it's good for communities when they became echo chambers and alienate people with different opinions.

Railing against trends is less a commentary against the premise of the site, and more a commentary against the emergent whims of groupthink.

Points systems amplify the perception of groupthink, and getting karma stomped into a ban happens a lot.

Getting banned for a greyed out comment is kind of lame, and I think a certain sort of darwinism, of letting vitriolic people express their contempt has utility.

In other words, more people should develop a thick skin, and fewer people should be silenced. In theory, that sounds good, but obviously it can also go wrong, to let people bloviate too much.

I think the solution is to permit the full stream but classify and sort the responses, but in most cases, NLP just isn’t good enough to automate grouped selections of comments, so we get stuck with a one dimensional mechanical turk voting rank. Yay versus boo!

I don’t enjoy the idea of AI submerging buried comments deepet, but trusting people to vote according to quality of discussion is a dubious gambit, and you really only get an edge detection doppler return revealing the joints of political fault lines, which gets old when holy wars guide many an opinion.

The principle still stands. Why care about points? Wasn’t that the motivating factor to remove displaying comment points on HN in the first place? Facilitating hive mentality?

If everyone agrees with a comment it probably adds no value. If everyone disagrees it probably adds no value. Maybe interesting discussions should be sorted by controversial, but I don’t think that would be a “safe space”.

That's a fallacy. The best comments in HN aren't the "edgy" or controversial ones, they are the ones where someone shares information that I've never seen somewhere else.

Saying offensive things doesn't lift the level of discourse, no matter how much people who would love not to be downvoted complain about the "hive mind".

In a way that's 4chans strength. The comments and threads that get most noticed are the ones with most replies - ie the most controversial ones. Thats why Alexandria Ocasio Cortz is one of the most prominently posted figures on 4chans alt-light/pol/ board

> Wasn’t that the motivating factor to remove displaying comment points on HN in the first place?

lobste.rs shows points (and moderation logs and who invited who).

It still feels much "safer" than HN, but I guess the real reason is because they are much stricter about what topics are accepted.

Which means HN is more interesting to me but I also like lobste.rs a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com