I think human conversations at scale with strangers is inherently difficult to solve. We are prone to quick, context-life reactions.
Threading management only gets you so far…
Threading management only gets you so far…
But now enter companies wanting to make a buck. And that's where all the stupidity comes into play. Because now you need to people to disproportionately be exposed to e.g. advertisers, and to keep the advertisers around you also probably need to stop people from really speaking their mind about them: 'This movie sucks.' 'Yeah, drink this fizzy corn fructose laden crap and get fat. Woot!' So you end up with shilling, 'moderation', and other mechanisms to try to help ease monetization. This, in turn, rapidly drives division, antagonism, and trolling. And so the corporate site needs to push even harder to maintain their advertising venue. Which results in an ever downward spiral.
And on top of all of this now you don't just need people to chat. You need for them to stay actively 'engaged' with your 'platform.' Those big buck advertisers aren't going to pay you to advertise to your 500 users. So now enter things like voting systems. Opaque manipulation means you can help drive discussion however you want, and you can simultaneously help addict users by giving them that tiny little dopamine bump each time they see 'oh wow, i got more imaginary internet points! herpa derp!' Hey what do you know, these voting systems are somehow driving the creation of increasingly radicalized little echo chambers. Yeah man, but look how engaged they are! It's all quite idiotic, but this derives from the fact that the problem is not enabling chat, the problem is enabling chat while making money off of it.
EDIT: It's "angry orange website", not "evil orange website". Not so bad after all.
People will find all sorts of reasons to think the article is wrong based on "mid-brow dismissal" or will say any public figure or company is lying about any statement they make.
Plus there's no emojis.
These are all consequences of HN's fundamental structure. It's a public, optionally-anonymous forum, so we can't control what gets posted. All we or the community can do is react after it has been posted. That takes time. Even if we ban someone, they can just create a new account in 30 seconds, and plenty do.
Most importantly, HN doesn't have silos, where users follow what they like and block what they dislike. Rather, everybody sees the same material. That means every one of us is more likely to notice stuff that we dislike. This leads to negative impressions, often painfully strong ones. The odd thing is, fundamentally, a non-siloed site is arguably objectively healthier: at least we are all in the same room. But it doesn't feel that way. It can be extremely painful to be in the same room with people saying horrible things one doesn't normally come near. In fact, I wonder whether for some users there may actually be no place other than HN where that regularly happens. Inevitably, the negative impressions get attached to HN itself, since none of these dynamics are at all obvious. That explains why people have such contradictory views of HN—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927454 in this very thread. They are drawing conclusions from different sets of painful impressions.
I'd love to find new ways to mitigate these downsides. We've worked on that for years already, yet I feel like the most we've managed to do is scratch a couple of crude gouges into a boulder. But let's remember that HN's structure has upside consequences too. There's no barrier to entry, so literally anyone can jump in. Wonderful things come from that. The absence of silos means people are talking and relating to people they would not otherwise come into contact with. These are precious things which are easy to forget amid the pressure we all feel. The upsides and downsides come from the same root: deep tradeoffs in the original choices of how to set up a place like this. As it grows and as the energy becomes more intense, the tradeoffs show up in ways that are increasingly difficult to bridge.
I find it incredibly frustrating. It's a lot of energy spent on my part and I get no actual debate. No matter how civil I try to be about the whole thing.
Your co-workers must be very different to the people I come across in my work.
Quick example: I said not vaccinating is risking death, and someone else said I shouldn't drive because that risk of death is higher. That's all it takes!
Want to build a better Twitter alternative? Train the moderation AI: No memes, no reposts, no shitposts.