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Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the problem is necessarily whether it's real people. The problem is that if you're not careful, Reddit becomes the upvote Olympics.

You can't build a healthy social diet on just approval. Some people do that with real life. It just happens to be far easier to do on the internet because we figured out that approval is addictive and drives user engagement.

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That's a large part of the problem. Another is that the vast majority of online content and votes comes from a small minority of people who are probably mentally ill[1]. Also, the way sites like Reddit (or HN) work are also in opposition to long and thought out conversations (you have a very short window of time to participate in the discussion before it drops off the front page and effectively dies).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827

This brings up a related thought. One reason I dislike online forums (and especially Reddit's technical communities like r/programming) are that discussions never have time to evolve, so nuanced topics always just end in popular talking points. That leads to a dynamic where it's hard to try to express any real nuance, because any gray area in the discussion gets squashed when somebody jumps in with the least charitable possible interpretation of your point. I rarely ever run into any cases of "hmm you have a point but I still disagree."

For example, I see this every time a discussion about code review culture comes up. The thread is always popular, and it always gets exactly two opinions: "we should be nicer" and "grow a thicker skin." God forbid there could be a situational truth to either point! You'd think from the discussion that every developer is either a caustic veteran or a thin skinned newbie who needs to get over themselves.

Concluding “the vast amjority of online content […] comes from a small minority of people who are probably mentally ill” is not warranted by your citation.

For one, the current top comment in the thread to which you link is careful not to take the word “insane” at face value, in keeping with the spirit of the featured (OP) article.

> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. [0]

The OP also observes

> Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18884146

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Totally true. It also gives rise to echo chambers, people just keep circle-jerking around those of approve of them reciprocally and thus keep themselves in constant denial.

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