Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

everyone is utterly paranoid

Everyone?

I have bit my tongue for a long time about this great community's slipping quality, but honestly, how does shit like this make it to the top of Hacker News. Flagged.

Any suggestions for how to get back to having hacker news on Hacker News? (And please spare us the lame "situational logic" response of how <anyShit> is hacker news.)

View on HN

It's not just the off-topic stuff. It's groupthink. The needle on that has been buried for months now.

I'll give you a telling example: the insane series of threads where, in essence, an angry mob chased a comp-sci grad student around for nominating Wikipedia articles for deletion. "Here's the main offender!" "You're a drain on Wikipedia, a negative source of knowledge!" "You're an idiot!". An Internet-famous guy chimes in with a comment calling him "a gigantic Nazi asshole" (fun fact: this is after the guy took the time to sign up to talk to HN commenters).

Then HN dutifully mods up a blog post by the same guy that calls the guy out by name for "deciding he's the sole decider of the notability of programming languages". Nice.

Then a triumphal thread on a post about how the guy has stopped nominating articles for deletion on Wikipedia. The system works!

Why do I like this example? No politics. Still bad.

You can see the groupthink everywhere on the site, from the comment on any Amazon post that gets reflexively modded up for pointing out that Amazon removed Wikipedia content, or how Sony once installed a rootkit, or how IP laws are bad for America (I especially liked watching people downmod 'grellas trying to provide context and upmodding someone who, presumably, was not a startup lawyer).

I like that example, too. Well stated. My observation was that the whole episode reeked of something you'd expect to play out on reddit, but not the old-school HN.

Yeah, it definitely had a sort of mobbish feel to it. I've been a Wikipedian since about 2003, been in and out of the meta-circles, and have a mix of positive and negative opinions about how it works (but I think on the whole it's a huge benefit to accessibility of knowledge). So when something like this comes up in a community I'm also part of, I usually try to participate in the discussion. Not even really just to defend Wikipedia, because there are plenty of criticisms one could make. But it was hard to figure out where to enter into the discussion, and what productive result could come from it.

When there's a bunch of angry people wielding pitchforks convinced that Wikipedians (or some subset) are evil bastards who hate knowledge and love nothing but rules, it's not that conducive to calm discussion. There's just sort of a vaguely defensive, "well, it's not quite like that, you know most of us also think about these issues and have tried to balance the criticisms many people have of Wikipedia, and even some of the rules and guidelines I disagree with do have some reasons they exist, but nobody seems very interested in discussing any of that, so I guess I'll just mostly sit this one out...". To be fair, there was some good discussion buried in some of the threads.

I did write up a way-too-long version of what I would've said in the discussion: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...

(As a non-HN-specific aside: What's frustrating from the perspective of someone who wants to make Wikipedia work is that it seems most external discussion of Wikipedia comes in these weird mob frenzies, but they come from opposite sides. One group of people is convinced Wikipedians are a bunch of rule-loving fascists; another group of people is convinced Wikipedians are a bunch of anarchistic amateurs with a hippy anything-goes attitude. So the first group gets angry when a topic they're a fan of is deleted, and demands fewer rules; the second group initiates big frenzies like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy, and demands more rules.)

Thank you for not only flagging it, but saying something. Supposedly that's against the guidelines, but if a community doesn't communicate in cases like these, how can the newcomers learn that articles like these are not hacker news.

One of my own guidelines for "not hacker news" is if it's an article that's designed to "raise hackles" in the sense of offending one's sense of justice or "how things ought to be". This clearly falls in that category. This isn't "intellectually gratifying", it's gratifying to your sense of righteousness / indignance. None of this stuff is at all new to anyone whose residence is not located under a rock.

Oh, also, as an aside:

> And please spare us the lame "situational logic" response of how <anyShit> is hacker news.

I think of that game as "7 degrees of hacker news". The more outlandish it is, the more 'fun'. For instance, an article about renaissance Italy could be hacker news, because Paul Graham has talked about the style of painting in that time period, and has compared painting to to hacking, and since Paul Graham is a hacker...voila`! Although, truth be told, that sort of subject matter might at least be interesting in the sense of telling me something I didn't know, rather than discussing current US politics.

  that sort of subject matter might at least be interesting 
  in the sense of telling me something I didn't know, 
  rather than discussing current US politics

I am of two minds about it. Learning is important and essential to our profession. But does all kind of knowledge belong in HN? I would not say so. Where the borderline is I am not yet sure.

(Regarding politics, I would say whatever affects the professional life, scientific research, etc, is in; pure politics is out. But it's just a single person's opinion.)

> But does all kind of knowledge belong in HN? I would not say so.

I agree, but a scholarly article about an obscure, uncontroversial and off-topic subject is just not likely to cause much 'damage'.

The problem with "affects professional life" in terms of politics is that pretty much everything does, somehow: taxes, health care, bureaucracy, and so on. You could talk all day long about that stuff without getting anywhere.

Given that the US is largely considered the most entrepreneurial country in the world, I think this is relevant. A lot of people from other countries want to do business here, and this very well might be of concern to them.

This thread has sparked a large discussion and I think this is in line with the submission guidelines as being intellectually gratifying.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wow are "intellectually gratifying" and "sparking a large discussion" ever not always the same thing.

Working in the tech field often means travelling to the States. More importantly, since many hacker newsers are American, you should be aware that setting up shop in the States makes it more difficult for you to do business internationally, that travelling to visit clients/customers/suppliers is easier for you than it is for them to visit you. So yes, this is relevant.

And flagging an article because of a little easily recognized hyperbole?

Thanks to this article, I now know that it is a gigantic pain to travel internationally with the US, that TSA agents are not good at their jobs, and that people get harassed for taking pictures sometimes. That's good because by trying very hard to express my frustration about these topics eloquently I am solving those problems. The Internet changes everything! Just ask Egypt.

Hm. Working in the tech field also means eating pretty much every day. I shall post cooking recipes....

Your are picking on the one time he goes hyperbolic. Overall, there are good points in the post, even if he does make that one statement that is obviously false. Just read it as "many" and move on.

Business travel to the US is extremely relevant for anyone working in hi-tech. Esp. when carrying expensive/electronic equipment.

Yes, and what useful relevant information did you gather from this submission? That immigration officers are often incompetent? That once they damaged some guy's camera? Let me inform you further: the airplane food usually sucks and US time is, annoyingly, 6-8 hours behind central Europe.

You're clearly ignoring the fact, that it's mostly US-only issue, and it doesn't have to be that way. We, non-US citizens, can't do much about it, and we'd like to get attention of US folks (who often are less affected), because they (you?) can.

I'll probably get downvoted for it, and I'd like to be mistaken here, but I'm getting the feeling that some of you get offended by critique, justified or not, of some of US politics.

> I'm getting the feeling that some of you get offended by critique, justified or not, of some of US politics.

I think many of us would actually make the same critiques.

But not on this site. We don't want to talk politics here.

I am not a US citizen, I don't see what TSA or US immigration officials' incompetence (which is certainly real) has to do with US politics - certainly not what it has to do with Hacker News.

>Any suggestions for how to get back to having hacker news on Hacker News?

I try to go to http://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upmod tech-related submissions once in a while. I should probably do it more often. Also, flagging stuff that could be on TV or Reddit.

Does the tech world live in an isolated bubbled insulated from the rest of society?

Yes why should tech people be deprived of my cat pictures? My cat is delicious!

I think since you are a well-known hacker and that a cat and the joy it provides you make your life richer, it would indubitably make our own lives that much better to gaze upon the adorable feline ourselves, not to mention be very much on topic (you're a hacker) and probably intellectually gratifying as well, if you contemplate how the cat as a species has 'hacked' people to care for them!

Who said anything about cat pictures? And why are they relevant? But what is pretty fucking relevant to tech and business in general is how the US's attitude to foreigners/visitors will impact investment and trade.

You know what I think should be off-topic here? Most stories about politics. Also crime and sports. Unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. I'll go you one farther! If they'd cover it on TV news, I think it's probably off-topic.

No, but a lot of people on Hacker News like to pretend it does and react badly when anybody presents them evidence to the contrary.

I don't think there's anything to be done TBH. In previous discussions about the community's slipping quality I was always encouraged by the fact that submissions stayed approximately the same. That's not the case anymore. And what that means aside from less useful content is that a critical mass of news users and complacent old ones represent the majority on the site.

By having a mental gauge of what's too subjective and not posting those, as well as not voting on, commenting on, etc?

Maybe there is some sort of algorithm that can be established to determine the level of subjectivity of an article or post with a 95% confidence interval?

Turn off rep score, then people won't post crap just to get upvoted.

Band together (e.g. private mailing list) with like-minded people and upvote each other's submissions until the culture has changed.

EDIT: Hey, that's the only reasonable answer to the parent's question so far, as far as I can see. I don't like the idea either, but it's a reasonable idea, downvotes be damned!

Why don't we just band together in a private mailing list and leave it at that? I'm pretty sure we'll lose the arms race on organized voting.

That's how it seems to me too. This was a very popular post, so most people here don't seem to share your views on this issue. Rather than blustering about how the site has gone to hell because so many people see travel as a legitimate part of startup life, and getting more hacks in the software to penalize the topics you don't want to hear about, maybe it's time to accept it.

The second-most popular story on Reddit right now appears to involve Paris Hilton. Good plan.

And surely this must all be a part of my evil plan to eradicate "travel" from the topics on HN. I. hate. travel. sooooooo. much.

There are about a 100 better sources of political discussion than Hacker News. I've only been here a couple years (lurking for the first 1.5) but I feel like the noise is really drowning out the signal for me.

So I have to disagree with you here, Jon. I care about politics, I really do, just not much while I'm here.

We shall see. Looking elsewhere in the thread, most of it is international people having a really great discussion about the issue. And it seems to me that they're very interested in talking about the issue and agree with me that this and related topics as a big part of entrepreneurship.

EDIT: downvoted. I wonder why?

You are getting downvoted for being so strident about something that comes pretty close to contradicting the site guidelines. It is not in fact true that popularity controls what stories are germane to HN.

I think you may think this nerdy Glass Bead Game of connecting the dots between arbitrary subjects and "entrepreneurship" is a compelling argument, but some of us have been here for many years and have seen too many different subjects --- Egypt! the TSA! Unionization! Ron Paul! The War! Red light cameras! Gitmo! Fighting in middle school! Peak oil! Corporatism vs capitalism! Apple murdering the web! Taxation! Censorship on Twitter! Global warming! Homophobia! † -- justified this way.

When you write a comment that acts shocked-shocked! that anyone would question your judgement about exactly how strongly connected a topic is to HN, you run the risk of making people feel like their intelligence is being insulted.

Keep something else in mind. There are people who vote on the front page. There are people who comment. There are people who vote on comments. Some of these groups overlap, but they aren't the same. Most HN'ers would probably agree that the latter two groups are responsible for the site's character more than the former. Which is a long way of saying: nobody's too impressed with the score on this article.

Next time you start feeling the outrage welling up in you about how people are bitching and sniping about stories that most people on HN seem to like, keep in mind: Paul Graham has been having to punch in manual filters to suppress some of the most "popular" stories on HN. He did it for Egypt and he did it for the TSA. The way you want to believe this site works is not how the site currently works. Thankfully.

† Take a guess how I came up with that list.

PS: Because you have a software security background, I'm atypically interested in finding out a little more about you. I'm also a fast reader. It may interest you to know that fully half of the top 10 pages of your best-ranked comments here are political, and that's not counting your takes on DRM or how "bubbly" the startup scene is. Everyone wants HN to spend time covering their favorite issues. I'd love to spend more time talking about cooking and whiskey.

Thanks for the detailed response, Thomas. My perception is that the community here is very selective which rule violations result in downvoting -- there are some great examples throughout this thread.

In terms of on-topic, stories related to barriers that entrepreneurs face, and the difficult tradeoffs we have to make as part of working in this field certainly seem to be within scope of HN. Interesting new phenomena are explicitly within scope and there are some truly remarkable things happening at the social network level with the grassroots resistance to the TSA -- and with so many key players in the security and software engineering communities taking an active role.

> Next time you start feeling the outrage welling up in you about how people are bitching and sniping about stories that most people on HN seem to like, keep in mind: Paul Graham has been having to punch in manual filters to suppress some of the most "popular" stories on HN.

I'm not outraged ... depending on the day, it's a combination of bemused, disappointed, and entertained.

> It may interest you to know that fully half of the top 10 pages of your best-ranked comments here are political

Good to know! Sounds like there's even more support here than I realized for my political stories. Is the story about my significant other, AWK code, and Brian Kernighan still number one?

It's an interesting discussion ... thanks again!

jon

If the story had been written in terms of a barrier faced by entrepreneurs --- as a war story from someone actually operating a company, as many of us here do --- it wouldn't generate the same enmity.

Also, please keep in mind that there are two factors influencing our perceptions of stories: first, the story itself and how strongly it adheres to HN; and, second, the comment threads the stories have been shown to generate in the past.

If somebody blogs about the challenges of being a Seattle-based entrepreneur who is boycotting flying (or getting harrassed at airports) because would you see that as on topic?

> the comment threads the stories have been shown to generate in the past.

Stories about the TSA have been shown to generate a lot of antipathy from you and your friends in the past. So is your argument that this should give you veto power in the future?

It's ironic you'd say that, because the opposite is true about me and the TSA threads; I'm the first to admit, I too took the opportunity to bay at the moon about the TSA on HN. I wish someone had called me out for doing so then.

I don't know what "veto power" you think I have here, but if you click around the site, you'll find a document that pretty well spells out what is and isn't on-topic for the site. The person who really does have "veto power" here is Paul Graham, and he's been having to use it lately; he buried Egypt, and he buried the TSA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com