Hacker News Reader

Comment by Leary | Hacker News Reader

While you wait for his response:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it’s grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment thread about a Times article, “YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views,” yielded a response likening journalism and propaganda; a muddled juxtaposition of pornography and Holocaust denial; a vague side conversation about the average I.Q. of Hacker News commenters; and confused analogies between white supremacists and Black Lives Matter activists. In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.

The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.

Not sure whether to agree or disagree.

That sounds like the Hacker News that I know. It's worth trawling through the comments because you get gems among the dross, but it should be a trawl.

>The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.

Ah yes, I remember this article. Oddly enough, this is a major reason why I still enjoy browsing HN. There are few places left that cover a variety of topics while also encouraging this open style of discussion.

Another reason IMHO that this site has maintained its relative quality is the policy of effectively banning memes (whether textual or visual) and not embedding images from links or allowing them to be attached.

Someone needs to do a deep cognitive study of how memes, especially in image form, affect cognition during discourse. Whatever is going on it seems obvious that their presence immediately reverts people to a juvenile junior high level of discussion at best.

They also seem to lead to the development of this kind of obscure signaling culture hive mind. I don't even know how to describe it. In Star Trek TNG they called it the "borg songs," the sort of emotional-cultural carrier wave that pervaded the Borg collective.

Meme-dominated sites like 4chan immediately turn me off. I find that whole style creepy and culty and gross and it feels like some kind of soft mind control technique. I felt this way long before 4chan became "Stormfront for nerds," but the fact that this style if discourse would create an environment compatible with that way of thinking doesn't shock me at all.

When you mentioned borg songs, I internally cried because of the new Picard show. It broke the emotional core of TNG for a cheap thrill, and your mention of Borg songs reminded me of that.

Would still be interesting if someone could train language / interaction model on different years of hacker news to see how a certain topic would be discussed differently over the years.

Neat idea. HN explicitly allows reposts of older links after some time, so you would be able to see how discussion of literally the same article has changed in some cases.

I think the view is accurate from high enough, but experience depends a lot on some element that's probably time and possibly the alignment of the planets. You can tell when Mercury is in Gatorade.

Sometimes people are really cool. Sometimes people are fools. The fools make good points sometimes. The cool people can be the worst. The roles are fluid. I've had my fool moments.

dang, who I assume is a cyborg driven by several different mods, generally makes good calls. There aren't many places online where I feel like I can point out a problem to the mods and not worry about being called an idiot. Or banned.

Amount of 'smart sounding' and trigger words that are shoveled into this block of cra..text to semi-insult people is the exact reason I'm reading HN and practically nothing else online.

I find that the opposite is true. Most comments are emotional, and I have to search for controversial comments to find anything objective/worth reading. Like Reddit, this site is biased to the political left (USA). I wish we could just avoid all politics in tech.

I don't think it's possible to avoid politics in any profession. Teachers care about education reform, which is a political subject. Doctors care about the healthcare system, which is a political subject. Civil engineers care about building codes and safety regulations, which are political subjects. Accountants care about tax laws, which are an incredibly political subject. Social workers care about welfare programs, which is also a very political subject. You might not talk about it in the realm of politics while at work, but it has an impact on your work as well as the lives of the public.

You could even argue that being "apolitical" actually means that your political opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, which other people may disagree with. For instance, some people believe that selling water is unethical because it's a basic human need which you should always have free access to -- saying that the status quo is acceptable means that you don't think that for-sale water is unethical. There's nothing wrong with that opinion, but it is an opinion (and a political one at that).

I don't express my political beliefs here because I think I would be massively down voted. I think that's true for lots of other users.

The way it's presented makes a huge difference. People are obliterated for any political opinion if presented in a way that treats politics like a game instead of something that affects everyone.

Make a polite, clear-headed enough argument for something like eugenics and people will upvote you. It's troubling, but I can make a pro-socialism post under the same conditions. It's an uneasy peace.

> You could even argue that being "apolitical" actually means that your political opinion is that the status quo is acceptable

I agree with this. I see Cultural Hegemony (domination-justification stories) being very strong in unexpected places. Family members or close friends who indirectly benefit from the artificial scarcity mechanisms (in SV especially Intellectual Property) that make up the various social class realities of rentier capitalism [1]. What seperates me and a mother of three in Bangladesh, who is getting paid starvation wages making the designer clothes I wear [2], is that I was lucky enough to have been born in the global North, in an upper-middle class family. I was able to grow up on the inside of the fort, and benefit from a rich inheritance [3].

[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGp5_Sfbss

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGnDDhco4gw

I'm starting to increasingly appreciate comments like this, because they appear regularly on both sides of the ideological divide, helping me keep my binary tree fresh and balanced. A few that go the opposite way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706668

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004

Sorry if that sounded snarky—I don't mean to pick on you personally, and I don't disbelieve you. But the perception is explicable by the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

I think people often mistake bias in the moderation for bias in the moderators, ignoring that much moderation depends on flagging, which in turn is influenced by the bias of the people who were attracted to the conversation.

People are political animals. The only way to avoid politics is to avoid people. Not exactly a workable proposition if you want to change the world with a billion dollar unicorn.

I think that's true, but it's also true that the distinction between curious conversation and ideological battle is a useful and actionable one, and that's basically what the site guidelines are staked on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

So, if we can not avoid politics it is ok to encourage some views while discouraging the opposite views?

How can we know for sure we are right or even on the good side, whatever "good" means?

First we'd need to establish a general frame of reference, a perspective, which could be a human one.

From that perspective, the lowest common denominator is that bad is what harms humanity, e.g. by disregarding human rights. Human rights then becomes the new frame of reference, meaning that something can't be good if it's not within that frame.

Power struggle then becomes what are rights, and who owes them to whom? Who gets what rights and how are they enforced is pretty much the core of political struggle.

Power struggle based on immediate and future system relevancy takes place within that frame (innovation), in a democracy that frame (human rights) shouldn't be broken because it damages the belief in the system itself. An informed society acts in its best interest, if it doesn't the education system or entire system is corrupted and broken.

Perhaps it would be better to assume (until clear otherwise) that everyone has good intentions, but a different persp ctive? Then we can try to work together, as partners, to understand each other's perspective and position, rather than thinking of others as opponents to be defeated.

> this site is biased to the political left (USA)

when you're the USA, the world looks biased to the political left ...

Fascinating, thanks for sharing. Makes me reflect on the (relatively few) comments I've made here, and if I'm making a positive impact on the community.

Oh come on. It's always the good users who worry about this.

(I looked at your comments and the ones I saw are not only fine, they're exactly what HN is for.)

Hey, thanks! And kudos for helping to cultivate such a great community despite its massive growth.

I wonder how that approach can continue to make sense unless they hire more Lisp moderators.

I don't understand your point but I relate to the idea of hiring more Lisp moderators.

It sounds like you guys were hired to be both Lisp programmers for the site infrastructure and moderators. Presumably as the site grows, you will need to scale more of you.

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