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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please don't post like this. Your comment got upvoted to the top of the thread, of course, and sat there accruing mass, choking out interesting discussion. Now that I've marked it off topic, consider that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968349 is now the top subthread. That's the difference between HN functioning well and functioning poorly.

Most of the damage is caused by the upvotes and replies, but that's what happens when you post something trollish to an inflammatory topic.

Edit: on closer inspection, 22968349 is not so great either because if there's anything interesting to discuss about blood irradiation, it's probably not related to Covid-19.

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You know, It's pretty frustrating to be accused of trollishness about a simple opinion which is sincerely held, widely shared and well-founded. If an older relative of yours told you to irradiate your blood against a virus and try ingesting some disinfectants, wouldn't you worry about their mental state at least a little bit?

To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here? It's not like this is an astro-turf either, the discussion looks back-and-forth. Is asking people for introspection trolling?

When you call me a troll, you're not calling me a troll in the classical sense of someone posting crap to get a rise out of people. What you're trying to get at is something more subtle - the way a person has an allergy, this particular community has outsized reactions from otherwise very benign opinions, and that I should be aware of these allergies and know not to post them here. But these are not obvious allergies at all and very much at odds with a place that considers itself a place to satiate your intellectual curiosity.

Right, I'm using the word "trollish" in the sense of the effects the post had. That's the only thing that can be observed and the only thing that matters for moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (I was careful not to call you a troll; this is about posts, not persons.)

"Asking people for introspection" is a skewed way of describing your original comment. If that was your intent, you should go about it in some way that isn't guaranteed to start a flamewar. I don't think these "allergies" are in any way obscure.

Ditto for "very benign opinions". If that was your intent, you should not be breaking the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I realized that it might be helpful if I mentioned the other aspect of why I posted what I did. You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines. We've asked you many times to stop that. If this weren't a longstanding pattern I'd probably have reacted differently, but it is a longstanding pattern, so please fix it.

It is not the only the only thing that can be observed or that matters for moderation. You prioritization of civility above all else is being exploited by trolls, something I've pointed out on many occasions.

This paper goes into considerable detail about how the suppression of disputes actually fosters an increase in bad behavior by preventing community members from repelling raids by trolls. By not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit, you're soliciting more of it. You acknowledged above that this is an inflammatory topic but you are spending your efforts on restraining the very people pointing that out.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3178876.3186141

My point there was narrow: originally the word "troll" referred to intent (the intent to derail discussion, or whatever). But we can't observe intent, so that isn't a useable concept for moderation. If you try to moderate a site like HN and use the word "troll" in that original sense, people simply reply that it wasn't their intent to wreak havoc, as if that settles the issue. Actually it doesn't settle it. If someone starts a flamewar and the thread goes to hell, does it matter if they intended to? The house has burned down either way.

After a while it dawns on you (me) that whatever someone's inner state is when they post doesn't much matter anyhow—what matters are the observable effects that a post produces. Those are what we react to and base moderation on. When I say that a post was trollish I mean it had that sort of effect on the thread, intentionally or otherwise. I was hoping that linking to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... would make this point clear and that I could get away with just referring to it, but maybe not.

This is a narrow point since it's about the use of a particular word, but it's a word that gets a rise out of people (ironically, I suppose?) and tends to make them feel like they're being personally deemed a "troll", when the point is about posts, not persons. I mostly use the word "flamebait" as a way to just avoid the issue.

Re "prioritization of civility above all else", that's not my view at all and it's a misrepresentation of how we moderate HN. If you said "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else", we would actually have something to discuss. Maybe you disagree that that should be the goal? Maybe you think we do a shitty job of it, in this case or even in every case? All that is fine, but being argued with about something that we neither think about nor try to do feels weirdly disconnecting.

"Not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit" strikes me as a bizarre thing to say. Users do that on HN all the time, which is why the site survives. We ask them to do it while remaining within the site guidelines, which is not only possible but more effective.

That paper looks interesting!

Dan, when you keep saying things like 'HN is not for internet ragewar', manually moving the top comment because it's contentious, and saying users should know better, that's the prioritization of civility I'm talking about.

In terms of "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else" then you are just opening the door to disingenuous bait posts, glib hyper-pedantry, sealioning, and various other trolling tactics. Of course HN exists for intellectual curiosity, but if that's the only mode of operation then it can be gamed, and it is.

Search on 'guidelines' in this thread and you can see people using the 'good faith assumption/strongest possible interpretation' guidelines to bait others. You're arguing that bullshit is called out on HN all the time, but you shut down people doing so in anything other than polite terms.

Regarding that paper, I urge you to pay particular attention to the comparison of successful vs. unsuccessful defensive strategies, and the fact that successful ones are correlated with higher use of anger words. Your antipathy to flames is what the posters of flamebait rely on to deploy more and more of it. Even if you kick accounts that regularly post flamebait, there's little cost to creating a new one and resuming the practice.

Much like forests, the occasional fire can significantly improve the quality of the overall environment. If you suppress fires so diligently that brush is allowed to build up, then the result can be catastrophic. In this metaphor, the brush is bad-faith discussion and wilfully fallacious arguments.

I think you need to be a bit more hands-off about this and accept that a certain amount of conflict and aggression in fact contribute to sustainability. While that might deter some obscure-but-interesting posts like the one today, the fact is that they will be just as interesting on their merits if posted in a week or two after the news-of-the-day focus has moved elsewhere.

I don't think you're characterizing HN accurately. If you want to convince me, I'd need to see more convincing examples.

The lesson in this case is not that a generic flamewar about Trump belongs at the top of the #1 thread on HN. If the argument is that I shouldn't have moderated that, I disagree and am pretty sure the community would disagree.

Rather, the lesson in this case is that, because the topic was attracting attention because Trump, this was the worst possible moment for HN to be discussing ultraviolet blood irradiation. A curious discussion was not possible. Thus I downweighted the submission off the front page at the same time as I moderated that flamewar.

I think your fire analogy is off. A better one would be fires in a city, and those don't promote quality. Quite the opposite.

We've been having this argument for several years and there is more trolling than ever. In past email conversation i've given you examples of people organizing on 8chan to target threads here. You always end up saying you need more convincing examples. Fine, if you want to wallow in toxicity at source go look at kiwifarms.net or /tech/ forums on imageboards for examples of both targeting HN stories directly and general discussions of waging cultural warfare in the social space around technology.

I think your fire analogy is off. An occasional conflagration in a highly-populated city doesn't do anything to promote the quality of the environment. Quite the opposite.

Since I made an explicit analogy to a forest, rewriting it to be about something else kind of makes my point for me.

> In past email conversation i've given you examples of people organizing on 8chan to target threads here

When? I don't remember that, and I just searched the email archive and didn't find it. I found a mention of 8chan, but not with examples, and certainly not with links to people organizing to target threads here—which is hardly something we would be disagreeing about. Obviously that's abusive.

> To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here?

I imagine it's a feeling of "I'm smart enough to rise above partisan politics" or "I'm smart enough to go against the status quo." In other words, people who believe they're smart enough to avoid getting manipulated, when in fact it's not a matter of smarts at all.

Why pretend that Trump _isn't_ spreading damaging misinformation during a pandemic? I don't see why HN needs to have some false sense of neutrality to be "functioning well".

What HN needs in order to function well is not be taken over by political rage-threads, which are not about intellectual curiosity (for one thing, they're all the same).

Don't you see how if:

* An ignorant authoritarian with an obvious agenda sets the discussion topic

* We discuss said topic without mentioning his ignorance, authoritarianism, or agenda

The topic effectively becomes "laundered"? Much like OP, I've seen this over and over again. Trump (or similar) says something batshit insane, a "well, maybe..." topic gets bumped to the front page, political discussion gets culled from the thread, topic gets somewhat normalized. And so the koo-koo express keeps chugging towards the cliff.

This thread might make me quit visiting this site.

I partly agree but would put it differently. When an obscure topic (like ultraviolet blood irradiation) is connected to some trigger in the daily news, people will end up arguing about the daily news rather than delving into the obscure topic. So from an HN point of view, that's the worst time for the topic to appear. HN should be countercyclical instead. This case has made that even clearer to me than it already was.

At the same time, HN is not for internet ragewar and users here should know enough not to feed those flames.

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