Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where to get started but I wish there was a manifesto for companies to pledge and social pressure for them to conform to design their software to not be distracting/addict. To not gameify it with badges, and points, and up votes and downvotes.

Most native phone apps seemed designed to distract. Most internet forums including HN seemed designed to distract. There's this like score at the top right corner and I'm aware of anytime it changes. When it does change I feel compelled to go look into why. The same thing happens on Stack Overflow. On both sites I've use Ublock Origin to block all scores. All of them. I've also used it to block the downvote button on HN. But, I honestly believe the world would be a much better place without this gamification and I believe that HN and Stack Overflow and Reddit and all the rest are acting irresponsibly by having these features.

IMO they're addicting, compelling, and they have other negative consequences like promoting group think.

I have no idea how to convince others of this and to get the various companies to give up their skinner box features.

View on HN

> I have no idea how to convince others of this and to get the various companies to give up their skinner box features.

Convincing others may not be very hard in the end, since everybody is going through this in one way or another.

Convincing companies on the other hand may be impossible under the prevailing economic ideology. As long as the primary and basically sole purpose of a corporation is maximizing shareholder value, they will be compelled to find the most effective ways to do so. If that entails designing addictive products that rot the mind, then that's exactly what they will do.

Exactly. Hedge yourself from this insanity, because you ain't going to fix the world, and wait for the new world order. Most young people will probably disagree with this approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

> you ain't going to fix the world, and wait for the new world order

I think this sort of Hegelian outlook is counterproductive. Human society is not external to us; we can change its course if we want to. As a matter of fact there are people who do this all the time - they're the ones who hold power and try to sway the course of events in a way that is favorable to their interests.

Whatever the new world order will be, it will be dictated by people's will (not necessarily the will of 'regular' people, mind you), not by the blind immutable forces of history.

Modern western society - and maybe others, I really only know the west - has built what must be one of the most powerful abstracting bubbles ever for separating people from the real world. For a wealthy westerner - if you don't want to know how your food is grown - you don't have to know. If you don't want to know how your shirt is made - you don't need to know. Don't want to know about the political systems that are keeping the world ticking over? Don't need to know.

Anyone who is in a position earning more than ~$60k/annum can be totally isolated from the real if they want to be and all their problems start becoming social ones, except disease and the grim spectre of eventual death. Even then we're starting to abstract away disease as well - look at how the wheels fell off politically when disease popped through the walls of the bubble on a mass scale. Been a long time since that sort of threat has been meaningful (maybe AIDS in the 80s?).

Good luck, in both sarcasm but also all sincerity, convincing people in that robust of a bubble that there are real problems that need to be fixed. People have no north star to fix a direction. They won't be able to organise anything in reality; they'll get caught up on social problems.

> Good luck, in both sarcasm but also all sincerity, convincing people in that robust of a bubble that there are real problems that need to be fixed. People have no north star to fix a direction. They won't be able to organise anything in reality; they'll get caught up on social problems.

It may turn out to be true that 'regular' people won't be able to organize and change society in a meaningful way. That still doesn't mean it's in principle impossible to do so.

Setting aside the problems internal to society, we do have the twin specters of global warming and nuclear holocaust looming over everything. They probably don't much care how comfortable we are in our middle class western bubble. I'm quite afraid that if we don't act there will be a collapse in the next 30 - 50 yrs.

> As long as the primary and basically sole purpose of a corporation is maximizing shareholder value, they will be compelled to find the most effective ways to do so.

Maximising shareholder value isn’t the problem. The problem is how they do it. Companies that achieve that by offering good, useful, timesaving products and services deserve to make tons of profit!

The problem is advertising. It’s a race to the bottom, the only value is relative (you don’t need to be good but rather better than your competitors, as opposed to e.g. Coca Cola which seems to have reached some (local) optimum). Unlimited amount of money competing for a limited amount of human attention.

Ban advertising, and this problem will solve itself.

>The same thing happens on Stack Overflow. On both sites I've use Ublock Origin to block all scores. All of them. [...] But, I honestly believe the world would be a much better place without this gamification and I believe that HN and Stack Overflow and Reddit and all the rest are acting irresponsibly by having these features.

Not sure if you're talking more more about "user profile scores" vs "comment scores" but I'll speak about the usefulness of upvotes/downvotes: it helps readers save time by seeing the most likely interesting reply first. E.g. Stackoverflow would be much less useful if I couldn't rely on "wisdom of the crowd" to rank the various answers on my behalf. Usually, the best answers are at the top and the worst buggy answers are at the bottom.

I lived through the old computer discussion forums without scores such as USENET, Compuserve, etc, and the lack of ranking wasted more of my reading time than Reddit/HN.

In the marketplace of ideas, discussion forums with scoring/ranking work better when contributors are anonymous because you can't rely on non-text signals such as reputation/integrity/competency.

You don't need scoring when every participant's identity is known such as Slack channel of business colleagues. Hopefully, the previous bar for getting hired in the first place at the company means one is typing worthwhile things for coworkers to read.

In most cases downvotes quickly degenerate into a way for toxic people to punish those that disagree with them. Upvotes can work, but they tend to result in people showing support for people they like, more so than ideas.

Personally, I think having a limited number of upvotes based on how many upvotes you've received, and allowing users to flag posts for moderator attention is the least toxic setup that still works.

I would like a system whereby the individual users likes and interests are used to weight everything. What we have now everywhere is basically a "majority of the moment" sorting and censoring the comments for me. I don't know who that really serves.

If the system served me, I wouldn't have to see comments from some whackadoo who feels offended because I wrote about laughing at a cop for not wearing a mask in a crowded retail establishment where everybody else was wearing them.

In my preferred system, comments from people I've upvoted in the past (and people they've upvoted in the past, and so on...) would appear more highly ranked than random nobodies. Likewise, if I've downvoted someone in the past, their comments would be ranked very low and might not appear at all if I've downvoted them enough.

This is more like real life, where people generally only hang around other people who are agreeable to their world view instead of surrounding themselves with disagreeable folks. I think a system that separates people could work wonders for social media. Let all the racists hang out together. Let all the whackadoos and Karens hang out together. What do I care?

In real life, if you've got extreme racist views, you can go hang out with other racists. But to find these like-minded racists, you'll have to churn through lots of potential racists - who may often turn out to actually be anti-racist - to find your group to hang out with. In the process of doing so, a lot of people are going to question why it is that so many people dislike their racist views. And the ones that stick through it are going to know that they hold pretty extreme views relative to the rest of society.

In contrast, the existing social media platforms have a way of making it feel like you're right, and a lot of people are supporting you (doesn't matter whether it's 1% of society, or 99%). Inside your filter bubble, you're not an extremist, and you don't have to encounter very many anti-racists on your search for like-minded racists. When you do, you've got your fellow racist keyboard warriors backing you, and some people even enjoy getting into these arguments.

I think the system you're proposing works well for hobbies and interests like tech or sports. If people who play football aren't aware of what's going on in the world of soccer, it doesn't really matter a great deal. But society - at least a democratic society that depends on informed voters - is worse off if a large number of people get together and encourage each other to think that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza store in Washington.

tl;dr - because it encourages political polarization, which is bad for democracy

I suppose part of the reason why current systems don't do this is because I imagine it'd be quite a bit heavier on the servers to calculate these things for every individual user...

I think, in the end user driven " rapid content curation " is the problem itself.

All toxic twists aside: The content we all need may not be the most comfortable in terms of how much time we need investing getting the info. I won't upvote content I haven't read, because it seems too long, or worse I will upvote the content for the first paragraph only.

Some things cannot be condensed into a comfortable chunk, but any voting system selects for that. Inherently. Because of the dopamine game, we adapt our expectations and then the content adapts to us.

I doubt there will be any "self regulatory" approach to this, which works to our collective benefit. Same with free market bla, bla... All darwinian systems don't care about beauty, stability, right and good, and particularly, they don't care about human wellfare at all.

> E.g. Stackoverflow would be much less useful if I couldn't rely on "wisdom of the crowd" to rank the various answers on my behalf. Usually, the best answers are at the top and the worst buggy answers are at the bottom.

It works rather well for StackOverflow because comments are not supposed to be a free-form discussion but only technical answers. (I guess we can agree that it is pretty respected.)

> I lived through the old computer discussion forums without scores such as USENET, Compuserve, etc, and the lack of ranking wasted more of my reading time than Reddit/HN.

That's not my feeling. I don't think ranking is working well on this kind of free-form discussion forums.

Here on HN, I see more and more comments which, despite simply stating facts or being personal testimony, are greyed out. I cannot even figure out a possible reason (I am not looking for a reason I would agree with, just any kind of reason, of mechanics): they are not opinionated in a way or another, they are not part of a heated sub-thread, nothing. I just don't understand what goes on.

As far as I am concerned, I for example avoid like plague any post or thread that talks about C. I've been a C programmer for 25 years this year, and I know that if I post something about C, it will get downvoted. Opinionated, non-opinionated, based on my decades of personal experience or not, it will be downvoted (and when we say 'it' gets downvoted, of course truth is it feels like 'I' get downvoted). So I try to remember not to comment on those threads or even better: not to open them and let for example the RESF or people who only used C in their introductory programming course at the university repeat their mantra on how dangerous it is, for the 2000th time of the year, in peace.

If I post something semi-factual, semi-opinionated, I have to pray that it fits with the mood of the day of the readers of the day of the thread. The same comment could end up positive one day, negative another day depending on the crowd that has been attracted by the post title.

Anyway, I know I can always make a joke to get back a few upvotes ("oh no, we are not Reddit", well yes we mostly are, we just dress a bit better when we come over here), after getting a few downvotes for a mostly factual statement :-) If I really wanted upvotes, I'd post a random Wikipedia article and get more upvotes in 4 hours than I'd otherwise get in a year (and the moderator would find that highly 'substantive') :->

>> Here on HN, I see more and more comments which, despite simply stating facts or being personal testimony, are greyed out. I cannot even figure out a possible reason (I am not looking for a reason I would agree with, just any kind of reason, of mechanics): they are not opinionated in a way or another, they are not part of a heated sub-thread, nothing. I just don't understand what goes on.

A recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324109

I referenced a simple fact: Joe Rogan's show is going exclusive to Spotify in October. Then added a plausible speculation: the link will probably break. I meant it to be helpful, but could have expanded it with a suggestion to add more context. Or at least an episode number so people could find it later on Spotify.

It sits at -2. I have to guess the ~3 downvoters assumed I was in some way criticizing Rogan and made a snap, thoughtless decision to downvote. This seems to happen a lot more.

Reading your comment, it seems completely non-sequitur. Were you expecting this particular comment to be read 6 months from now, and felt it very important for the author to take this into account?

I think your comment just didn't add anything to the conversation, no one was really disagreeing with you. But that's one of the major disadvantages of downvotes: It's natural to make assumptions about the motive behind it.

Also, your link might stop working if HN switches to UUIDs instead of unsigned integers.

I like the odds of a smooth migration on HN over two competing platforms cooperating on an exclusivity agreement.

>> Reading your comment, it seems completely non-sequitur. Were you expecting this particular comment to be read 6 months from now, and felt it very important for the author to take this into account?

Link rot is a growing problem, and it's not going away. Extra context, reference numbers, etc can help rediscover the content behind broken links. In this case, it's more of a certainty than usual that it's going to break, and there's zero chance it'll show up (or stay) on something like Internet Archive.

But you're right. Without that context, my comment is easy to misread, and there's no way to know what votes in either direction mean.

> I know that if I post something about C, it will get downvoted.

You "avoid like plague any post or thread that talks about C" because you will lose points?! I suggest you try caring less or not at all about fake internet points and more about saying what's important to you. Post if you have a point worth reading, that contributes to HN and the conversation. Write as well as you can. That's all anyone can do.

> I suggest you try caring less or not at all about fake internet points and more about saying what's important to you.

They aren't fake, since they determine and unlock all sorts of real powers on the site.

Also, if the community doesn't appreciate his wisdom, why should he continue to provide it? The downvotes are giving him useful feedback, and he's smart to respond to it.

There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. I learned stop looking at the highest voted answer and instead read the answers themselves. Hiding the scores helps with that. I wasn't lead to an answer based on popularity. Maybe that's only true for S.O. because there's rarely more than a few answers.

For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote, but the scores were not visible. You'd still get sorting of comments but you wouldn't get the "think like the rest of us or will downvote you" part of downvotes and you (or I) would not get the addictive dopamine hit from seeing my comment get voted up.

>There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date.

Of course -- because no system is perfect. Your proposed mechanics for designing discussion forums isn't perfect either. It's about tradeoffs.

I don't expect perfection with SO's top-voted answers. Instead, I'm more realistic about the probabilities of the top answer being more useful than the bottom-most answer. Relying on probabilities is a much better usage of my limited time than reading every single answer from unvetted users for every single question on SO and mentally sorting them myself.

>For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote,

From a statistics perspective, the downvote mechanism helps with the spread[1] of the scores. Instead of just 2 states of 0 or +positive; you get 3 states of -negative, 0, +positive. That way, 0 and negative being won't be in the the same "undifferentiated category". Again, it's about tradeoffs instead of perfection. Your proposal tries to stop "toxic" downvotes at the expense of asking readers to wade through more undifferentiated comments (which is arguably another form of toxicity from the readers' perspective).

(Arguably, there's a 4th category on HN which is "flagged" which goes beyond the downvote.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion

I think the answer is to decommericalize social media. I use Mastodon Social and it has none of these problems because it doesn't aim to monetize the users of the platform. It's an open source project developed by the users for the users. It doesn't need to keep you engaged, it doesn't need to push ads to you, doesn't need to track you, and so on. This creates a drastically different user experience that's not designed to exploit the user and turn them into a commodity.

One simple example is that Mastodon allows you to disable notifications for likes and retoots, you can just ignore them completely. So you can just see when people reply to your posts and actually interact with you. This small changes makes a huge difference in the experience. And this is precisely the kind of feature that simply can't exist on a service like Twitter because that would result in lower engagement.

There's now a whole federation of such open source services using ActivityPub, and I really think it's the future of social media. The federation is inherently decentralized, with servers being run by regular people across the globe. You can find communities that focus on your particular interests, and there's no single entity deciding how the platform should work for everybody. This approach is also more resilient to censorship as servers are located in many countries across many different jurisdictions. This is precisely the way internet was originally meant to work before it got commercialized and turned into the nightmare that it is today.

This also directly helps with the problem of Overton-window-compression and normalcy-compression that the article talks about. You have some weird kink or idea, then you can run your own server for people who share it. You can even make it private.

Some of the ActivityPub services I recommend checking out are

https://joinmastodon.org/

https://pixelfed.social/

https://joinpeertube.org/

https://write.as/

come join us and help build a community by the users for the users

> I use Mastodon Social and it has none of these problems because it doesn't aim to monetize the users of the platform.

But it still does the likes & retweets part, right? Because I agree with the comment you replied to that that is the problem, not the intention behind doing it.

I'm unsure whether people would use Twitter (or Mastodon for that matter) if it wasn't there. I believe the real-time and constant feedback of belonging to some culture is what drives usage of social media platforms, and in turn influences what people present as (and possibly what they become) because they want positive feedback and want to avoid negative feedback.

Mastodon does likes and retweets, but lets you completely ignore them removing the stimulus. So, the difference with Twitter is that you're constantly notified that people liked or retweeted your stuff, and you see the numbers. When that information isn't displayed then you don't think about it at all.

Having used both Twitter and Mastodon for a while now, I can definitely say that Mastodon is a much healthier environment. For me at least, it completely avoids the dopamine loop that Twitter creates, and I don't have the constant urge to keep checking it.

I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.

Edit: I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.

That's of course the downside of a federated internet model run by many individual administrators. Nowadays, there are very large instances that are funded, and are very unlikely to just up and disappear. Also, running your own instance is actually not that hard nowadays. Digital Ocean has a provisioned option where it's a one click set up.

Mastodon also has the option to do import and export right in the UI. So, you can easily export your network graph now. Migrating between instances has explicit support now as well https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...

And I think these improvements show that community run services like this do listen to the users, and evolve to make them more user friendly over time.

I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater especially when it comes to forums. Reddit, HN and SO couldn't exist without their voting systems. SO upvotes are an indicator of the quality of the question/response, they aren't there to hook anyone to the platform. And there's a level of personal responsibility on the user's side that you leave out when you simply say that any platform with a voting system is acting irresponsibly.

I agree and disagree. I think the voting system as a tool to weigh the quality of the questions and responses is a good implementation. That does not (as far as I can tell) require publishing people's scores, ranks etc. I think that's where the toxicity happens.

I faced the same issue for myself on HN...I started obsessing over my very underwhelming score. Here's how I dealt with it:

1. I intentionally forgot my old account password so I wouldn't be able to log into it (there was no way to delete the account on HN at the time...still??) 2. whenever I had the urge to respond (which is maybe 1/100 of what it was when I had an active account), I sign up with a throwaway and make sure I enter a password that I won't remember in 5 minutes. 3. I log out and go back to my life.

I really like this idea.

What about if HN didn't show your points next to your name when you're logged in?

It really doesn't matter how many fake internet points you have except to get you hooked into the gamification. I'd much rather not see that number. Any attention I pay to that number (which is way more than I'd wish) is a waste of time, at best.

Apart from that, you have to go out of your way to see points values, except on your old comments.

The optimist in me thinks this problem with corporations and addiction will soon pass. And my reasoning is two-fold: 1) all addiction is "accelerating", 2) social media is ripe for parasites.

First about accelerating addiction. There is a know phenomenon: the more drugs you take - the more is required to reach the same high. Same happens with porn: the more porn you watch, the more depraved varieties you look for in order to replicate the experience. Well, same happens with "clicks" addiction. At first a simple "Today I Learned" post gets you going, but as you indulge more and more the more depraved content is needed to sustain the interest. Soon it turn to memes, then to politics, then to actively looking for "other group" to hate on. And at this stage the same user base that was once "addicted" are no longer profitable. They manifest themselves as racists or anarchists or whatever gets them the same rush as they once had from a "TIL" post. But in either case they are no longer profitable for the corporation. Maintaining and policing everything becomes more and more expensive. The company begins introducing various "changes to policy". They try to sell those changes as "better thing becoming even better", but in reality they only try to combat the natural consequences of their own platform.

Second thing - currently the corporations themselves are an untapped resource in the market ecosystem (so to speak) and other companies will feed on them. We already see some forms of this happening. Take reddit for example. It thrives on addiction, but is also speedily acquiring parasites that, in turn, feed on reddit. Bots, ad farms, vote manipulation. Reddit wants to sell ad space, but how can other companies trust the metrics, when bots abound. How many of those "clicks" are actual people? Reddit tries to put algorithms in for bot detection? - old users are start selling their accounts for real money. It is an arms race. While at the same time new competing platforms also advertise themselves via reddit.

So those two observations, taken together, suggests that the profit part of the social-media corp is slowly decreasing, while operation costs are increasing. Sooner or later they will die. The new ones will spring in it's place. However the acceleration in new corps will be a lot faster. For one, the "parasite" companies now have experience and they won't wait until a platform becomes popular - they will jump on the host a lot quicker. And the users, coming from a dying platform, will demand memes, porn, and hate almost immediately.

Hence there is no real cycle here. Just one dying idea of a social media. At least that is what I like to imagine is happening.

Nice write up! So what does the future look like? Are you saying these social platforms will burn out or fade into the background and people will get their pre-2000 lives back?

>promoting group think

Downvotes are particularly egregious here. An argument can be made that upvotes help to surface content of interest. That still doesn't account for these accumulated top-right-corner scores, however, which have no value WRT enhancing discourse on any individual topic. In fact, they seem to actively encourage appeals to authority and other fallacies.

But, what is the purpose of downvotes other to encourage groupthink and stifle discussion? Why are downvotes allowed to be used as stand-ins for expressing disagreement through actual refutation/discourse? Worse, this allows people to actively submarine (i.e. censor, to some degree) opinions with which they disagree. So people can care enough to submarine someone else's ideas, but they aren't required to explain why? How is this helpful?

If someone is being disruptive or otherwise in violation of terms, there's always the flag option. But, downvotes punish people who meander too far from the group.

HN has the built in "noprocrast" setting which I use and appreciate. They admit it's addicting and give me the tools to limit myself.

Center for Humane Technology[0] comes to mind. Tristan Harris (ex-design ethicist at Google) is the founder.

[0] https://humanetech.com/

I have a different account eg for hn on every device. I don't add my email and immediately forget my password, so the accounts are all disposable, and doomed. Karma has no value on my accounts.

Better approach is to educate people. You're never going to stop the momentum of the free market.

You will also never be able to educate someone who doesn't want to be educated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com