PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

I first did a small launch in my own neighborhood to tune the product before going broad. It was during this phase that I discovered the toxicity of social networks. I was either a witness to, or drawn into, every petty bickering match on my side of my zip code. I am certain my product gave a wider voice to the wrong people. I should have known; ten years earlier I was an officer of my homeowners association, and it was the same thing, but face-to-face.

This wasn't the only reason I shut down the project, but it was the biggest. I thought I'd be bringing people together. I was right, but I had incorrectly assumed that doing so would be a good thing.

It is strange, too, because I am normally an extremely forgiving person, and am often criticized for giving too much of the benefit of the doubt to people. Even if I am like that in real life, I was still able to be sucked into the outrage cycle.

Because we saw that this was a dead end, we created institutions whose purpose was justice. Their mission was unfulfilled because the justice was not meted out equally, and this racist backlash in the form of outrage culture fought against it strongly (still does).

A few things have changed though — before 24/7 news we didn’t have constant, unfiltered access to a stream of all that was wrong in the world. People with differing opinions to us ranging from benign to hateful, constant tragedy, etc.

And additionally, due to the rot of our democratic institutions (unions, etc.) and the growing imbalance of power between everyday people and elites, people are starting to turn towards outrage culture as a solution to societal ills again. And so the calls for “community justice” and the sort return as well. The difference this time is that social media has democratized access to a voice. So now anyone and any cause can be fought for, and with minimal effort.

Fixing social media won’t fix outrage culture, it will just mean that the only people with the power utilize it will be financial and racial elites.

If we want to get rid of it entirely, we need to make our society more democratic.

Real actions in the physical world are at the root of this outrage.

The internet, in all of its forms, simply increases awareness of what's going on around the world.

In the past, there was a relatively miniscule amount of information you could get about what was happening, and you could only get it through some gatekeepers. Now you can see what's happening, often as it happens, in cell phone camera footage and in direct reporting from people who are there, and the opinions of your fellow men are not filtered and reduced to a trickle by gatekeepers.

A pessimistic view is that, like the babel fish, such increased communication will only lead to increased conflict, yet there is evidence that increased understanding and compassion can come from it too.

Outrage-driven profit models existed before social media as such. Once known as tabloids and the guttered press, this kind of media existed a while before Facebook. William Randolph Hearst was credited with starting the Spanish-American war back in the day (as fictionalized in Citizen Kane). This is to say the "outrage complex" extends well beyond social media platforms though such platforms certainly serve to accelerate it.

    It would be a real service to society IMO if we could
    find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and
    energy to challenge the big players without the outrage 
    culture. 

As far as shaping a positive community, you attract good people and reward good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior.

This is at odds with things you might reasonably do to "challenge the big players" (if by "big players" we mean Facebook, etc) in my experience, though. It's hard to scale up because it's labor-intensive.

Camaraderie is relatively easy in small groups but tough in large groups. Not sure what HN's size is but I suspect it's right around the tipping point.

Reddit shows one possible solution to scaling up: you scale horizontally. Each subreddit is a semiautonomous "shallow silo." It's partially successful at this: you have a lot of shockingly supportive and positive subreddits and some absolute dumpster fires.

FB sort of does this well, with their groups feature.

Ultimately a challenge faced by those two is their revenue model. It you don't charge users directly, you are either going to be privately funded (HN) or ad-supported. Relying upon ads is the kiss of death as far as sane discourse goes. It means you crave engagement and eyeballs and pageviews above all else. It is how you survive.

This is my impression too. What should we do or even think about it ? I tend to go slightly radical and cut socnet while allowing a few IRC and a bit of reddit.

I think our understanding of 'social' is incomplete, as if social bonds without simple and clear goals (important tasks to be done, or sharing moments with people we have deep bonds with) leads to degenerate noise tsunamis like we're seeing.

I'm more inclined to think that social media is where people go to let off steam. Most people I know have full lives outside of social media, and just get online to relax a bit, if at all. Many people I know have stopped using it at all. The ones who do vent and rant online are the minority, and they are more likely to be doing it online than in person. Of course, there are plenty of trolls and shills who join them, and together they make our society look more ready for conflict than we really are.

Now, it is true that we have some serious problems going on, and are vehemently divided in the USA at the moment, with some actual riots and violence. I don't want to be dismissive of that. But I believe social media is still a magnifying glass over all our troubles, not a true barometer of our collective readiness to get into physical combat over our differences.

We have always and will always disagree about political issues. Issues that from our subjective appreciation are destroying many people's lives, so it's not surprising that we resort to all sorts of toxic behaviour in order to "help the cause", whatever it might be.

This emotional need for justice (even when misdirected) can not be discarded in the discussion about toxic behavior. Sometimes it takes the form of physical violence, sometimes it's an insult, a threat, doxxing, etc.

We should strive to channel these desires and differences of opinion in healthy ways. "just ban all heated political discussions" is a good enough workaround at the forum level, but not a noble solution to the root problem at a societal level.

It’s not about outrage or any kind of drama. It’s achieving or supporting agreement and like-mindedness, which is a mob. Any outrage present is a secondary consideration of potential challenges to the agreement at present.

So long as people are coalescing into groups out of mental laziness others people will be there to manipulate the mob for some selfish reason. The problem isn’t big players or media. The problem is foolish people.

I like to use a phrase I got from the Simpsons years ago: “Addicted to rageahol”

https://youtu.be/kCUIzs8i9EU

For many of these people it seemed like they hadn't ever used the Internet for communicating before, and for us employees it always felt like supervising children. Sometimes they would dig up the phone number of the CEO or some poor developer, and call them with some angry complaint. Their anger died down somewhat when they got a human to talk to. I suspect a lot of the heated discussions stemmed from people's inability to see the other party as a real human; people behave online with a completely different level of respect than in real life.

One of the most amusing experiences I had was hearing about how the "like" button next to comments had become a form of bullying. People would (rightfully, it would appear) complain that other people "liked" their comments ironically, and asked us to remove the likes. People in their 60s being bullied by other 60-year-olds through "likes". Both hilarious and sad.

I'm not being cheeky (see below), but this already exists. It's talking to one another, person to person. :)

Social media, at its core, targets the very primal part of our brain and bodies. This is my feeling and observation, and I would be very interested to see if there have been studies that show there are fundamental differences to how people communicate online, primarily via text, versus communicating in person. I would suspect there are differences in that our brain literally responds differently.

As I type this, you can't see me. You don't know me. And I can't see nor do I know you. We can't respond to facial expressions or hear the cadence and tone of voice. Many, many times on the Internet, conversations get sidetracked by someone making a joke and then someone taking it too seriously. That's a simple case of online social media interaction, and there are far more complex examples. It's the same thing as working at a company. Often times you hit this moment where you just stop typing a message or an e-mail and just call the other person or go over to their desk. Even with just voice-to-voice communication, things are communicated much faster, and in person is even faster.

A lot of this has to do with the process. Online, someone types something and then someone else types another thing in response and so on. In person, it's a more dynamic exchange.

So at the core, my hypothesis is that almost all media (such as news) and especially social media are doing nothing but bypassing our natural filters and sensors for understanding things and try to directly target our inner primal self. As we can see online, humans are innately primal, especially when you remove all of our other evolved methods of understanding and empathy. When people see someone online say something they vehemently disagree with, they immediately ignore all possibilities and empathetic responses. We go straight to the core of finding the thing we hate about what they just said and then let them know that. However, if a stranger on the train says something like this, we often let it go. If we do engage, we are much more empathetic about their feelings and thoughts, both for human and societal reasons.

Given this, I think it's essentially impossible to build an online community that is directly based upon this type of communication. It's tough enough to build one in person with people you know. And as we've all experienced over the past months, even digital face-to-face communication is hard. There's still dynamics missing like low-latency, body language, tone, hand motions, subtleties of voice, etc.

I view it as an API or architecture diagram. If one drew one out for human communication, there's a lot of abstraction built upon our inner primal workings. But modern media, the Internet, and now social media has given a way to bypass all of that. The inner core can be accessed directly via advertisements, news, social media, propaganda, forums, etc., and now the Internet is like a connection between all these primal cores. It's why it's so insane.

Adam Curtis' documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace covers this.

perhaps social media was not the proximate cause but it certainly was enabling.

even civil war in the US was a good thing. whose to say a next civil war won’t also be.

People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).

I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.

It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?

Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.

And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.

And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.

The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.

I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.

(Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)

Importantly, I have changed my opinions on certain aspects of technology or politics based on rational civilized discourse that happens here. Disagreement is actually an active and important part of such discussions.

The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.

Nit: Hacker News shows job ads, and is interested in attracting new users. Just not like your typical VC-funded social media website.

HN doesn’t have ads because they are running HN at a deficit to get eyeballs on YC. Granted, to my knowledge, they haven’t suppressed any threads in their competitors; kudos.

(Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)

This is a pretty textbook look into a very unreflective echo chamber.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

...working on new forum ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I agree with your sentiment, we need more/new options.

For one, yes, but Facebook has clear names (usually) and still it degraded quite a bit and hosts obscure trends such as flat eathers. So I don't think anonymity is really all too important. Maybe it's rather that you can now find like-minded people to strengthen your opinion, even when there are actually really few overall.

The biggest problem is that replying to a post makes it appear in more feeds. Never in the history of debate and discussion has "add more people!" led to more effective communication. Think of your own work experience - how many meetings were useful when they grew and grew every week?

HN benefits from the lack of a feed but also suffers from the inability to continue discussions over long periods of time between a few users. Something like slack's threads would be useful for a forum, as well as more permanent (old school) topic-based subforums and threads.

such an oddly particular criticism. don't you have the same conversation with certain people all the time offline too? it seems completely unavoidable if you have other people in your life. that it happens online too should be thoroughly unsurprising.

it's like thrift store shopping. you wade through all the same boring stuff to get to that rare new (to you) thing that makes it all worth it. focus on the payoff, not the rummaging. and certainly no one is so learned that nothing new can be found in many, if not most, of the discussions.

If you want, send a draft to hn@ycombinator.com and I'll try to help you with feedback similar to how I help YC startups with their launches (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches - that's a YC-only thing but Show HNs are similar). Just realize that I can't necessarily reply quickly. The inbox can be brutal.

Same offer goes for anyone who wants some advice about how to present their work to HN.

I thought he had mods like dang to take care of it for him.

I'd be more interested to hear what dang thinks of HN than what PG thinks.

(or, more frequently, failed to make. in the old days one could ask "have you ever gone fishing? Well, did you catch all the fish?" What would be a modern equivalent?)

Put so simple makes it a fascinating puzzle that I will need to ponder for years to come. Why is it the case, what can be done, who is up for it, what will they turn into, what happens with the subjects if done right/wrong?

It's quite possible, that while it's hard to watch, it is just the growing pains of a whole new chapter in the evolution of human thought. One that isn't restricted to sophisticated and polished elites.

Maybe the real problem is our aversion to an all out brawl, rather than the fight itself. It's possible that younger people will just be able to deal with it better -- learn how to better cope with and ignore distractions like trolls etc.

I'll bet that this will never happen for topics like politics.

Politics is a 0 barrier to entry conversation and a maximally emotion driven discussion.

If a forum allows politics, the mod work load goes up and the forum will polarize itself. Politics is one of the natural scissor statements of the web.

Forums are very hard to start. You need a catalyst. HN’s was YC - that’s the bar.

People can be abusive in subtle ways that enter a gray area of civility. For example, a discussion thread that devolves into a combative exchange about what a participant really meant by their comments, and whether that means they're a white supremacist, will eventually become exhausting and pointless, and everyone knows it, but what kind of rule can ban "exhausting and pointless" threads?

But any moderation that can't be enforced on technical terms will start making the enforcers seem subjective and biased. Reddit has a long record of subs abandoned in anger by a large cohort of users because they consider the mods to be unfairly biased, and it's not always the case. Conversely, forums can die if the "good" users think that not enough is being done to shut up problematic users.

I help run a private discussion board that's been active for ten years now. It's great, but it's had its own share of drama. The hardest problem we had was a person who simply incited trouble. He didn't break any rules. He was just a very difficult person, and we knew (through friends of his) that he had mental issues. In the interest of being fair and keeping to our terms of use, we let him stay. While there were people who openly argued that the community should have room for people like him, others complained and started leaving the site, just because of all the heated drama. This went on for years. After several incidents where it just became too much, we decided to ban him permanently. But it was a hard decision. We still have "problem users" who, purely by voicing unpopular opinions (from nationalist/fascist sympathies to belief in anti-vaxx or rejection of Western medicine), incite a lot of heated discussions. They're not breaking any rules, they're just loud and controversial.

I think a discussion board lives and dies by the trust its users put in the moderators.

> Wouldn't that be great?

Yes, until 10 years ago or so. Try it today and people, whose idea of a public discourse is to doxx, cancel and threaten people with opposing views, will still harass whoever they can identify if they read something they don't like. Even if they can't post.

Thanks for this comment /s

But now we have put all of the communities onto the same websites, and this is much more difficult.

We just aren't designed to handle this and it's bringing out the worst in us.

(Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)

Things go sideways when false assumptions are made. Assuming a safe community is hostile is a path to unnecessary conflict. Assuming a well-intended statement is intended to be malicious is a path to complete communication meltdown.

PC-ness and call out culture has hype-reduced human communication to mere words. That's not to how communication evolved.

Yes. Words matter. But they are not the way humans communicate.

pg used to post graphs sometimes using an old Google API where you could supply all the data points in a URL and it would return an image. Edit: like http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=ls&chco=ff7700,000000..., which still works! via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833276

It’s hard for us to believe our fancy AI algorithms that optimize for ad clicks have this massive side effects of actually manipulating what is perceived as reality and affecting their emotions.

They surface more enraging news and create echo chambers where anyone who doesn’t think like them are the enemy.

Create a good culture, then break it out and parallelize it. New users get slotted into larger groups to learn the culture, then they can be sent on their way into the larger culture.

Twitter Training Wheels?

People aren't making this up.

We don't need to pile on more features for the sake of it. There are plenty of communities for DIY projects and AMAs.

People who behave poorly, especially if it's something they've done for a long time, can dislike being held to account for that. dang has a range of tools available, and these get used to hold people to account for their destructive behaviours. These people get increasing levels of warnings before they eventually get banned.

And then, when they've been banned, they see some other account that posts similar content that hasn't been banned and they say "inconsistent!". What they've missed is the "yet" part of "hasn't been banned yet" -- that other account may be banned in future, or if they drop the destructive behaviour they may have all the measures removed.

> He also applies penalties that last for years, and people are too afraid to say anything.

I don't know what dang's email account is like but I'm guessing it's full of people who are not too afraid to say anything.

But it could be that dang enjoys what pg found stressful.

I was part of running a community website but I absolutely hated running the admin side of it. I just wanted to build pretty UI and make things work. I absolutely loathed responding to support emails. It drained me out. A non technical friend of ours loved the admin and people side. He would onboard users, write nice how to articles for others, resolve conflicts, respond to suooort emails. He did not care one bit about how it all worked, just that it worked and he could help others get value out of the site.

Some people are good at building things, Some people are great at fostering built things.

I have seen that small forums, especially for a specific purpose, tend to be mostly civil and positive. It is pretty easy for a handful of bad actors, maybe even just one, to be disruptive enough to pretty much singlehandedly destroy such forums. It seems almost inevitable once a forum grows to a certain size, but swift and effective moderator action can often nip it in the bud. Experience or good instincts may help a lot in identifying users who are just inherently destructive and booting them out entirely before they have a chance to really get going.

But you did, and it makes me sad to see the testosterone blaming stuff here.

To be honest, I do remember online communities being much nicer back then (we're talking 14 years ago here) but things have changed a lot. I feel like strong moderation and guidelines work great (see HN where discussions are mostly civilized) instead of blaming half of the world population from an individual observation which can quickly be debunked by visiting any female-only forum or subreddit in 2020 for example.

I saw certain MLM groups where women (and exclusively women, since these MLMs didn't cater to men) would say pretty nasty and offensive things to push their agenda and using the same idea of positivity, encouragement and "female empowerment" and any naysayer will get shut down supposedly because they are being negative or not supportive (completely overlooking the fact that they're hawking a scam).

I am not sure whether women need an external trigger for this (such as the MLM in this example) whether as men tend to do it by themselves, or if you simply got lucky and happened to be surrounded by good people, especially in that early era when computers, internet access (for non-work purposes) and social networking was still relatively niche and acted as a filter compared to nowadays where every idiot has access to all those things.

Male and female were about equal, and no specific issues were more related to either gender.

Just one additional data point.

—-

In my experience, men will generally be overtly hostile/assholes.

Women will be nice to your face and then try to destroy your reputation behind your back.

It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).

Our male:female ratio was 2:1.

(Which was honestly really high for those days, particularly the early 2000's)

Our ratio of problems with male users to female users was probably more like 20:1.

Overall it was a positive community. There were memorable exceptions involving problems with female members, both online and offline, but they were notable partly for being such anomalies.

Additionally, many female members expressed to me that the "sparring" nature of the forums tended to be a real turnoff. They preferred to use the other features of the site.

Let's not draw premature conclusions from insufficient data.

(Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)

Source: You know, I have been to Mars back in 2005.

Do you have evidence for this statement?