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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

> Time and time again I've found cited sources that don't say what was claimed.

I've seen that here on HN, too. Person 1 claims X. Person 2 asks for evidence. Person 1 posts a URL, as if it's evidence for X. But when you read the contents carefully, you realize that it doesn't actually provide any evidence for X. It provides evidence for something that's somewhere in the same general topic as X, but that's not what Person 2 asked for.

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This is a good point although I would say that citations are still better than no citations as they at least give the basis for a reasonable discussion. Now that "evidence" for X has been cited, person 2 can come back and explain why the URL does not actually support X.

> I've seen that here on HN, too.

Oh yeah? Give us an example then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899838

Thank you. ;) That was the response I was hoping for.

It occurs to me, though, that many people may not even click that link, or its content might disappear* one day, and its mere existence in the conversation might let readers assign more weight to the argument.

* Thanks to the good folks at Internet Archive for working this problem.

Hahaha no problem, I almost restrain myself from it so dang or other mods wouldn't think it's pointless. But couldn't help myself and is something I see in HN sometimes, like it's own internal meme... hahaha

Just as often person 1 says something, providing no citations (but living in a world where we know that anyone can support/debunk with their own searches). Person 2 comes along and posts a retort with a number of citations, properly linked in the footer of their post.

HN upvotes person 2. Downvotes person 1 to the nether. Clearly they were debunked.

Only person 2's citations were noise [1]. They were just marginally connected nonsense [2] to add gravity to whatever else they were claiming as a credibility multiplier. They were playing the crowd [3], knowing that extraordinarily few will ever bother reading anything, and just want to browse past and give passing judgments.

This plays out on HN daily, and is spectacularly effective.

----CITATIONS-----

[1] - https://processing.org/reference/noise_.html

[2] - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/inside-the-cult-of-t...

[3] - https://medium.com/skeptikai/the-real-story-behind-the-quote...

Is it really so prevalent? I've followed up HN citations on topics I disagree with, and I've rarely found them to be rubbish.

I've seen it enough to chuckle when I see it now. In any scientific or medical discussion it is rampant. People will cite things to support claims they are making, but the things they cite don't concur at all. They might be related, but the obligation is on the reader to go through and parse whether that giant research paper supports what they're claiming which is a task that extremely few will undertake.

It's an appeal to authority that short circuits the fast nature of HN. Most people are just skimming and some will vote based citations.

@dang what do you think of a rule against citation spam?

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