Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by site-packages1 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

site-packages1

The most striking one:

Person1: "The posted has no substance and is pure regurgitation, it was probably written by GPT-3"

Person2: "Your comment punches below the belt and isn't welcome in a community like this. Maybe you're new here."

YIKES.

View on HN

HN is very tone-sensitive; I pretty frequently see comments that are correct (sometimes even by people who are extremely expert in the topic) that get downvoted because they're stated in a blunt or impolite way.

IMO it's more nuanced. If you're endorsing something the majority here likes you don't really have to care about tone as long as you're not being totally crazy. If you're trying to go against the grain then you need to chose your words very carefully.

Edit: Of course the real world is like this too but I think there's a meaningful difference in the degree.

Frankly, I consider us lucky to have a place where it's only as bad as you've described, since at this point you're getting down to borderline unavoidable qualities of human communication. In most other communities, there are no carefully chosen words, and downvotes/disagreements are primarily petty, rather than attempts to address pettiness.

Like in the real world.

Except it's not that simple - - the difference is that, in the real world, there are no scores associated with your negativity or 'going against the grain'.

You can disagree in whatever manner you want, as long as you are oblivious to the obvious social cues of the people around you.

Whereas on HN, there is a score to tell you that you've committed a social faux pas. It's more immediate, so it's a little easier to figure out.

I've often thought about ways to integrate the scoring feature into real life to help folks on the spectrum learn to communicate with neurotypicals. Haven't squirreled that one out yet.

What's worse, with visual cues that you've commited a faux pas (the graying out), people are inclined to jump on the bandwagon. There is a subconscious temptation to pile on.

In real life, you're not grayed-out for being contrary.

I'm not sure if the graying out is the best approach. However, in real life, people may look at you funny, and if they do, others will notice this.

Tangentially, the lack of body language feedback is a major reason people are such assholes online. It doesn't exactly feel like you are talking to a real person and you aren't getting realtime feedback, so it is harder to adjust to the other person or even just treat them reasonably.

Agreed.

I find downvote visual cues such as the graying out a bit like laugh tracks in sitcoms. On their own, some people will find the jokes funny, some find them distasteful or unfunny -- add a laugh track and you're telling people how they must feel. Downvotes are a lot like that: "people find this comment distasteful, what are you going to do about that?".

There is nothing wrong with the tone of Person1. Every aspect of their statement is true and correct, not exaggerated, and gives due respect to both the OP and the reader of the comment.

To provide you another point of view: I can not tell if they are being snarky/sarcastic, or if they are being literal.

I agree, it's simply blunt.

But if they had said something like, "I suspect this post is written by GPT-3. Consider X, Y, Z sentence -- these are typical constructions of GPT-3 because of A," it probably would not have been down-voted.

I guess. That an asymmetrical expectation, though. If we require a great effort to politely point out that a blog is devoid of substance, the spammers win. It's also a very important skill these days to understand when you are being manipulated by the tone police into supporting an extreme position, or at least not denouncing it. It's super easy to lure some HNer into espousing an essentially eugenicist position on race and IQ, which weirdly is a topic that always makes it to the front page on HN, but then if you go on to denounce their position as eugenicist, you'll be flagged. I think that inevitably leads to decline in the quality of a community because if you don't have shorthand for "this is autogenerated spam", "this is climate denial", "this is a conspiracy theory", or "this is racist" then you'll instead waste all of your time trying to politely refute the bullshit point by point.

>If we require a great effort to politely point out that a blog is devoid of substance, the spammers win.

But until spam becomes a problem on this site, it is premature to alter norms to protect against a non-issue.

Those are not precise quotes. With things like this, the details matter.

This is a professional engineering / IT / white-collar crowd -- most people posting on HN write a lot of emails and expect a level of professionalism.

Honestly, that's what keeps the quality of the site high. Compare that to reddit, where I've seen multiple responses that were literally just "bruh"

These both look like reasonable thoughts. Person 1 either sincerely believes it was written by GPT-3, or they are simply using the comparison as a sarcastic remark (they should have made it more clear). Person 2 reasonably took the latter meaning.

Edit: I should say mostly reasonable. Person 2 ended with uncalled-for snark, and as I said, person 1 potentially was being unnecessarily sarcastic. But I don't think this interaction is a good example of "bullshit".

It brings up an interesting HN moderation problem: can someone bash a post/article by implying that it was written by GPT-3? The community then has to determine if the comment is snark or a reasonable conclusion.

There's a lot going on in these comments, but it's worth noticing the breach of trust which occurred. Person 2 is trying to uphold the tradition of trust and charity which is a large part of what makes HN as successful as it is. Person 1 can "see the pixels" and wants to call it out. Person 1 was correct and Person 2 was charitable but wrong, and of course that counts for something. But if you look beyond that fact for a moment, I think there was real damage to the community of trust within HN. The OP acted irresponsibly by posting the article at all. That he used the trust of the HN users to prove his point doesn't matter at all.

> I had a lot of fun doing this experiment. Some people will probably get mad at me for tricking people, but whatever.

OP even recognizes the externalized cost of their actions, "but whatever", as they say. What they did by posting fake content to prove a point was wrong, betrayed everyone's trust, and was completely against the spirit here. And as a community we could say that we don't support this behavior. I think that's a good idea.

This is a _very_ charitable interpretation of Person2's motivations. Person1 correctly called out something fairly bluntly, and the call out had (in hindsight, I didn't see the comment before this) a pretty good basis for the comment.

Person2 was very dismissive without even addressing the comment. That to me seems antithetical to "trying to uphold the tradition of trust and charity," though I'm pretty new here. I personally don't think a dismissive attitude and a snarky quip for no good reason is worth anything.

The point of my comment was to focus on the harm which the OP did by posting the faked content in the first place. And my comment explicitly says to forget about Person 1 and Person 2.

Person 1 and Person 2 are integral to the analysis. They can’t be forgotten since the entire thing is about them lol

> Person2: "Your comment punches below the belt and isn't welcome in a community like this. Maybe you're new here."

> YIKES.

This.

These condescending comments is what makes the community aspect of any kind of website terrible. I've felt for a long time that using the net without joining a community and leaving comments is the healthiest way to go about it. I'm not trying to take up the moral highground, I'm guilty of behaving as a douche, but ever since I started refraining myself from commenting - my internet experience and mental health has been way better and even the douche aspect started to tone down.

if anything this validates all the shitty feedback i get when i post something that goes against the hackernews norm. It also proves that this social community is not immune to all the shitty things that happen in much less moderated spaces like reddit. Social media is broken (or working as intended depending on your metrics) across the board.

I got an idea. Start an HN clone. When you vote something down it gets voted up for everyone else.

Knowledge about this has to be hidden from everyone, though and I don't know how long it can be kept hidden.

I'd actually like to see HN try this for a day. Some of the most substantive content is also the most voted down content.

>I'd actually like to see HN try this for a day.

Meh, HN already has hidden functionality that they don't tell users about, and honestly it feels like psychological torture. For example, all of my posts lose points after posting. For a long time, I thought a bot was following me and downvoting me. No, I was just being tortured by dang, feeling like I was crazy for all of my posts receiving down votes. Unless I consistently only post things that subscribe to the norm, I will be in a points deficit. I will never be able to downvote posts and participate in the community at large. I've effectively been cancelled, mostly for having different opinions and partly for responding to trolls in an unhelpful way. I'm working on the second part, but I don't think that's the problem.

I'm not interested in trying to psychologically harm people, especially in a time when social activities only really exist on the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com