Comment by leafboi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leafboi | Hacker News Reader

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It's actually quite scary and shows a lot about human nature.

The comment in question was insightful and displayed intuition and judgement a level up beyond other people. Really every other comment was a load of crap, and the one comment of actual substance was buried. Many comments like this are voted down on HN. These are the comments that should in a perfect world be the top voted comment under any topic.

The fact that this is common shows that there is a huge difference between what people actually value and what they think they value.

People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.

What's even more scary is the fact that the comment wasn't insulting. It was factual and to the point, yet the replier accused the original commenter of punching below the belt and not being civil. Accusations that originated completely from his imagination.

It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.

And what's even more crazy is no one is aware of this. That responder thinks he's being civil and logical when in reality he's being stupid, illogical and biased.

I know the policies of HN are done for the purpose of preventing HN from becoming like 4chan or reddit. BUt where do I find a community where that guy who made the insightful GPT-3 comment will get voted up?

Somewhere buried in every HN topic is a comment that is ahead of it's time but you won't see it because it's been buried to oblivion by the mob.

> People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.

> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.

It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.

So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!

Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.

Yeah it is ironic. You didn't say or do anything out of line. Yet people are voting you down simply because they disagree. Imagine what happens in the real world let alone on the internet.

This is why I believe there should be no downvote at all. Or there should be a way to see which posts are the most controversial instead of hiding them. When someone disagrees with an opinion and downvotes it - they bury it and in a way hide it from the world. This behaviour is what creates echo chambers where only the popular opinions are amplified even if they are wrong.

I guess part of the problem is that our brains tend to use the authority of who says what to validate the opinion.

We need to switch our brains to focus on what is being said instead and a lot of people have a problem with this.

When there's no way to define the authority of who is saying it, the authority is transferred to the subject instead, in this case "Hacker News".

People will have a tendency to flock on the authority represented now by the subject.

(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)

>(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)

I agree. Still, even though it is the "best" it is still quite bad and this very article proves the point.

It should be scary, because since internet discussions often become less than argumentative. Instead of even lack of arguments, it becomes combative. People need some guiding principles, but with different streams of information and manipulators willingly misleading people, you end up with lowest common denominators setting untrue agendas. I guess this is what they mean by "digitalization", just that nobody know the consequences of what they say.

And no, I don't "fear" or am "frightened", as some using dominating speech would have it. There are real concerns in the world that need to be openly addressed, and people need to demand accountability and fairness for those issues.

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