Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

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HN's great flaw is that it has been allowed to be overrun by huge numbers of people from large organizations.

There are tens of thousands of people from FAANG/YC acting as self-interested agents of their organizations without any kind of disclosure or counter-measures. These are, in effect, massive voting rings and propaganda efforts which are supposedly not allowed on HN.

It's obvious how this results in the total dominance of FAANG/YC content, and how it skews the public conversation in Silicon Valley in their favor.

HN could take a variety of counter-measures but they don't. Maybe because users would quickly point out the hypocrisy of ending FAANG voting rings/propaganda while permitting the YC voting rings/propaganda.

HN is now the premier mouthpiece for tech corporate interests.

It would be great for the world if someone were to create a replacement that was designed to prevent this problem, while preserving what is good about HN. Or if HN took action even if it was 5+ years late.

Many have tried. There's a simple reason that you glance at but don't directly confront in your post. The "voting rings" you outline are actually a huge constituency, thanks to the outlandish concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of these few companies (I mean FAANG - YC has a huge and unique network but I don't suspsect it's anywhere close to the same scale in dollars or current employees). No site can keep out so many skilled and knowledgeable techies and expect to keep up the level of quality that HN provides. This is one of those cases where culture flows pretty clearly from material reality - you can't have a better site until the titans are dethroned and dismembered. So, if you want a better HN, don't build an HN clone! Build political power that will target monopolies, monopsonies, and anything "too big to fail" for levelling and redistribution.

It is simply not true that many have tried. HN has certainly not tried to solve this problem. They seem to be focused on much smaller problems, like preventing handfuls of friends from upvoting a GitHub project at the same time or Viagra spam.

As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name. HN cold also disregard votes for google.com submissions for Google employees, etc. These steps alone would reduce the problem drastically.

No one would like to link their LinkedIn account, of course, but most people in tech have one and could do so in seconds.

That's an obvious solution but there are many other possibilities as well. And it would still be possible to maintain the ability for anonymous throwaway accounts to be used.

> As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name.

I downvoted you. If it makes you happy, know that this downvote is completely organic.

I'm just annoyed by someone suggesting that we remove one of the real advantages of HN: availability of real pseudonymity.

Edit: I also sometimes vote in the same direction as supposed voting rings and I am starting to see Dans frustration with all these accusations.

I have been here for more than 10 years and I have started to get a feeling for some of the weird voting patterns here now. It has even gone so far that I am joking that I want do go to university to hopefully do a study of group dynamics in online communities :-)

I get the impulse. But think it through. There is no real possibility that the claim I made is actually false. Of course not every Google employee upvotes Google submissions and not every upvote is from a Google employee. But the influence is clearly large enough to have a huge amount of undue influence.

And how is:

1 point by starfox9833 (Google) 22 minutes ago

not pseudoanonymous? Google has 100k employees.

HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another. It also knows the IP addresses of users, which are often coming from FAANG corporate networks (at least pre-Covid).

It might cost some amount of theoretical privacy but gain us a huge amount freedom from the dominance of a few major organizations.

Yo but what about privacy and freedom of expression bruh.

You are right that it would still be pseudonymous. Some problems:

1. LinkedIn is probably easy to game to create fake accounts.

2. HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another.

One of the really great things about HN is that they've been trustworthy (AFAIK). Unlike a good number of other sites they haven't done all the things they could do.

3. The more you do to identify users the lower concentration of really high quality users one get it seems. As newspapers decided on Facebook comments the only one that would show up to comment were:

- those who didn't realize or didn't care about the privacy implications

- those who just had to anyway because they felt so strongly about the topic

- trolls with faked Facebook accounts

I don't think it's that easy to game LinkedIn accounts. Faking the account age and number of connections is non-trivial, for example.

I don't think it would limit the high quality participation, at least not by very much, and that could be mitigated. Maybe users that do not link their accounts could still comment but not vote?

There would definitely be some trade-offs but the current wholesale domination of corporations on HN is a huge trade-off in one direction as well. It seems a very high price to pay IMHO.

> As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts.

What about those of us without a LinkedIn account?

The top comment is violently decrying Apple. I’m sure what you say happens does, but not to the extent that it completely changes the conversation. It’s always worth checking back as early negative or positive feedback doesn’t always remain.

How would you determine these actors? Any ideas?

how do you keep FANG employees from commenting?

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