My own personal experience is that opinions on topics are geographical cargo cults. Upvoted by Europeans in the morning and downvoted by Americans in the afternoon or vice versa.
I imagine if you interviewed all 5 million visitors you would get about 5 million different experiences.
(That's not to dismiss your experience at all.)
It tends to be certain kinds of comments and unlike almost everything else about HN, I am usually not surprised by that pattern because I tend to expect it for certain topics or certain types of observations that I sometimes make.
I have a really poor ability to predict which comments of mine will do really well.
I have a really poor ability to predict which articles I submit will do really well.
I have a reasonably good ability to predict which comments will be promptly downvoted and then get corrective upvotes.
But are you not making an assertion about how voting behaves overall?
>> Corrective upvotes are a tradition on HN. If you aren't being an asshole, some people will upvote you back to neutral if they think you are being downvoted for the wrong reasons.
>> You just have to have a little courage of conviction and patience and not start editing your post in reaction to voting or complaining about it, etc.
>> HN does a much better job than most platforms of allowing people to genuinely express a minority view -- assuming they can follow the guidelines and not bitch about the voting and not get reactive and inflammatory because of baggage, etc.
>> It's not an easy thing to do, but it can be done here, unlike most platforms.
Have you formed this conclusion based on a statistical analysis of the raw voting data on a variety of platforms?
If so, can you link to where you obtained these datasets (I'd like to have a look myself)? If not, upon what is the conclusion based?
A common practice on Metafilter when I joined was for the mods to tell such a person to shut up and leave the discussion because they were "being disruptive" and then let everyone else keep taking pot shots at the person who would get in trouble if they came back to defend themselves after the mods had told them to leave. This often happened solely because the person had a minority view or was a demographic outlier and was otherwise doing nothing wrong, imo.
In contrast, I posted as openly homeless on HN for nearly 6 years and my views on homelessness have become respected on HN. I was never targeted by either the moderating staff or membership of HN the way I was on Metafilter, even though there is noticeable overlap of membership between the two sites.
Given the overlap in membership, I'm pretty confident the difference between the two sites is about moderating policy.
I'm also a woman and HN is overwhelmingly male. I originally joined over 11 years ago under a different handle and posting here as openly female can be somewhat tough and used to be tougher and de facto makes me a representative of a minority view here.
I have a really long history of commenting on gender issues on HN and that still sometimes turns into something of a hubbub, but has gotten to be less thorny than it used to be.
When I first joined, members of HN sometimes posted surveys asking about things like "What's your age and gender?" Those surveys at that time showed that members were 95 to 98 percent male.
HN is not very transparent about certain things and lacks avatars and has a completely free form profile section which many members put little or nothing in, so demographic data here is somewhat hard to come by. It's not even necessarily apparent what the gender of a person is.
At a time when I had maybe 1500 karma and the bottom of the leader board was around 10k or 12k, I was getting comments from members that suggested they perceived me as being "prominent" for a woman on HN. I was probably homeless at the time or possibly still working an entry level job at an insurance company. I was also getting a shocking amount of social pushback that suggested to me my participation was being disruptive of social norms here and I was rocking the boat in terms of gender norms on the site.
So I spent some time privately gathering my own data on HN membership wrt female participation here.
I no longer have some of that data and I've always been not very forthcoming with the details because it feels uncomfortably close to "doxxing" people to me and I'm aware of the potential for it to be hurtful to other people and for it to come back to bite me. But I did keep my own data at one time and I still keep an eye on certain things somewhat casually and female participation here is less problematic than it used to be.
I'm probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN, so I'm sort of a unique minority here and for that reason I make some effort to some degree to quietly let people know that I sincerely believe that HN is a place where you can get past your minority status if you will make an effort to read the guidelines and follow the guidelines, even when it feels like you are being ganged up on and have a minority view.
It's a big forum with about 5 million unique visitors a month, so sometimes you will get a bunch of replies that don't agree with you and this will tend to be more true for minority views. But unlike other forums I've been on where the moderating staff were clearly and obviously part of the problem, it is okay to stand your ground here on your minority view and not crumble to social pressure lest they ban you.
It's not easy because you do need to keep following the guidelines and that's emotionally and psychologically hard to do when you are representing a minority view and most other people are telling you that you are wrong and some of those people aren't following the guidelines and are engaging in personal attacks and the like.
I'm okay with you chalking this up to "personal opinion and she can't prove it." I'm never going to be able to provide the level of data sets your comment suggests you are looking for, but I'm quite confident my statements are accurate and I make them to try to assure people here who are feeling picked on that it is possible to present a minority view on HN and stand by it, but you need to have a thick skin and be prepared to back your position with data, citations and solid arguments. The membership here will take you to task and demand you support your ideas with something substantive, but if you can meet that standard, the social climate here is not actually the usual BS where you get banned for making people uncomfortably aware that they are merely prejudiced assholes. People here will consider your minority view if you can adequately support it.
But my disagreement in this specific case is the accuracy of your description. In your prior comment, you seemed to be evaluating HN on an absolute basis, whereas this one seems to be mostly on a relative (to MetaFilter) basis.
Indeed, HN is one of the best forums going, even as its popularity has grown which makes moderation difficult. That said, common descriptions of it bordering on perfection (mild hyperbole) seem innacurate to me.
> I'm probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN, so I'm sort of a unique minority here and for that reason I make some effort to some degree to quietly let people know that I sincerely believe that HN is a place where you can get past your minority status if you will make an effort to read the guidelines and follow the guidelines, even when it feels like you are being ganged up on and have a minority view.
Might this depend on which minority status you hold? If not, then does that not suggest some form of ~perfection &/or consistency in bias? I don't think it would shock too many people to discover that a forum frequented by hackers and silicon valley type are neutral to pro-equality when it comes to gender differences. This notion seems to align quite nicely with any news stories I read. But does it also follow (both logically and observationally) that this lack of bias necessarily holds for other dimensions, like political leanings?
> It's not easy because you do need to keep following the guidelines...
This depends to some degree on who you are and what you say.
> I'm okay with you chalking this up to "personal opinion and she can't prove it."
I'm not chalking it up to that, I was simply pointing out that you were describing HN in a manner that is literally not possible without access to significant quantities of voting data.
My issue is not so much the bias around here, that I can live with - it's the widespread refusal to acknowledge that it (and other portions of reality) exists. Sometimes it gets rather absurd, imho.
> The membership here will take you to task and demand you support your ideas with something substantive, but if you can meet that standard, the social climate here is not actually the usual BS where you get banned for making people uncomfortably aware that they are merely prejudiced assholes. People here will consider your minority view if you can adequately support it.
I believe my comment history suggests things are not always as rosy as reflected in your personal experience.
But worry not, I'm not losing a whole bunch of sleep over it. It is a very valuable learning experience, for my purposes. It's simultaneously depressing, and motivating.
Thank you. That's nice to hear.
I don't think HN borders on perfection and I don't think I said anything of the sort anywhere. I said stuff like: HN does a much better job than most platforms of allowing people to genuinely express a minority view.
That's still a relative rating, not an absolute one. It does a better job than average. Your remark seems to generally agree with that, so I'm not sure I understand what the issue here is.
I have not had an easy time here and at one point I left for 18 months in part because I felt it was too rough for me here. But I was also really sick at the time and homeless and "wherever you go, there you are." My primary reasons for taking a break were not, per se, "HN is a shit show and everyone there is mean to me!"
I'm quite open about the fact that posting here as openly female was only "a bed of roses" if you are thinking of it in terms of the thorns. That opinion isn't one that is very welcome here. It gets a lot of push back.
I've had college classes in things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I know something about best practices for dealing with difficult group dynamics.
I'm not claiming there is no bias here. I'm not claiming things are always rosy and I used the word "hubbub" in my remark, above.
I don't really understand why you think I am engaging in hyperbole and attributing some kind of perfection to the site. My very first comment was basically a recipe for how to weather the downvote storm and wait and see where it goes after that.
And in my experience and opinion, it will go better if you actually follow the guidelines and don't start complaining about downvotes. As someone who attracts a lot of negative reactions on HN, my firsthand experience is that if you actually follow the guidelines and say nothing about the voting and wait and see, things will be less negative and a few hours later you may feel differently about how people are perceiving your comment because it may no longer be in the negatives and there may even be constructive engagement.
And you are less likely to experience that if you start complaining about bias and about downvotes and about people disagreeing with you.
I don't agree with you that I can't know what I know without spreadsheets full of data. I think I do know what I know based on having studied how social stuff works and having participated on a variety of forums over the years.
Metafilter is not the only forum where I had really negative experiences and was ultimately banned. It's just the only one I happened to use as an example to try to illustrate my point in one particular remark.
And it shows! That's a big part of why I'm a fan. That, and that you are an independent thinker (no small feat these days), and lots of other things.
> And in my experience and opinion, it will go better if you actually follow the guidelines and don't start complaining about downvotes. As someone who attracts a lot of negative reactions on HN, my firsthand experience is that if you actually follow the guidelines and say nothing about the voting and wait and see, things will be less negative and a few hours later you may feel differently about how people are perceiving your comment because it may no longer be in the negatives and there may even be constructive engagement.
I have more than enough first hand experience to know that your intuition is off in this case. Certain ideas (perspectives on reality, even though they are accurate) are not acceptable here - and that's ok, it is phase that Western culture is going through, what can you do.
I'm so controversial on so many axes that I simply don't care that some of my opinions don't play well here and I've largely stopped talking about certain things here.
Like vaccines. No matter what I say, both pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers are equally hateful. And I feel it's not super important and it's just something I rarely talk about anymore.
Anyway, this is real off topic and I am feeling like you just don't really understand me or something on this topic and it's not important, really, for you in specific to understand every little thing I say.
I don't intend to continue this discussion.
Have a great day.
It's sad that you and I differ on whether it's important to understand other people though. I wonder if there's anyone on this planet that is able to even consider the possibility that understanding is important, maybe even when it seems like it isn't. In any normal undertaking, if what you're trying isn't working, it would seem logical to try something else. But when the scope of the undertaking gets too large, this thinking seems to mysteriously change.
Enjoy your day as well. :)