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Comment by shaggyfrog | Hacker News Reader

I would much rather read an article about land value tax from a site that doesn't also have an article suggesting COVID-19 is a hoax.

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On HN we go by article quality, not site quality.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Link disintermediation:

https://medium.com/@phila_31297/why-a-land-value-tax-is-inev...

(And reputation and trust matter.)

Oh, that's a legit reason to change the URL. We've changed it now from https://www.progress.org/articles/why-a-land-value-tax-is-in..., which points to this. Thanks.

I hear you, dang, but I’d rather not spend my time on a site that also hosts those kinds of articles. I don’t want to support them. I don’t want them to gain credence because they happen to have an article that’s not filled with harmful paranoid delusions. I don’t want my pageview to give them credibility capital.

In other words, I don’t think it’s possible to completely separate an article from its site, and so why I understand the spirit of that rule, I think it’s idealistic and naive, and it doesn’t consider the consequences of promoting a problematic site like this.

One problem with this argument is that users don't agree on what sites deserve that description. If we were to ban the union of all sites that some people feel this way about, that would be a lot of bannage. I don't think HN would be better for this.

The main thing to understand about HN is that we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... I'm not saying that other things aren't valuable, such as the considerations you're raising—they are. But we can't optimize for one thing without foregoing other good things.

We do ban and penalize some sites on HN. We ban the ones that are clearly off topic or spam, and penalize ones that are quite likely to be off topic, or whose popularity/interestingness ratio is too high (which is basically almost all major media sites). But even when a site is banned, when a particularly good article appears there, users can vouch for it and upvote it. All of this follows from what we're trying to optimize for.

I’m not sure what argument you are asserting I’m making; it sounds like you’re saying I’m suggesting this site should be banned. I’m not. I’m merely stating my reasons for not reading the article, and why there are negative consequences of HN boosting the profile of sites like this. And that the “prefer article quality over site quality” rule is idealistic because it pays insufficient (if any) consideration to consequences of using this platform to boost theirs.

You frame this in terms of optimization, but I’m framing this in terms of acknowledging there are negative consequences are of boosting problematic platforms (and perhaps having a discussion in terms of what negative consequences we as a community will accept).

So would I, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the article. Let's judge it on its own merits.

How do you judge an article by its merits when it involves something complex that you don’t already fully understand? I don’t have the time or desire to become an expert in tax policy, so I have to use some other signal to measure the merits of this article. At some point, that signal will come down to reputation of SOMEBODY or SOMETHING, and looking at the other articles posted by this site is a good starting point.

You can determine if the article is internally self-consistent and externally consistent with your priors.

Those two things are necessary, but not sufficient, to prove something is credible. The best propaganda will meet those two requirements.

Well, you can give up and not read anything you don't already understand, I suppose.

Then why ever read anything?

> This article was originally published at Medium by Phil Allen, the founder of The New Physiocratic League project.

Upon skimming, that article appears to be general radical leftist criticism of big government past propaganda campaigns about the Iraq War and bank bailouts, and ends up calling for UBI in the form of a Citizen Dividend. Other than the anti-establishment framing, it seems to be relatively weak tea criticism, it doesn’t claim that COVID is a hoax nor engages in anti-vaxx/anti-5G woo, it just puts out a narrative that “the government has lied before, it’ll lie again!”

Progress.org appears to be a Democracy Now! type publication that accepts content from different grassroots progressive viewpoints, some fringier than others.

The article also suggests that COVID was maybe an inside job, and that it's unpatriotic to follow health restrictions. (Not in exactly those words, but it warns about "acquiescing" to government restrictions.)

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