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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Indignation attracts upvotes, then flags. When an indignant post is relatively empty or misleading, flags will eventually win, but it's like the immune system—it takes some time to marshall enoguh white blood cells.

This is a nice case because moderators only saw it after the process was done.

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Hundreds of people commented and how many tens of thousands read it first though? Reminds me of the moderation problem big tech companies face. Humans are prone to confirmation bias which means that when they read inaccurate information that confirms a bias it even further twist people's brains. For example, this article likely twisted thousands of people just a little further against Google even with though there was no good reason for it.

My grandpa twenty years ago had some legitimate gripes with the other side of the political aisle. However, he has seen so many biased and false news stories that his confirmation bias has accepted as truth without critical thinking that he now believes the other side is literally made up of evil criminals intent on destroying the country.

The only solution I can think of is something like a libel law that makes anyone who publishes false information liable to anyone who reads that information... Basically, cut out the enormous amount of garbage produced by media and people chasing pennies. People should only publish things they firmly believe based on evidence to be true.

> The only solution I can think of is something like a libel law

Let's bring things a little bit back into perspective, because on the whole nobody's getting hurt here.

It's just Google Chrome. It's not a person. A thread like this isn't going to hurt its dominance of the browser ecosystem. And if it did, it would even be good for the diversity.

I don't think it would make a really big dent in people's bias against Google, because slowing your computer down is way way WAY less bad than the things that people biased against Google are worried about (being a gigantic faceless corporation with power equal to nation states that is controlled by something that is not, does not care for democracy).

It's like badmouthing Thanos because he has bad breath.

If true then Chrome has some bad code, and what else is new. If false then ... then what. At worst somebody deinstalls Chrome, and then?

Let's not bring libel law into this, or in fact even compare it to biased and false political news stories.

That's a different and much harder problem. I don't think there's a way around it. Community mechanisms need time for people to evaluate what they're looking at.

It's also an old problem - the adage "A lie flies around the world while the truth is still getting its trousers on" traces back to Jonathan Swift:

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.

A perfect 18th century description of internet dynamics!

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

The interesting thing here is I follow Loren on twitter - and he has dozens of credible people repeating the experiment and getting the same result, including people that I would consider unimpeachable sources such as:

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1338412989473382400

Well, I agree—that's interesting. It implies that something real is happening, though not that the OP's interpretation was accurate. It often happens in such cases that the observation is right but the interpretation is wrong [1]. It's when the interpretation rushes into angry denunciation, and especially a campaign using baity tricks to rile people up, that fair-minded readers start to have adverse reactions.

A discussion oriented more around a question (what explains this odd phenomenon?) could be a good thing. A more neutral submission, with a less baity title, might get a different reception from the community. But the combination of overstated claims and baity denunciation is usually going to trigger an immune response.

[1] I have no idea if it's wrong or not, just that a lot of informed commenters reacted that way.

Indeed. It’s almost as though Loren was reading this thread an took your advice. His post as of a few hours ago (he continues to troubleshoot this with google and tons of people experiencing the same thing)

https://twitter.com/lorenb/status/1339372013232779264

“ Also, sincere apologies for any misleading language in the original post, coming down off my fury that this was possible (helps not wanting to hurl your mac through a wall).

Thanks to everyone for coming through now with samples/evidence.

Something's up, but I'll shut up now.“

Thanks, as always for the calming and wise guidance Dang.

Dang, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed you applying that old quote to the modern day. The more things change...

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