If you are commenting here, you haven't really quit "social media".
No, for the purposes of what I'm doing, HN was not included in that. From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way. No personalized, UAM-optimized algorithmic feed, no infinite river of small content bites, no rich mechanisms for interaction. And, very importantly, it has the noprocrast feature, which I long ago set to low usage levels.
And as others point out, it's not like I took some sort of vow of internet chastity to a god who will now smite me because I looked at HN. The point was to partially undo some bad habits that had built up during the election cycle. I'll often make some 1-month change at the beginning of the month. For me it's valuable mainly as self-experiment and a way of getting back to some baseline.
I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. Every time I see my total Upvote count go up, I get excited and I rush to see who has agreed with me again. If it goes down I immediately get angry and defensive that someone is downvoting what I said. And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?
It might not have been designed this way but it's exactly what it is. And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.
This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.
You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoints at this moment none of the comment are in the negative. I'm sure that on Reddit the hivemind would've decided what the Right Opinion(tm) would be and people disagreeing would be sitting at -200 comment score.
Maybe the system could be pushed further and hide the scores even for your own comments though, removing all gamification. I don't know if it would improve things but I'd be curious to see how it would impact the quality of the discourse.
>otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?
I mean even on forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/BBSs/imageboards without scoring system (or even publicly identifiable accounts) people would do the same thing, so I think that you overestimate the influence of the scoring system. I guess the closest equivalent on these other forums in general is getting "replies", i.e. engagement with your content, which I suppose is what we really crave in the end. We want people to listen to us.
Beyond that HN does have a few huge quality advantages over other social media. A big one is that the focus is still on textual content, not images and videos which means that you have to take some time to digest every story instead of mindlessly scrolling through the main page one gif at a time.
Disagree, a lot.
I've railed against it, but pg (the site owner) noted that voting as a proxy for like/dislike was not improper use on HN, much to my chagrin. In the early days (of my use, back on my first HN account) voting seemed mostly to be done to move a comment to it's "proper place".
Nowadays very good comments get greyed to non-readability. I find myself so often vouching for things I disagree with because comments that add well structured, logical, or interesting thoughts get voted out of view because they go against the group norms.
A lot of people seemed to have liked (do like?) the system that Slashdot came up with: choose a random group of people every day and give them moderator posts to police the discussions. However, if you post in that day you lose your moderator points.
They seem to have gone with a wisdom-of-the-subset-of-the-crowds instead of a wisdom-of-the-entire-crowd/mob.
News readers had scoring. Neither the NNTP protocol, nor NNTP servers, had a scoring mechanism, and certainly not one that was distributed over the world-wide Usenet infrastructure.
If you think otherwise, can you point to (e.g.) an RFC where it is documented?
As mentioned earlier, engagement seemed to be the goal. And the newsgroups I frequented were usually about getting help with a tech problem, or helping someone else out, which has largely been replaced by Stack Overflow.
Why not? Do you not value discussion, hearing new ideas, learning new concepts, having a soundboard for your thoughts? I also like sharing knowledge and participation in the process of humanity developing its collective memeplex (or at least fooling myself that I'm doing that). The fact that I'm not going to meet the people I discuss with has no bearing at all.
While what you describe in your comment is a factor, I cannot agree the rush is the dominant factor for commenting for me.
I do, but ultimately, I post because I want someone else to read what I said and comment on it(good or bad). It triggers the same release of oxitocin in my brain that seeing likes on a post does.
As to the design question, I think the biggest things it's missing for me versus modern social networks in terms of addiction potential: 1) river-of-content setup; 2) algorithmic feed with personalized engagement; 3) images; 4) video; 5) wide topic variety; 6) follow graph; 7) real-world social connections in the platform; 8) on-platform notifications; 9) on-phone notifications.
> why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet
For me this platform is as close as I have to discussing things with my profession. So both with my professional Twitter account and this account, I see it as an opportunity to influence my field a bit and support younger colleagues where I can. Were it not for that, I'd just consume it in a read-only way, as over the years I've come to see on-line argumentation as unhealthy for me.
It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.
Mostly. There is an unconscious hive mind on HN too, and it downvotes when you disagree with it. It just happens that most commenters belong to it, at least most of the time.
edit: Now I see the numbers. The quality of posts is still far better than Reddit and the interactions less addictive, at least in my experience.
Slashdot's approach is to have different kinds of upvote (Insightful, Funny, etc) and different kinds of downvote (Off-topic, Flamebait, etc), and scores are clamped, iirc the lowest value is -1 and the highest is +5.
The act of writing out your thoughts gives them added clarity. This holds for long(er)-form comment-based sites such as HN and Reddit, not so much for FB and Twitter.
I realized the aforementioned, checking my points and who responded what to my thoughts. I actually made an adblock rule to block out my points. So I dont get that rush, because I realized that too, that everytime I arrive at HN, I just checked my points, and if it were more than before, I felt the rush. And I just knew it was bad, and that is not indeed what I come for to this site.
I use it only as a news delivery system, and in there there's already pathological signs - for instance I rarely skip reading anything that pushbullet displays. And if by accident I "brush it aside" (literally), then I open the app and recover the link.
I have noticed the same reactions myself, and dislike them. I am slowly and gradually learning to be able to deflect that angry defensive reply impulse. Simple awareness seems to be the first step. I don't know yet what to do about the upvote thrill.
business only policy, during 9-5. no news/socialmedia, cannot discuss irrelevant issues with my cofounder. Otherwise, I can go into rabbit holes for hours to research certain topic if my brain thinks that it is interesting.
Feels familiar, but I'm still in control. Much like with alcohol.
Just because HN doesn't have formal attributes of addictive social media like tailored feeds, shiny pictures, endless scrolling, etc., it doesn't mean that it's very different. I'm saying that, because I managed to get rid of almost all addictive sites, but HN sticks, and I still spend far more time here than I'd like to admit. If you look at it closer: this is an _endless_ list of _news_ with _a lot_ of _comments_ from your _peers_ that you _engage_ with. If you take words in italic it's obvious that this is exactly what makes other social media addictive. "News" and "peers" are the most important words here of course.
In a way, I believe sites like HN are even worse than others because they are somewhat disguised. I shrug FB, twitter and instagram easily (never actually even got into them), Reddit was harder but their stupid redesign made it much easier, HN sill stands for me.
I think you may need to add a few more months to this social media cleanse...
Like in a social media you mean?.. :)
I’m not sure there are « good » and « bad » platforms. It’s not about the platform, it’s about our usage.
Just like that if you want to eat less meat because of the environment, just eat less meat. If you eat selected meat once in a while on selected occasions this won't make you a heretic, because you are still reaching your goal of reducing your impact on the environment etc.
The people who say "if you want to reduce X you are a heretic if you don't abstain 100% from using X" are projecting their own lack of dicipline onto others — they feel they wouldn't have the discipline to do it, but also realise it would be good for them to have it. So they have to invent an excuse why this is a goal that cannot be reached, not worth reaching etc.
Being a free thinking and acting person fundamentally means also to notice when you are manipulating yourself by making your thinking fit the image you already have of the world. I for example often fall into the trap of "if I can't do it perfectly it might not be worth doing at all", and because I know that, I try to work against it.
So what your comment does here is undermining another people's effort to be in control of their social media environment. Why you deem such an act necessary should be something you should know yourself.
For some context I don't consider things like forums to be social media. As an early internet denizen I had lots of thoughtful discourse with folks that reminds me of what I experience at HN. I continue to use IRC, which I also don't consider to be social media.
So what makes them different? I think it's the underlying technology. The graph, our ability to search it and correlate immediate (mostly irrelevant) commonality is what makes things dangerous.
Humans are full of dumb or awful thoughts. They'll combat these ideas or thoughts with alternatives regularly which end up referring to as cognitive dissonance. The result is that these lesser ideas widdle away or drop off completely. On social media, the graph doesn't forget and continues to tie you to people, ideas, and thoughts that are increasingly useless. While this sells ads and generates interest in new products it doesn't align well to the way humans have discourse, socialize, or just relate in general.
That to say, HN isn't social media to me.
The articles and the conversations are better quality than on any other social media with the added bonus that what I read is relevant for my daily job and career.
At the same time, it's still distracting, I almost never finish an article and go straight to the comments, thinking "entertain me, comment section". I feel productive, but in reality, it's superficial knowledge, and spending time here is time I don't spend on actually working on my goals.
In the end, it's all about balancing the pros and cons. For Facebook, Instagram, it's easy, I don't use them. For Twitter, I focus exclusively on tech so that I don't end up in a pointless yet vicious fight. For HN, it's spending 10 minutes on the top articles, keeping up with important industry news every second day.
I've spent countless hours in the last ~5 years on reading seemingly useful articles, and comment sections.
I cannot pinpoint even one instance where anything helped me IRL.
Something might've helped indirectly, but the connection is not clear.
As a personal example, I have noticed how my way of discussing heated topics has changed based on discourse I have seen here.
And this would not have happened if I didn't invest time similar to yourself.
This is a hit or miss though, because you either identify specific ways to improve or not, and you may or may not actually improve those identified skills by reading trough the comments (and not taking action).
If improvement is the goal, then there are more efficient ways to eg. learn better ways to discuss heated topics (like reading a specific book on the topic, or attending a "Nonviolent Communication" workshop).
The more I think about this the more HN only seems like a place to get a specific flavour of entertainment (which I personally like), but nothing more.
HN content tends to be longer-form which I feel is quite different from the typical infinite scrolling for quick dopamine hits on sites like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
If you disable the notifications, that's good for you. But you're a small exceptional minority.
HN afaik has no such feature at all.
Notifications, addictive design and gamification are really bad practices that we should try to avoid - but the underlying drug of social media is that someone noticed and reacted to your content, and HN provides that just like Facebook or Twitter.
I turn off notifications on my phone for almost any app. It's just way too annoying. I'll get to it when I get to it! I guess I'm part of that minority mentioned above but as you say I do keep coming back too. It's not black and white but we can stay on the healthy side.
If I try to find an analogy, it's the difference between sitting by the fire in the evening and chatting with other people vs. spending the entire day running around listening to and actively spreading rumors.
I don’t consider HN to be social media anymore than a discussion forum on gardening is social media.
HN is not a SV startup selling ads spying on you manipulating your behaviour to sell crap or breaking democracy or depressing teenagers into suicide, it’s just not comparable and these false equivalences are just so tiring. Stop trying to bring other people down.