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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This is a case of the contrarian dynamic: an initial wave of objections to the article, followed by a wave of objections to the objections. The latter get upvoted, and so we end up with a top comment saying "I can't believe the comments in this thread" or (as in the current example) "the comments here are so $bad_somehow". Recent explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616. More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

It's important to be aware that this is a mechanical process. The first comments to appear in a thread are there because they're the fastest to write, not because they come from "the average HN commenter". Another way of putting this is that the initial comments tend to be reflexive rather than reflective: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... (Objecting to objections can be reflexive also, but at least the second wave tends to be more substantive and charitable.)

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Replies are welcome, but I've collapsed this subthread to prevent the page from going too far off topic. Sorry—I know that my comment is just as off topic. But it has an educational function (at least under optimistic assumptions) and that requires people seeing it.

Let's clone dang and employ the clones as moderators for all forms of social media. We will of course pre-program them for compliance.

We can replace one moral quandary with another, much darker, one, which is a boon because it is something to talk about. And we've solved twitter.

What if we shadowbanned all comments for half an hour, or an hour?

I think this could be useful. Or maybe something like suppress the first half hour of comments and then show them all at once but in reverse chronological order.

It’s possible that the current system is fine as it is, and that Dan is simply explaining how it is. Suppressing comments is an interesting idea, but there are all kinds of second order effects — if it’s a disaster story, people need to communicate. If it’s not, the ranking algorithm would need to be adjusted, since the suppressed comments have an unfair time penalty. And so on.

Many of the "initial" comments here are at least as deliberate and thoughtful as the ensuing "objection" comments, including the one you replied to.

I agree that such a contrarian dynamic likely exists on HN, but you're not quite being fair in this illustration of it.

That's possible. I haven't read the whole thread, and am taking the GP's word for how they perceived it, since it's the perception that creates the reaction anyhow.

Thanks for this. I didn't notice myself falling into this wider pattern of behaviour. Kind of uplifting!

"reflexive rather than reflective". Thanks. I learned something very useful. I'll always try to recall it when I can't understand why I am having an argument at all.

I loved your aphorism in the linked thread about "Negativity about negativity is not positive. It's an idempotent operation."

It's gone straight to my anki quotes collection. :)

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