Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This generalization comes up in every polarized thread about every polarized topic. Literally every side that feels passionately on such a topic feels like the community is outrageously biased against their side. For every sarcastic and aggrieved "anything that supports $X will get downvoted and flagged" or "anything even mildly critical will get $Y", there are isomorphic comments from the opposing side which are just as sarcastic and aggrieved, only with the obvious bit flipped.

In reality, the community is divided similarly to how society at large is divided. But the actual experience of this is extremely difficult to bear when we're all bumping into each other in one big Brownian room. I wrote about this at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

Each side is so upset by the manifestations of the other side that they come to see them as utterly dominating the community. This is out of proportion numerically, but that's because it's not a numerical experience but an emotional one.

We humans place a much greater emphasis on what we dislike than what we like—the bad (e.g. what you disagree with) stands out more than the good (what you agree with), and you are much more likely to notice it and weight it more heavily [1]. This is what leads to false feelings of generality [2]. Unfortunately it also leads to the feeling of being surrounded by enemies or, as I sometimes put it, demons [3]. This dynamic encourages flamewars, because each side feels like it is the righteous underdog in an unfairly biased situation, and anyone who feels that way will feel justified in lashing out in "defense".

If the combatants in such a situation could really see how closely they are mirroring each other, it would surely change something somehow.

I definitely don't mean to pick on you personally, nor the theme of Indian politics in particular; it's just one of many, and this dynamic seems to be universal. I think the next big phase of work we need to do as a community is to develop more awareness of it, and that's work that we all need to contribute to.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

Dang, could you share how many times this thread was flagged, if at all? Also, did you or another moderator have to manually unflag it?

Implicit in your comment is the idea that I’m just imagining this, like a paranoid person claiming persecution. But IME, Bay Area Indians are highly supportive of Modi and are highly active on HN. They incite a flame war, flag the thread and the thread vanishes. If a moderator comes across it, they see that there was a flame war and the flag was justified.

I get where you’re coming from - that maybe I’m overestimating the prevalence of apologists for a mass murderer. Maybe I am. But I think you are discounting how effectively they use the mechanics of HN to shut down criticism of their deity.

It wasn't heavily flagged and we didn't have to manually unflag it.

Thanks.

By the way, your explanation of that persecution complex was good. The challenge is people (like me) looking at and thinking “yeah, sounds correct except in my case, where I know for a fact I’m a persecuted minority on HN”

But maybe it’s enough to convince people in general that there’s no such persecution going on, even if there is. That way comments like mine that imply it’s existence end up with -10 instead of +23 or whatever. So fewer tedious comments, but maybe easier for the downvoting/flaming/flagging cabals (should they exist) to take control of the narrative on HN.

You’ve been doing this a long time. So you’ll probably make a good decision, whatever you decide.

> “yeah, sounds correct except in my case, where I know for a fact I’m a persecuted minority on HN”

Exactly! that's how we all do it. The weird thing is that even when you become aware of it, it doesn't stop. You simply become aware that you think this way, just as everyone thinks this way, and that despite knowing this, you still feel that you are the noble exception to the universal rule—a human among worms, as it were. It is like an optical illusion that persists even after you know that it is an illusion. However, the awareness seems to have the effect of modulating one's behavior, which is the important thing.

I suppose it's still an open question what really has a chance of shifting this at a community level. Asking people to go against human nature is a tall order. One thing I've tried is pointing people to similar-but-opposite generalizations being made by the other side; or showing them long lists of contradictory generalizations, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. I'm not sure it really helps, though.

> But I think you are discounting how effectively they use the mechanics of HN to shut down criticism of their deity

I don't care about Modi but I flagged your comments because I'm tired about the endless whining about "them" supposedly manipulating HN. If you don't like Modi tell me why, don't go around strawmaning and generalizing Indian tech workers.

Entirely unrelated to questions about the balance of the community at large, do you have any sense for how this perspective approach can stand up to things like asymmetric astroturfing (e.g. what are sometimes called "troll farms")?

I don't spend time analyzing HN discourse like I think you probably do as a natural part of your role here, but it occasionally feels (perhaps a little less here?) like the actions of certain entities get a higher percentage of suspiciously blind or low effort defenders and whatabouters than others on high traffic public fora.

nb. Like you, I'm not talking about specifically this thread just the concept in general.

You'd be welcome to email specific examples that you're worried about to hn@ycombinator.com, but based on everything I've seen, the null hypothesis has to be that your perceptions are conditioned by your own passions about said "certain entities", whatever they are. I don't mean to be dismissive (and when people ask us to look into cases they're worried about, we always do); it's just that this is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN. Nothing else comes close.

Internet users invest far too much energy into perceptions of "asymmetric astroturfing" and other sinister manipulations. Most of what they think they're seeing is easily shown to be a figment of perceptual bias, driven by their own passions on the topic. When I say "easily shown", I mean even from the public data. People could, but generally don't bother, to check the history of the accounts they accuse. When an HN user was posting about, I don't know, Ansible in 2018, or Forth in 2014, what are the odds that they're a foreign asset or secret shill on $hot-topic of 2021? That's literally what most of this stuff amounts to.

What most needs to happen is for us all to become aware of how these psychological mechanisms function in ourselves, so we can interrupt the process by which they convert into sinister fantasies about others. This isn't unrelated to the "balance of the community at large"—it's at the heart of that question. Not seeing, or not wanting to see, the genuine variation of the community on divisive topics is what leads to sinister fantasies. The odds are overwhelming that the person against you on $hot-topic is not $evil-manipulator, they're simply someone with a different background than you, who is as sincerely persuaded as you are.

Does genuine manipulation also exist? Yes, but even answering 'yes' to that already gives a mistaken impression of the proportions. The group-psychology dynamic I'm describing is responsible for the overwhelming majority of these perceptions. That's why the site guidelines ask people not to go there in the comments, but rather to email hn@ycombinator.com if they have concerns. Then we can look at the data and see if anything objective can be found.

I hope I haven't bitten your head off! My comments on this can get tetchy because of the number of times I've had to repeat myself on this issue. At some point I'm going to compile all this into maybe a single explanation that can just be linked to.

I appreciate the continued (even if you hate that it's repeated) commentary, and I feel like my head is still attached.

It took two comments for a thread about Twitter to turn into HNers identifying and generalizing a racial/national out group.

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

delete my account

Reply on news.ycombinator.com