You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.
You can find joy on here sure but it's despite the culture here not because of it.
The problem is not politeness vs. impoliteness, but rather acting in good faith vs. pretending to do so. As readers, it's our responsibility (now more than ever) to tell good faith from trollish decorum.
And if it is those aforementioned bad actors who get to define and gatekeep what it means to be "polite"?
I agree that on Twitter this is a much more complicated matter.
HN does have an assumption built into the guidelines that we should assume all arguments are being made in good faith - I don't actually have an issue with reading arguments made in bad faith in good faith myself - if someone makes a baseless claim that is refuted soundly and sanely in a comment then readers will be able to parse the two comments and will generally favor the one more clearly made in good faith. Ad hominem attacks actually hurt your argument here while on twitter they can bolster it - most of hackernews has no respect for "sick burns".
it literally is not. The idea that all topics have equal both sides is not founded in any actual reality, it is a device used by those who would push falsehoods to demand an audience. Falsehoods do not deserve equal footing to truth.
I am totally fine with bad faith actors making ad hominem attacks since it weakens their argument, but responses made in good faith should keep it civil to not erode their own argument. By the way, I can sympathize with you somewhat as this can essentially lead to sealioning[1] and that is extremely common elsewhere on the internet. But with strong moderation and flagging mechanics that actually work quickly on HN obvious sealioning can be quickly called out and quashed. I understand that some folks get their jollies by making low effort arguments and forcing others to put thought and time into crafting a well formulated counter argument - this will happen on the internet and it can be depressing to realize it after the fact but I think it's still worth it to try and craft well structured[2] responses when you can.
I don't actually disagree with this statement:
> Falsehoods do not deserve equal footing to truth.
and if I were running a talk-show called Hacker News then I wouldn't invite on folks with obviously racist viewpoints, but this is an internet forum where we can't pre-emptively screen participants. So I'd argue it's less about putting falsehoods on equal footing to the truth and more about making sure the truth of the truth isn't eroded by it coming out of a poor mouthpiece that biases opinions against it.
If someone wrote a comment that's obviously in error to you please do write a response highlighting what you think the problem was in a calm voice so that other people who might not notice the error can see it clearly spelled out. And do that because you're options are:
1. Respond in a sane tone
2. Respond with personal attacks or a poorly formed argument
3. Decline to respond
On that list is not the option to delete the comment you think it incorrect so, of the choices, I think #1 is by far the best option.
1. http://wondermark.com/1k62/ if you're unfamiliar with the term.
2. Well, except grammatically, I make no claims that my grammar is in any way well structured - sorry if it makes it hard to read!
The second major way in which this concept collapses is that HN has a dangerous addiction to labeling things ad-hominem attacks. If someone makes a horrific argument, and you say "that argument is horrific and leads to harm being done to others", you are in every case met with responses along the lines of "that's an ad-hominem attack" or "that's politics this space isn't about politics". HN posters time and time again fail to separate the argument being made from the person making them.
> this is a space where beginners do not belong
Not true at all. There's a lot of introductory material hitting the front page every single day here. If you ask a technical question there's usually someone VERY knowledgeable who will be more than happy to teach you some things and point you to further guidance. I often see two people disagreeing about a topic they both know WAY more about the topic than me. What am I supposed to do? Tell them their knowledge is unwelcoming to me? No way! A level-headed dialogue between them is about the most productive form of teaching I could hope for.
You don't just talk over people who know their shit as if you knew more about it. You present your knowledge (and lack thereof) and ask questions, maybe build an argument. If they're interested in continuing, they will engage in a similar way. I don't see what's so "hostile" about that.
> "that argument is horrific and leads to harm being done to others"
If you just say that and leave it at that, that doesn't mean anything. It's not an ad hominem, but it's not an argument either. If you provide an argument and evidence, you should be taken more seriously. I can tell you I've seen A LOT more ad hominem attacks being labeled as such than actual arguments. What commonly happens, though, is a commenter mixes both a good argument with an ad hominem (or some other fallacy), and then others focus on the fallacy and not the argument. Of course that's bad, but it's all the more reason to not be fallacious.
Oh and forcing them to marry a guy they had sex with, regardless of whether it was rape or not. As social engineering to force good behavior on others.
He was all polite and serious. And I still perceive him as the biggest threat to my safety and well being. And the most uncomfortable thing that was tolerated here.
No, being polite is not better and does not make it better. If I am expected to be perfectly nice to him in response, well this place sux sometimes.
You shouldn’t assume that every argument made against a particular solution to social injustice is an argument advocating for social injustice.
While there are some people who are just plain racist or bigoted or have certain religious views; and therefore believe that racial/gender/etc injustice is inevitable, many others are just arguing against a particular solution.
For example, not everyone agues against dialectical materialism because they want people to be poor. They just don’t think communism can work.
I also really disagree that tone is a minor and unimportant factor, keeping the discussion civil manages to open up the door to a lot more discussion between people who disagree strongly. One of the users I recognize on here I recognize not because we agree - but because usually when we're talking in a thread it's an interesting conversation despite a really deep philosophical disagreement.
That is deeply not the case, and if you or anyone finds examples of it, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. If people are being cruel and not getting moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Oh and we don't give a fuck about swearing.
The generalization you're making is so false and so mean that I would call it a slur, both of this community and of the people who work on it.
But all you can do is push the nastiness below a certain threshold of passive aggression. It's literally impossible to do more than that.
I've found it just a bit more unpleasant to post here with every few months which pass. Insults still get moderated and downvoted, sure, but bad-faith dismissals and pugnacious pedantry become incrementally more common, not to mention drive-by downvotes on neutral and factual posts which maybe signal some kind of tribal affiliation, no matter how weakly.
I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.
Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.
Here is an important observation I think I've made over the years:
All else being equal, the HN model (full names voluntary, IRL connection voluntary i.e only username and password, long lived profiles encouraged) has been better for interesting civil discussions.
Why?
Full name policies only encourage this explosive mix:
- People who don't realize the foolishness of commenting publicly using their full name on a controversial case.
- People with fake but real-looking accounts.
- People who realize it is stupid but does it anyway sometimes because even newspaper comments sections deserve some adult voices.
Very many of the people you'd want to hear from are silent because they don't want your name mixed in with the regulars in the comments there.
Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320284
It is wildly not the case that the median HN commenter who writes on stories related to economic inequality is biased against marginalized people.
This is a pretty clear instance of what Dan refers to as the "notice-dislike fallacy"; you've noticed people writing callous comments, because they rub you the wrong way (as they do me), but haven't noticed the countervailing comments, because they're boring (to you).
Philosophically, I would say HM is like a wealthy suburb. You don't see trash in the street. People mostly follow the law and are good neighbors. Everyone wants their neighborhood to be okay and are okay sharing/learning about gardening and home improvement from each other. Now: are some people disconnected from the what other people experience as the harsh reality somewhere else? Absolutely. This is the case everywhere. What you do when you see or hear someone with a completely different perspective is listen and try to understand what they are talking about. We all need to get better at this no matter where we are (work, store, hn, twitter, etc)
I've just deleted the longer part of this comment because we've had this discussion in private mail several times, but for the record: I think you're focussing too much on naked words, and ignore evil behaviour (like intentional misrepresentations of the other one's position) too much.
I'll concede that your job is hard and you're doing a mostly good job. I just think it could be better.
It certainly has its share of silliness, especially around the subjects of VC and Silicon Valley culture generally. And economics...
It's no surprise within the echo chamber things seem harmonious, but there's something really funny about seeing people from here thumb their noses down at Twitter.
If you follow the right people in tech on Twitter, their replies are pretty similar to HN, and it's a lot of the same people.
Crapping on Twitter while acting like HN is above it all is kind of like saying your favorite coffee shop is so much better than the entire City of New York.
you can be deeply offensive on hn if who you are offending is people outside of what hn considers to be its own audience. hn posters will defend the harm their software does to society all over town. people on this site care only about decorum; the syntax of kindness without the semantics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm biased of course, but I also see more of this place than anyone else does (at least I hope I am, since I get paid for it), and comments like yours do not reflect the community at all accurately. "People on this site care only about decorum" is a cheap shot, and—speaking of syntax without semantics—is a cliché at this point too. People in this community care about considerably more than that. ("Syntax without semantics" is a great phrase, though. Did you come up with that? I like it.)
The denunciatory generalization you're making seems to me an example of unkindness, and so a little ironic whilst denouncing others for unkindness. I don't like seeing anyone unjustly accused.
If you, or anyone, has a good idea about what we can do to make this place more kind, I'd love to hear it (as long as it doesn't reduce to "ban my ideological enemies", which turns out to be what a lot of people would prefer, but is not viable given the mandate of this site).
That's what the HN organizers think it is and want it to be, but I don't think it's an accurate reflection of how HN users actually behave. It's prescriptive, not descriptive.
> People in this community care about considerably more than that.
I've been here many years and that has not been my experience. I come here to look for updates on libraries and tools I use and to hear about new libraries and tools. In the years I have been here, I have found this to be the most nihilistic, false-equivocating social media site I have ever encountered. What I have witnessed all too often is that admissible HN opinion talk stops at "what makes a computer program well-constructed", and very rarely considers "how might computer programs cause harm to their users and to society". Often times when people say "hey maybe that use of technology is harmful to [group of people not well-repesented on HN]", that discussion is immediately downvoted into oblivion. When it comes to software criticism, that is, the well-reasoned consideration of how software affects society, HN gets an F. HN doesn't care. HN would look at a Java program for a police torture system and would say "it should be written in Haskell" instead of "maybe we shouldn't be building instruments of torture". Maybe a given individual user wouldn't, but that's how the votes would land.
> If you, or anyone, has a good idea about what we can do to make this place more kind, I'd love to hear it
Sure. Here's a few.
Remove all visible scores from the site entirely. The idea that a person is aware of points given to them for saying the correct thing incentivizes saying things that get points, not saying things that improve the discussion. I'm not saying that no system of tracking the success of comments should exist. I'm saying that currently, the mechanics of HN allow people to see their own karma and are rewarded for saying things within the HN zeitgeist with more karma. The karma system precludes the Overton window from shifting.
It's a discussion board. There should be no point reward for comments posted. The reward is the replies you get from others.
Experts and beginners are given an entirely equal footing, but beginners outnumber experts in every topic; that's what makes them experts. If all of the experts in a topic think one thing, and all the beginners think another thing, should the beginners always win because they are more numerous? Hmm.
One solution might be to implement something akin to pagerank, but on a topic level. E.g., if a thread is posted about Ants, a user that had participated in a lot of past discussions about Ants should have their upvotes/downvotes weighed more heavily. There are doubtless other solutions, and since I'm not in your codebase I'm not sure what solution is actually reasonable.
Separately, make posts a limited resource. The mechanics of this are, I imagine, proper difficult to get right. Very very difficult. Some ideas that would have to be tested: You can only post if you have a post token. You're awarded a post token every six hours, even when you're gone. You can hold a maximum of four post tokens. Add in some mechanic where users can cause other users to gain post tokens. Some concepts along that line: When you reply to someone, they are awarded a post token (or a portion of a post token). Upvotes grant either post tokens or portions of post tokens. If a user really loves a comment, they can give one of their own post tokens to the person that made that comment. Users in their first week are given only 1 post token a day.
Could you cite some specific HN submissions where you've observed this behavior? I honestly cannot recall a single one.
when you see a strawman point it out. people may not like it, you may get downvoted but... something about being the change you want to see.
for example: I routinely get down-voted every time I say something positive about cryptocurrencies. Should I stop telling people my opinion when the overall sentiment on HN is pretty negative when it comes to the likes of bitcoin and ETH?
people on this site care more than just decorum. sweeping generalizations like this rarely hold water.
I accept there are people who feel that an argument in defence of certain types of software is in bad faith, and an argument made deliberately to hurt and exclude others.
It’s not much of a leap, given that harm obviously exists to many in society, and software isn’t helping, or at least that some people get much more benefit from it than others.
However, not everyone believes that software harms people. Not everyone believes that that harm is deliberate. Not everyone believes that anything can be done, and even if they do it’s probable that they have differing ideas on what is to be done.
I get that when people see problems, and they see others ignoring those problems, or arguing with them, that they feel that those other are being callous, cruel and disrespectful. As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
I sympathise, but I can’t agree. There are so many solutions to the world’s problems and so few who agree on any of them. I can’t just assume that everyone who adopts a contrary position is deliberately being cruel, deliberately acting out of selfishness or deliberately acting to exclude and suppress other views.