It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
> all JS related discourse moved to Twitter
The jokes write themselves at this point :v
I notice it too on H.N.; it would not surprise me if 75% of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more extreme.
The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment, dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone to impulsive angry decisions than the latter.
I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading.
Could we try "influence" boosting posts? Some kind of combination of "this person has X karma, commented on Y post, that yields the same result as upvoting in Z fashion" and normal upvotes?
I don't know that this would solve the above described problem (and it will likely introduce other issues in the social fabric of HN), but it might be interesting to see the outcome...
So say we have a these posts:
A
- B
- C
- - D
E
- F
- - G
- H
E
- H
- - I
- F
- - G
A
- B
- C
- - D
This results into posts whose children have the most activity statistically are more visible, but if an inactive post be replied to, it will briefly be at the top and more visible, and any new post will also start at the top.
Essentially, it is the treed evolution of the traditional linear thread system where threads are simply ranked based on most recent replied. DeviantArt uses this system and it's boards do not feel as though they be an echo-chamber and are full of people challenging each other's views and trees seem to be more balanced out rather than al replies being under the top post, which became the most visible due to upvotes such that others are ignored completely.
It indeed resulted in some threads being alive for months, but that was only because the discussion in it was healthy and interesting, and new input on the same subject continued to be had.
They typically also do not have an archival system and often præfer that one revive an old thread that was dead for years rather than make a new one on the same subject, as in doing so all the old content becomes visible again for a fresh perspective.
I agree that often it is quite interesting to receive new replies with new input to a thread that died off three years ago.
I am not seeing these fora being gamed at all: in order to game them, one must provide content interesting enough to draw replies. — Visibility is purely a function of the number of replies, not of agreement.
It's hard to convince world to move from this thing, but it promotes some kind of addiction, an ability to manipulate
web 2.0 is kinda mistake when it comes to news and stuff.
Virtually all websites that have them such as Reddit, Facebook, and Youtube are known to promote isolated echo chambers and extremist views, but that's what they attract so it's not going away or they would loose their userbase.
I do not believe that Reddit was started with this mentality, but at it's start wanted to promote decentralized leadership, but by now they must have realized this and their current policy seems to be to capitalize on their current userbase, which is known to favor and enjoy echo chambers. — H.N. is to a certain extent spared from this because it only has one page rather than attempting to divide itself into semi-isolated communities, but it's still quite obvious in distinct threads that one can be upvoted for saying the same thing one can be downvoted for in another thread, and that in general threads are filled with agreement.
Ironically, in this very comment train, people are mostly agreeing with each other that the voting system creates too much of an echo-chamber.
There are a lot of small Reddits that are off the beaten path. It's a diverse ecosystem and you aren't required to participate in the larger subs which may well be "an echo chamber" because they were started for a specific interest and you either are into that or not and if not, it's not really the place for you.
I don't think you need to be fighty and actively oppose every single "popular" opinion to provide a different take. I say a lot of unpopular things on HN and, so far, they haven't banned me.
I'm older than I used to be. I'm more inclined to pick my battles and I have a different understanding of how to introduce other ideas. If you do it right, you can get taken seriously sometimes though it's a slow process and not for the innately impatient or the folks looking to grab karma or the folks wanting to make a splash.
They certainly don't ban for opinions that would be upvoted in another thread, but one will be downvoted, and H.N. seems to limit posts to five per day to any user with any recent downvoted comment.
Just yet I was limited because a single one of my comments received a downvote, but that comment has now been upvoted again, so I am no longer limited. — This does not seem like a particularly good system to me and scares people from saying anything that goes against the mentality in any particular thread.
> I'm older than I used to be. I'm more inclined to pick my battles and I have a different understanding of how to introduce other ideas. If you do it right, you can get taken seriously sometimes though it's a slow process and not for the innately impatient or the folks looking to grab karma or the folks wanting to make a splash.
There are certainly strategies and diplomatic tactics that can aid one, but I do not feel one should need to do so if absence of such would leave one upvoted in another thread depending on what way they mentality of the thread swings, which is of course vicious, since this system further diminishes dissent.
I seriously doubt this is true.
I generally stand by my right to my opinion. I have worked at figuring out how to do that without making every single comment a hill to die on. It's taken time and effort. I used to be a walking, talking train wreck waiting to happen and I still have personal challenges to being me and not being overwhelming amounts of drama for existing.
I don't like drama. Accusations that I say and do things for dramatic effect or similar are inaccurate understandings of who I am and what motivates me.
I view HN as an opportunity for growth. I have had the experience of feeling like "a big fish in a little pond" and I generally gate it.
I enjoyed being here at first because I was a little fish in a big pond and was free to just enjoy the opportunity to engage in meaty discussion. And then that turned into drama and I began trying to figure out why and yadda.
These days, it's less drama than it used to be. I'm still trying to find my sea legs here with no effective role models, but I still prefer to see it first and foremost as an opportunity to engage in meaty discussion and to whatever degree it still serves that function, it's life enhancing.
Upvotes, downvotes, etc are all niggling details. The opportunity to enrichment my mind without paying tuition or leaving home etc is extremely valuable to me and has caused me to be thick skinned about a great many things for nearly twelve years now.
Why do you think this is not true? This is something that is quite often discussed and just happened to me.
One comment I made today had one downvote, and I was met with the dreaded “You're positing too much” message, but shortly thereafter someone else upvoted it again to bring it to 1 again, and I could post freely again.
Your opinion seems to be conditioned upon that this is false, but even if it were false, votes simply have a habit of scaring people into saying something others might disagree with. And even Reddit in a less extreme fashion limits one to 1 post per hour on any subreddit where one has negative total karma, which is certainly less extreme, but one can very easily receive negative karma for simply disagreeing and being well within Reddit's rules in how one phrases such disagreement. Simply going to say, r/movies and saying “I disagree, I personally did not like this film at all and thought it was overrated.” too much is all it takes to be limited to one post per hour on r/movies.
> Upvotes, downvotes, etc are all niggling details. The opportunity to enrichment my mind without paying tuition or leaving home etc is extremely valuable to me and has caused me to be thick skinned about a great many things for nearly twelve years now.
Even if these websites did not limit one in any way for being downvoted, they still give visibility based on upvotes, and the psychological effect on others is real, which leads to such places slowly but surely becoming a monoculture which attract more and more users that simply desire an echo-chamber which will lead to more and more users that do not like it, or simply desire a different ech-chamber, to leave.
A real problem I have with r/manga on Reddit is that really only one specific genre is read and discussed there, because all threads about anything else obtain no visibility due to the voting system, the genre is controversial in most other paces, but anyone who criticizes it there is downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622148
I've been here a lot of years. I was rate limited at one time. I'm not currently.
I framed that very carefully as my opinion and not an assertion of fact.
It's possible to be Dutch and strongly opinionated on HN and in good standing (not rate limited).
Maybe you are right and I'm wrong. It ain't no big thing. I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm just making conversation and trying to be helpful, which is something of a bad habit of mine and habits die hard.
(Shrug)
You have a good day.
Exactly why I read the comments before I click the link to the article, and why I'll read the article (assuming the comments give me a valid reason to) before commenting about it. ;)
Controversy with the angular team or high profile developers — why?
I’ve been off social media for years but I’d hear about it second hand from coworkers.
It does mean occasionally unfollowing someone who has otherwise great content, but often it’s retweeted by someone else I do follow, and anyway - it’s worth the cost.
The more accessible the language, the more politicised.
It would reach the point where not trying very hard to bypass the filters would make you liable somehow: "you, a JavaScript developer, should've tried harder to bypass the politics filters when you posted your pro LGBT tweet. What are you, an anti-Semite?"
Google Plus got this right in reverse, in that you could organize your people into circles based on your interests and then you could choose which circles to share any post with. If they had done it so that I could subscribe to you for either everything or just things about VueJS, than they would probably still be around.
In fact if somebody is trying to start a Twitter competitor, there is a space for a copy where you must select at least one tag for your posts and where I can then subscribe to intersections of tags and people.
It doesn't even have to be anything about politics, but Cpervia tweets about cryptography and FreeBSD. I have no interest in the latter, but I have to skip over the tweets that he makes because there is no good filter for them.
Now suppose It was somebody posting about compilers and upsetting pictures of aborted fetuses. In theory I could still skip those, but it would be far harder.
Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, & retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead, never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus, something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing.
I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I still think the network of people model is incredible. But also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years. There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the defining problem was that there was much less interesting stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works, way more really good libraries. And there's way way less inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas.
JS left college, got a job, got boring.