Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzbra | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.

My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.

I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.

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> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case.

The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely.

Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial.

Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.

Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions. And I would probably miss the mythical PG if he showed up in a thread. I don't know his handle anyways. Sometimes I'm made aware that a relevant "celebrity" is present in the thread but that's when people act obviously star struck like "oh thank you for that seminal paper back in '15".

So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k.

Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't know what that signifies and I do not want to know.

> Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions.

OK, let's call it a discussion forum instead. I'd still argue that is a subcategory of social media. The general shape of these things has been around since at least the BBS days.

These terms, however, don't seem to capture the difference I posited between identity-based and topic-based social-discussion-service thingies, and I don't think there exists a standard terminology to make this distinction at this time.

My reasoning is that the socialness here doesn't affect my experience in any way (that I'm aware of). "Liking" stuff by upvoting doesn't mean _I_ get more of "Content X" on my frontpage, it just means everyone gets more of this content. And I can't friend/follow people so my frontpage can't be affected by a secret algorithm that shows me more content of what my clique is currently raging about.

So I both agree with you and disagree with you. Our terminology is lacking for sure. And I agree that this is _more_ of a discussion forum, but not just simply that. But I wouldn't classify a discussion forum as a subcategory of social media. Maybe the other way around.

It isn't? It seems to me like it is. We have groups of people discussing issues in these online forums. Isn't that social media? And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users, we do have the upvote/downvote mechanics for posts and comment count per post. Admittedly I quickly scan all posts for these numbers to help me decide where to click.

So it seems like what can make social media a positive or a negative in a person's life is pretty complex. What each person brings to their interactions with the media varies a lot and the ways mechanics are used in the different sites and apps vary a lot.

So it seems like a lot social is going on here on this site. The social group here is responsible for all of the content, I think? Right? It wouldn't be the same if it were posts selected by an elite group and we were just allowed to comment on them.

So I think the article's suggestion to "quit social media" is too simplistic and lacks the nuance it would need to be helpful advice.

> And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users

It is possible to see someone's profile, posts and comments. I wonder how many users do this to form opinions about others.

I clicked on you. Karma 918. I have absolutely no reference of whether this is "good" or "bad" because I never do do this to form opinions about others here. =D The only thing I know is that this comment (28626404) made me think about something and then type something as a reply and that could be good news or bad news, who can say?

> nothing social going on here, just [..] discussions

Discussions are social interactions. HNs format just makes them very shallow because they start from zero each time.

There are different kind of social medias, like there are 50 shades of gray. Any media that have network effects and a positive feedback loop is a social media. I'd say HN is one of the healthier social medias.

>some usernames are green

New user.

>I do not want to know

Too bad :)

the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.

but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.

the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.

and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).

>but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.

Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks down whenever anyone needs it most.

If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's upvoted. But few people really need help answering those questions.

If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific question requiring expertise you will get the same naive surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to oblivion by the people who know just enough to be dangerous.

If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking about answering your hard question and getting downvoted for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy question.

Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF they're talking about contributes minimally if at all.

Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I described above.

> but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions

This has the effect, however, of making it clear that the forum itself is mostly racist, rather than masquerading as not being that.

> the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.

> but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.

> the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.

The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to

- stop frequenting racist forums,

- if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable)

isn't it?

I was lurking here last year during the racial justice protests, and before that during the James Damore controversy. I still saw casually racist/sexist posts get upvoted fairly often. A discriminatory argument can be stated well and seem reasonable on its face, but still be discriminatory. It's the kind that moderators here are too lenient against and won't really want to delete as long as there isn't a pattern of it, because it could just be an well-meaning person suffering an error in judgement. I don't know how our world is supposed to move past that, or if it's even possible. I would have probably been a little less disappointed in the state of humanity if some of those posts had been flagged, because there were a lot of them across the whole internet.

Is being racist against the law? Why would someone tell law enforcement?

Racism can be considered hate speech, which is illegal in places with no right to free speech such as most countries in Europe.

For example: https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime

Incitement to racial hatred, done publicly, can be held illegal if it crosses certain thresholds. I don’t think this means Europeans don’t have free speech.

Consider both:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta...

I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're correct here.

How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to submit "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." That reads to me like an identity-based forum.

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

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are primarily networks of personal (or corporate) identities. The centerpiece is the user. HN and Reddit are primarily ranked lists of interesting URLs. I don’t know one user from another, apart from a handful of prolific users, and half the accounts start with “throwaway”. (It wasn’t so in the beginning, but even then there was no reason to go to someone’s user page.)

I think you are misunderstanding my use of the the phrase "identity-based". What I mean is that the primary entity around which conversation and content revolve on HN is the topic (from URLs or questions), not the individual user's identity.

Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.

Hacker News IS harmful because there's no established standard for what should receive an upvote or downvote (>500 karma can downvote). This leads to people just upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they don't. It's all groupthink. Alternatively, all well thought out comments should receive upvotes (despite personal cognitive dissonance) and inflammatory, trolling, or irrelevant comments should be downvoted. That would support diversity of thought and ideas.

I'm confused, isn't established standard too nebulous a concept to be "needs to be upvoted", there is just too diverse of an opinion on what what is a "well thought out comment" and one person's "inflammatory" comment could be another person's "well thought out comment", the cognitive dissonance is upstream of all the voting patterns and there can be no set standard except organic, binary up/down voting. I think the ideal is that on average the local maxima (upvote groupthink) eventually is balanced by local minima (downvote groupthink)...

but I would like to see how an established standard could be set for what should or shouldn't be upvoted?

You're right. I was just offering one scenario where it might work, but even then there are people that think they are the sole arbiter of moral thought and speech they disagree with is akin to violence, etc. I didn't want to get into all that. Sufficed to say upvote/downvote is not a great system.

The was the original "reddiquette" from back in the day. But as you know, it's pretty hard to align incentives, human nature, and that ideal.

The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)

Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.

[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful

> The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)

> Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice.

Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally?

I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there.

My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I cannot finish it ever.

Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people stopped posting what they did and started just posting motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).

I would argue that there is something about the physical interaction that is scrolling. you can scroll at the same time you are reading--this makes the text more of a moving target, and then your "reading" becomes mere scanning. it's hard to shift out of that shallow level of engagement once your there because it's by definition a distracted state, you're trying to just get the gist of this and move onto the next thing you just know is out there which you will actually want to read.

thank you for the link! I'm happy to see other people making this point--raises my hopes some future UX designers will bring it to the platforms someday.

I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes, upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them.

Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy).

Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward.

(Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.)

I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.

In my opinion the main differentiator is whether or not the platform's userbase is more or less like the population at large.

This is important for two reasons:

- If a website is full of normies - sorry for the word, feel free to suggest a more appropriate one - then mainstream cultural references, information sources, opinions and so on are bound to dominate the scene. This makes the community far less interesting, because mainstream sources necessarly aim for the lowest common denominator. Those communities also look very similar to each other, as though they were TV channels.

- The community is prone to segment itself along the same lines that divide us in real life. Language, politics, education, etc.

As harsh as it sounds, I have come to think that being exclusionary in at least some dimensions is necessary for any kind of community to be interesting.

> I think HN is less affected by karma farming

A very underrated feature that I have come to really like is how positive scores are hidden for everyone except yourself. That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal (I might disagree with the signal but it's clear that other commenters really disliked that), but on the other hand not knowing whether a comment sits at +1 or +20 forces you to think about what the comment is actually saying.

>That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal

Knowing that something is a) spot on but ideologically inconvenient b) wrong doesn't really help if you don't have the subject matter familiarity to already know what's right and wrong. It just reduces your options to a binary choice.

"ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from "incoherent nonsense" if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who disagrees with said ideology.

It's typical of people knee-deep in weird politics to fall into "with us or against us" type of thinking.

> "ideologically inconvenient" is indistinguishable from "incoherent nonsense" if

No it's not. Counterexample (which is inconvenient to a wide variety of different ideologies):

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H. L. Mencken

It does a good job of saying, "That comment isn't a good fit for this community." You may decide you don't care; you may decide to adjust your tone or approach; you may decide HN isn't for you. But it provides useful information.

> the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes

That's an interesting point. The ThinkPad subreddit has been taken over by "Thinkstagram" photos. People seem to love them, based on the votes, but I'd hoped for a place to have actual discussion of ThinkPads.

Of course even being text-only may not help. I used to be an active participant in the old ThinkPad mailing list. A small group but very knowledgeable people with interesting discussion of ThinkPad issues.

But then one person turned the list into his own tech support channel. He would ask things like "How do I do X in Microsoft Word?" People would tell him "That's not really a ThinkPad question." And he would say "Yeah, but you are the smartest people I know, so I figured I would ask here."

After that went on for a while I kind of lost interest in the mailing list and unsubscribed.

I agree that Upvote based sites and engagement based sites usually produce different dynamics, and that upvote places become echo chambers and that engagement based sites tend toward controversial content for exactly those reasons. I think the frustration comes from the fact that many highly specific communities use upvotes as a proxy for correctness. It's one thing to write off Twitter's lack of quality as a facet of its highly general audience, bit it's another one when highly technical (not necessarily computing) forums full of expert hobbyists and practitioners succumb to groupthink. And if you think HN is immune to karma games and groupthink, just look at any thread about $CURRENT_HYPE programming language.

I'm not sure it's anything mechanical. Facebook is a wretched hive of scum and villainy for sociocultural inertial reasons. You may as well ask why Detroit is a crappier place to live than Madison. Facebook succumbed early on to echo chambers, disinformation campaigns, and marketing of snake oil and pyramid schemes. Hacker News set rules and followed them consistently, moderating the discussion in accordance with those rules.

Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific communities full of great information and productive discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface technology. The difference is culture.

If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of guiding principles other than engagement. The purely algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it doesn't make the site worse.

Facebook was PAID to carry disinformation campaigns. It's just another sort of advertising to a certain way of thinking, and they probably figured they were acting like a common carrier and waited to see if counter-disinformation campaigns coughed up any money to retort.

I don't think it was happy times at Facebook when they figured out what they'd collaborated with, but it put them on the defensive. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't really wired to play defense. He is not a natural diplomat.

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm

Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes.

Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise.

Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.

>>Is it the like/upvote mechanism?

Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm

The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media

Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation

I would place more emphasis on the downvote button causing most of the harm. If you post something, and it doesn't get up-voted, that's less of a hit than posting something and having it be actively downvoted. One is a statement that no one found it interesting enough to vote up, the other is a way of saying that kind of content isn't desired here. I'm guessing it's the downvotes that cause people to leave, leaving an echo chamber in their wake.

Upvotes can lead to karma farming, and the need to see that number of likes go up can be a problem I admit. I just think the echo chamber effect is a worse problem. We've all dealt with fragile egos and boisterous idiots before.

I miss the days where you weren't shunned for wrong-think, just argued with constantly if your opinion differed from the norm.

Twitter doesn't have upvotes and I find it to be more addicting than sites with a upvote/downvote system. In a way, downvoting is still getting a response from a person, maybe that is why

The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).

Why does HN display a number next to a submission ?

I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications that are of interest - and a relatively small number.

Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.

>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.

I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour.

It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement.

Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it.

I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.

I feel the same is true for me as well. I wasn't aware of this extension though. For now, what I do is if I see myself getting addicted to an app, I just uninstall/block it for 2-3 weeks. After that even if I install it back, the craving is mostly gone. It does come back though in 3-4 months. Facebook was boring for me so never used it again after uninstalling.

> I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

I believe it's advertisement-driven content curation. You're being fooled into thinking that your feed follows your interest, but instead it optimizes around stealing your attention. The feeds control you, not the other way around.

> Is it the like/upvote mechanism?

Yes it is, HN pays people to keep things at bay. But that doesn't scale

It scales, just not at the price companies are willing to pay. Or, put another way, the main social media platforms aren't spending enough to ensure their service works well.

This guy is making a lot of inferences based on his own experience and I think he may want to consider hiring a therapist to work through these issues:

"In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain."

If you recognize the pitfalls/dangers of social media, I think you can utilize the platforms if you are mindful without falling for those pitfalls/dangers. Pitfalls such as creating "echo chambers" and "bubbles" with who you follow and further falling for emotional hooks ( Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 )

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.

the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us.

"oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"

exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps.

although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation.

[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It seems to detract from the information you get out of other comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments are most helpful.

Good points. On the other hand, I couldn’t fit your whole comment on one screen. I did scroll down to tap reply. Please stand by while I go recover.

lack of infinite scroll != no scrolling.

your post didn't specify infinite... ;)

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