Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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This looks like a case of the contrarian dynamic [1]. Dismissive comments tend to appear first, not because they represent the community, but because they're the fastest to write. Often there's a wave of such comments objecting to the OP, followed by a second wave objecting to the objections with some variation of "I can't believe how negative the comments here are". The irony is that they're driven by the same impulse—to make objections—they're just objecting to different things.

The second wave of objections tends (ironically!) to get upvoted to the top of the thread. Whether that's because people's minds are open to the creativity in the OP or because they enjoy disses of other people (i.e. the rest of the community) even more than they enjoy disses of someone's work, we can leave as an exercise to the reader.

This impulse governs the internet but it isn't the greatest thing on a site that values intellectual curiosity [2], because it's essentially reflexive: people see something that activates a previously existing grievance (be it battery-draining websites, bad internet comments, or what have you), which generates irritation and therefore energy to produce a post, but the post is actually litigating the generic grievance rather than responding to anything interestingly new. To get the latter, one has to perceive the new information and digest it in a way that leads to a new response—that is, one must be reflective rather than reflexive [3]—and that is a much slower process. But we definitely want reflective comments here.

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

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Edit: I'd like to add a response specifically to this:

> HN has become one of the worst places to have one's work demonstrated at

... by pointing out that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29786132 is currently at #1 on the front page. It's very much a question of which examples you notice and how much weight you put on them.

Idk. Feels like HN has been veering this direction over the last year or so, and the comments are becoming markedly negative, critical comments about everything. I'm not sure it's a problem HN can solve at all. But I definitely agree with GP.

The post the other day about the individual leaving the C++ community (something like "Wrapping Up 2021") was an absolute nightmare thread basically dismissing the author as mentally unsound without really addressing the content.

Every post about nuclear causes a massive fight without even addressing the contents.

Every post about COVID is a shitshow.

Anything having to do with programming languages devolves into a war.

Not every thread is like this of course but a lot of these harmless, cool submissions often get completely wrecked by nay-sayers and just generally unpleasant people anymore, it seems.

I'm not sure what the solution is but I've definitely been discouraged from coming around as much as I used to.

HN has been like that for a long, long time. You are probably only now starting to notice.

I've had "automatic top dismissive HN comment" on my list of project ideas for at least 7 years ^_^

FWIW, I actually feel like it used to be much worse than it is today. At one point, it felt like it was practically a meme that the top post would be someone poo-pooing whatever was being discussed / shared. Maybe I've just become purposefully blind to the negativity or something, but I feel like I see a lot more interesting comments at the top these days.

I sure hope so. Maybe the coolest thing we've learned about moderation in the last 5 years or so is that downweighting top subthreads when they fall into certain categories (e.g. generic, indignant, predictable, meta) is one of the highest-leverage things we can do for thread quality.

It's not that those comments are necessarily bad—it's rather that those categories of comment reliably attract lots of upvotes for reasons other than intellectual curiosity. It's not in HN's interest to have them at the top of a thread, because their tendency to attract upvotes creates a feedback loop that the system can't break itself out of. They just sit there, accruing ever more mass and choking out more interesting conversation.

The solution is to have moderation (and to some extent software) carry out a countervailing function. That's basically what moderation is for, anyhow—to jig the system out of its default failure modes.

I was just writing about this here, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29788303

(Someone observant might ask why we didn't do that to this very subthread, i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781971, which is still at the top of the page. The answer is that the rest of the thread wasn't that great in this case. Had there been lots of curious conversation going on elsewhere on the page, we'd have downweighted the generic/meta subthread. It's still helpful to let those run sometimes, though, as a kind of valve for community self-reflection—we just want that to happen in places where it isn't choking out something better.)

I think we all need to be cautious about such perceptions. It's easy to see this sort of thing and derive a general conclusion of deterioration, but people have been making such pronouncements about HN for well over a decade—basically since the beginning of the site.

The way these perceptions tend to work is that we notice a few data points and then jump to a general conclusion. Remember the so-called primitive tribe that supposedly could only count "1, 2, 3, many"? It seems that's basically how all our minds work. The trouble is that a stochastic data feed like HN inevitably generates as many such sequences as you could ask for. It's really the mind that decides which sequence to pick out and deem representative. This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

(Edit: for example, look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781019 and how positive the top comments are at the moment. The stochastic feed generates lots of those datapoints too!)

What's worse, those feelings have consequences, since they lead to a "why bother" sense of no longer needing to take care of this place or do one's part of build up the culture. If it's all just a shitshow, why not just add more shit? everyone else is, right? Well, no—that's not true at all.

This is not to say that the problems you mention aren't real. They are, and it's important to work on them, and we spend a lot of time trying to persuade people to work on them. It's in everyone's interest to do that, so we can achieve at least part of what we all want here, which is to have an interesting internet forum that doesn't suck.

We should also all be cautious about seeing other people as the problem ("completely wrecked by nay-sayers and just generally unpleasant people anymore, it seems"). My experience is that if we look honestly at ourselves we find all the same things to be true there too, and that's a more productive place to work.

Thanks. I, for one, will evaluate my own dyspepsia.

In fairness, is there anything new here that wasn't a screensaver in 1996, except repacked as a script include to be a background on what would surely be a terrible website? I totally commend the effort they put into the screen saver controls (more polygons, more lines) but, is this what Flying Toasters died for? I was gonna say Tom Dowdy but that's just rude. People are probably right to slam this, and that's a considered decision and not driven by irritation or a generic grievance. It's so mundane I wouldn't have given it a second of thought or written a word about it if it wasn't here, but it's here.

It wouldn't be a terrible website. These animations are beautiful, some just need some power on the client. Like any font, color scheme, layout, effect ... awesome if properly implemented.

mmmmmm... what kind of website would you put this moving background to?

What if we force people to wait before they can comment?

Like, what if we make them wait forever? That would be awesome. FWIW as much as I hate to accept dang's logic of the overcoming anti-anti-ness of every thread, it does seem true, so why not just let the thing play out...?

> why not just let the thing play out

I think because it could kill the thread, or demotivate the OP. People reflexively rejecting my contributions would demotivate me.

Naw. You have to just gird yourself for the hit. It's true, what he says. The first wave is brutal. Nothing _anyone_ says should demotivate _you_. Your motivation has to come from your own inside vision. Having people talk shit about it is actually a sign that you're doing something right, because they're jealous. The only time you should worry is if they say nothing at all.. =\

We tend to be wary of technical solutions to human problems. I fear the unintended side effects.

HN is rife with "technical solutions to human problems" already, which is why new users can't downvote posts. It improved Stack Overflow, it would work here.

This "don't let new users comment right away" idea is a frequent suggestion on HN, and one obvious problem with it is that some of the best threads on HN happen when the subject of a story posted here jumps into an HN thread for the first time to answer questions. Case in point: Nick Kokonas from Alinea Group has an account on HN ('nkokonas) because Tock, the restaurant booking company started out of Alinea, got mentioned here.

Delaying comments from new users would be of dubious benefit to the community (many of the worst comments on HN are not as a rule coming from fresh new accounts, and that safeguard is easily gamed), and what we'd lose in exchange is pretty clear. It hasn't been adopted here for a reason, not just out of laziness.

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