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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. Even (group) email can become quite toxic if people don't convey their emotion well.

I have been on HN for 15 years, I have spent far too much time on this site. Eventually you learn which topics will be "toxic" and avoid them (if you want to). To some extent it just maturity (or lack there of) but I actually think HN is far less toxic outside of some specific topics than other sites.

The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides. I'm certainly still guilty of getting drawn in at times, especially when I feel I have a horse in the race. There is always insightful comments in these threads too.

Fortunately HN is designed to detect topics that are getting out of hand (far more comments than up votes) and they drop of the homepage quickly massively reducing the exposure. Exactly where this thread is already going.

I think the best decision HN made was not breaking the site into categories or "Sub-HNs" where specific toxic topics can grow and mutate, everything is forced though the front page ensuring a level of self moderation.

After 15 years on the site I have no intention of leaving it.

View on HN

I'm a very sparing user of social media, but after work I do love to play games. I play games with people I know IRL as well as a litany of people I've never met - true to my old 90's and 00's gamer days. Now, there's Discord.

I was pretty skeptical the first time people implored me to join a Discord server, but I've found some communities are very dope. I've discovered that managing peoples behavior online is like trying to herd sheep in a straight line. The flock always goes forward, that much is constant. There are sheep on the left and on the right side of the herd that push the herd onto a new trajectory, a lot of the time I don't think they even know what they're doing, but if you take a step back you can watch it occur in real-time. A leader, who likely doesn't know they're a leader, starts acting in a certain way, which causes the shift. Then another leader clashes with that leader by proxy, which is what I describe as the other side of the herd. These bounding behaviors almost never keep the flock constrained, they cause the flock to split.

These leaders are disposable though. They're placeholders for culture, language, collections of experience, values, etc that people identify with. It takes having conversations with troublemakers and making their effects known in plain language. Some people will get it, moderate their behavior despite their culture, language, collections of experience, values etc and some won't. Those who won't will either leave on their own or get banned.

Health, specifically diet/exercise, are also on this list of topics that typically get pretty toxic in my mind. Where the volume of voice outweigh the experts in the crowd.

> I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation.

I believe the reason is that epistemology (generally: theory of knowledge, seeking/determining what is actually(!) True) is not just hard, but it goes counter to the natural workings of the human mind. If the topic of a thread is a psychology paper dealing with human perception, bias, this sort of thing (an abstract discussion of the phenomenon), few people have difficulty realizing and acknowledging that this is a fundamental problem, in/with reality. However, if the topic of discussion is an object level matter, particularly culture war issues (but even technical ones, as the author notes), the mind seems to run in a different mode - gone[1] is the knowledge that the mind is subject to imperfect thinking, replaced by ~"perception is reality". And, one's intuition might suggest that intelligent people would be less prone to this problem, but substantial evidence[2] suggests that this is not only not necessarily true, but that intelligence exacerbates the problem (if one is usually more often correct than others, it is perfectly reasonable that their default confidence level in being correct would increase).

What I think is also interesting: it seems to me that this one fundamental idea could be one of the main root cause problems with human interaction on the internet (or, in general, really), a topic most people seem to be very interested in - but oddly, these same people almost without exception (in my experience) have zero (or less than) interest in identifying plausible root causes of the problem and contemplating/brainstorming solutions - the exact opposite of what one's intuition might predict. I have yet to encounter a single human being that is even marginally seriously interested in this idea (and many(!) who recoil from it), and I have talked to hundreds of people about it, often in meetups and other places where the general problem with people getting along, fake news, etc is literally the sole topic of conversation.

I am not optimistic that humanity can solve a problem that their mind does not grant them access to (assuming my theory has some truth to it).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

[2] A word that causes tremendous discord when humans are discussing object level matters

There are four ways in which people disagree. First is just miscommunication which is easily clarified. Second is working from a different set of facts. Third is same facts, different interpretation. Lastly is same facts, same interpretation, different principles. Discourse online straddles the four, with an unhealthy amount of ego and stubborness thrown in for good (bad) measure. Without a good way to get people on the same page first, aka people don't even read the linked article before commenting (tbc, guilty of that myself), there's zero real hope of getting people interested in epistemology and why we get it so wrong. And who could blame them? Examining why you believe something central to your identity threatens it and is very uncomfortable, and most people simply aren't here for that.

> There are four ways in which people disagree.

This itself is an epistemological matter.

You've listed a perfectly reasonable high level summary of some of the problems....but is this summary actually true, comprehensively? For example: "There are four cities in China" is also a true statement.

There's one fundamental thing most everyone overlooks when engaging in examination of reality: you're not actually dealing with reality, but rather a sophisticated and invisible model of it - and it is because of this (fundamentally, with massive amounts of additional nuanced details) that I believe at least some decent background in the fundamentals of epistemology (plus: logic, linguistics, semantics, psychology, meditation/mindfulness, etc) are required for humanity to get a handle on this out of control bus we're all riding in.

And the scariest part to me: not only is there no serious initiative underway or under discussion approaching the problem from this perspective (unless I've somehow not encountered it in my searching), rare is the individual who is not opposed to the validity of the notion. As crazy as it sounds, I truly believe there is something hard wired in the human mind cutting off our access to such ideas - it seems not possible for people to even consider it.

This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.

Ehhh...

I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive.

I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern:

Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted.

Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views.

This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding.

While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum.

Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity.

I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.

I am not aware of another forum in today's Internet that has discussion quality (or moderation quality for that matter) even comparable to HN.

I listed a few in the first paragraph, and a few relatively inactive ones near the bottom for a more slow-paced conversation.

He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion.

It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel.

Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.

It's hard to be very academic when discussions are as massive and short-lived as on HN. I think of Lobsters as a lot more academic than HN, and the fact that so very few people have posting privileges there is clearly a part of that.

I've read the lobste.rs moderation log for a while and i think its a bad platform. pushcx bans first and considers second, there were several times users complained about it in the irc channel.

I remember the time when the poster of the (at that moment) no. 1 post got banned for self-promotion, because it was a link to their own blog.

The dataswamp domain ban also was a disgrace that looked like pushcx had no skin and a bad day.

Oh, I thought it was just me - I was looking at the moderation log and thought to myself "is it just me, or is pushcx being awfully aggressive with the banhammer? nah, I probably just aren't seeing the really awful posts..."

Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...

> Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...

That's like praising someone who threw out the baby with the bathwater to give him credit on an outstanding work filtering water of any residue.

Knowing it is likely non-viable, in the same way "pass this quiz to demonstrate familiarity with the issues on which you are about to vote" is non-viable,

I wonder if there are forums which have formalized (rather than consensual implicit) proof-of-read friction in front of contribution to a discussion...

Why am I suddenly envisioning a humanities/chattering-class distributed proof-of-comprehension blockchain, in which miners compete to consume and compelling demonstrate relatively dispassionate comprehension of successive argumentation in a domain not readily reducible to "data."

Mostly kidding unless you are interested in being seed round DMs open

You don't need a blockchain for that.

https://xkcd.com/810/

If you could write up a "whitepaper" a couple of pages long and it was semi-coherent, I'm sure you could get some web3 vc to bite. Or form a DAO around it.

Might never actually be a viable concept, but that needn't stop you in this environment!

I think such an idea is viable....my main issue (as someone who can't program himself out of a paper bag) is getting not just funding, but non-silicon-valley funding, from someone I can also trust.

User comment voting has many more downsides than upsides. Pretty much every forum should have abandoned it years ago, but apparently it's never going away.

It really depends. If you say a facebook employee should quit because their company is toxic, you'll have dang on you in no time. Talk about killing homeless people as a solution to homelessness in SF? No problem.

The moderation here is setup to avoid personal attacks, snark, and to stop people from shitting on YC companies, but for the most part, a lot of the most toxic parts of the internet are just as bad here (or worse) than other parts of the internet.

Did that "killing homeless people" comment actually happen (and wasn't made dead in short order) or were you using hyperbole to make a point?

Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but more along the lines of "the most effective way of dealing with the homeless, of course, would be to kill them, but that's not politically acceptable..."

At the time I had seen it, which was hours after the topic was posted, it wasn't voted down.

> Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but (...)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and given that it only took a reply to water down the initial bombastic claim, unless you support your claims with concrete proof I'll have to write off your claim as hyperbolic misrepresentations.

It's not watered down. It's a person nonchalantly talking about killing homeless people as a viable solution to homelessness. The way you've edited my reply completely misrepresents what I said, to make it look like I've somehow changed the meaning. I followed up to give more specific language, not to change the meaning.

This kind of comment isn't out of the ordinary on this site, so I'm not going to spend a few hours tracking down the specific post to prove it. Just wait for a similar topic, and you'll see similar posts.

I'd guess such a comment to be made satirically (in the vein of 'a modest proposal'), especially given the context you added, but I could see why this would be disturbing.

> It's a person nonchalantly talking about killing homeless people as a viable solution to homelessness.

Do you have a link or not? You're running in circles about he-said-she-said, but the only concrete info you shown so far boils down to your own personal extraordinary words you're trying to pin on some random person.

I mean, how can anyone tell whether you're making everything up or not?

Don't you have a single link to show for?

Yes, if you want to say something reprehensible it’s fine as long as you say it in a long-winded and impartial-sounding fashion involving lots of “logic” and “objectivity” à la Slate Star Codex.

Not sure if anyone will appreciate this sketch but it's too relevant to pass up:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

This does not match my experience here. Can you back that claim a bit?

> Talk about killing homeless people as a solution to homelessness in SF? No problem.

That's of course not true at all. If you're talking about a specific post, can we please see the link?

Btw, moderation here is not set up to "stop people from shitting on YC companies", but exactly the opposite. That is literally the first rule of HN moderation: we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC co is the story. It was the first thing PG explained to me when he was teaching me how to moderate (he was blurting it at me before I'd even had a chance to grab a chair), and it's the first thing I've taught to others.

Lots of past explanation if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've been on lobste.rs for a long time and I'm not a fan. Lobste.rs has IMO been progressively getting worse in a way that HN has not (which has, IMO, mostly stayed the same over my tenure here which is long, even longer than the time I've been on Lobsters.) tildes.net I have mixed feelings on but am much more hopeful about its outlook. They both have the same failure mode:

1. Both sites have closed membership with invites given to users. In practice this means that some users invite people but mostly a minority of users with very strong interests/beliefs end up inviting others who share the same strong interests/beliefs in order to shift the narrative. On Lobsters these are PLT enthusiasts and FOSS systems programmers, on Tildes these are leftists. All of this:

2. Makes any conversation about topics that the in-crowd is a domain expert in (on Lobsters: PLT, FOSS systems programming) good, but makes any conversation about other topics anywhere from clueless (networking) to just bad (scientific computing, machine learning). HN's breadth makes it a fantastic resource in a lot of more esoteric topics. Networking threads will have folks chiming in who authored core RFCs or who help run large ISPs. DB threads will have DB authors talking about block algorithms. Sure, political threads often draw some pretty bad quality discussion, but the top posts on most technical topics are often posted by insiders with lots of first-hand knowledge (though the moment you get more than a few posts down, that changes.)

3. Creates identity-based politics around the in-crowd. Anti-FOSS viewpoints on Lobsters are heavily criticized. Liking Go used to get you piled-on, though these days it happens a lot less frequently. Oppose software minimalism takes and get lots of pushback. Rules are fine to break if the in-crowd agrees with you but are much more brittle if the in-crowd disagrees with you. You have to have a thick skin if you want to oppose the in-crowd on Lobsters. The site is mostly driven by the whims of its posters and pushcx, which the rules are a thin veneer atop of. There's a lot of snide commentary and petty negativity on Lobsters and a lot of it is based around insulting members of other communities (insulting folks on HN is pretty much a pasttime for Lobsters.)

The big differences with Tildes and Lobsters are that Tildes is a general discussion forum and Lobsters is not. Correspondingly, Tildes's mod Deimos has a fairly light touch moderating the website, which makes me much more hopeful about its ability to build a healthy community. Lobsters' current head admin pushcx is IMO an extremely overbearing mod who bans first and asks questions later. Sometimes I think a topic's survival on that site is based purely on his mood. If pushcx doesn't like something you're posting there's a high chance it's going to get deleted.

While Lobste.rs certainly started out having a more technical focus, over time it has essentially become a longform discussion platform for folks in FOSS Mastodon circles. If something is popular in those circles it'll get upvoted and discussed on Lobste.rs, if it's unpopular it'll get booed. On HN you can discuss a much larger variety of technical topics and get reasonable answers from insiders. Just avoid the political threads and the flamewar-du-jour threads (crypto and ads right now, who knows what it'll be tomorrow) and you'll be fine.

As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully.

It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!

A lot of that kind of thing slips through the cracks. Dang misses a lot of stuff.

Even if he misses things, I think it sets the tone.

Yeah, that is true though Dang has remarkably few peers when evaluated on effectiveness.

That said, we see his efforts and when we model them, we amplify an already solid showing.

That's how I choose to play it. Hope it helps. I think it does.

> the tamest and most well moderated forum

It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.

> I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better

Such as? I've been looking for someplace to pay for because it's better

It's very topic/interest specific, not a general forum: Green Building Advisor.

Also, I have some private email groups in which I only have thoughtful discussion with people I know and trust (though don't always agree with).

I don't know if any general paid forums though.

There's Something Awful which is fairly general and charges a one time fee, but it's much more poorly operated than HN.

SA used to be in a troll war with the old Slashdot.org tech forum. 4chan was a later 'spinoff' built by a Something Awful user, and taking much of its initial community from there. Given these facts I've never thought of Something Awful as especially free from toxicity.

They also used to be very toxic to the the Church of Scientology and Habbo Hotel. Nevar forget.

Pool's closed!

But that's Anonymous, not SA.

I'm guessing something like Metafilter's buy-in.

Metafilter was extremely toxic. If it's sanguine now, it's only because everybody with other views was driven from the site.

I think I tried reading Metafilter once; it was a thread discussing whether men rape for power or for pleasure, and anytime a man tried posting in the thread they were driven off for not "centering women".

Although that style of discourse was pretty common at the time, quite popular on livejournal and later tumblr.

Lately I see complaints about it being full of people who tell you to go to therapy as a solution for everything. Which I didn't even know was a type.

Metafilter has remarkably high-quality discussion given its size.

I've been a member of various private email lists over the years which can be good, though those seem to have an active lifespan of 5--10 years, with 10 being a pretty extreme outlier.

Those communities become quite insular over time, and tend to retain less-interesting and spin out more interesting contributors.

> Metafilter has remarkably high-quality discussion given its size.

Here's an example of the toxicity in Metafilter:

https://www.metafilter.com/194412/Canadas-Protest-on-Wheels#...

I don't even feel comfortable quoting it here.

As you can see it's the 3rd most favorited comments in that thread.

I wasn't even cherry picking, it was the first story I clicked on.

Metafilter isn’t toxic at all unless you have the wrong opinions.

And this is the takeaway for everyone using any platform anywhere. The fundamental reality is people disagree with other people.

> Metafilter isn’t toxic at all unless you have the wrong opinions.

Echo chambers have that effect on people.

On a similar post here I was given a lot of flak for posting anti-Nazi sentiments, I didn't realize that it was such a charged topic considering how it's Canadian truckers boycotting mask mandates as the mask mandates are ending and how neo-nazis are showing up in support for the whole thing.

I mean, generally, if I am at a large gathering and Nazis show up and they're on my side I would hope I would have a nice long think about what I was doing at that moment but some of these people are failing to realize that the sentiment of "they're on MY side, so it's okay now" increases the likelihood of people ending up on their side as well in the future.

There's a wide chasm between what the government and media portray this protest as, and the reality on the ground.

The following channel contains hundreds of hours of raw unedited video:

https://www.youtube.com/c/Ottawalks/videos

I challenge you to find one nazi flag there.

If you can't find any, then maybe you should rethink how much trust you place in your news sources.

What exactly prevents whoever filmed this of simply not posting any clip that's offensive? Because I've seen many videos and photos of hate symbols, and there are quite a few examples of assault and harassment

> What exactly prevents whoever filmed this of simply not posting any clip that's offensive?

It's not clips, it's live unedited raw video.

If you want to be 100% sure, you can watch it live.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ottawa+live&sp=...

> I challenge you to find one nazi flag there.

You mean in the videos extensively edited and cherry-picked to hide any reference to Nazi flags or any hate symbol?

No, he means the raw unedited videos, like the ones on channel he linked. The extensively edited and cherry-picked videos are the ones shown by corporate media and partisans.

> No, he means the raw unedited videos, like the ones on channel he linked.

Is it though? Things don't magically disappear from raw footage. Either you edit it out or not show inconvenient footage.

I mean, all this gaslighting requires you in the very least to accuse other footage from the same events and involving the same people of being fabricated.

> I would hope I would have a nice long think about what I was doing

Whenever I encounter vegetarians I remind them that Hitler also was one. For some reason they usually just scoff.

Well, yeah, because that's a dick move and not relevant.

What specifically are you pointing out as the toxic behaviour?

> What specifically are you pointing out as the toxic behaviour?

I am not the the grandparent, but with your permission, may I ask you …

Do you agree that “pie-hole” is deprecatory?

Do you agree that the question “who cares what X says?” is likely dismissive rhetoric, rather than a genuine expression of interest in who the people are who pay attention to X?

> Do you agree that the question “who cares what X says?”

Perhaps I've become desensitized, but "toxic" is not a synonym for "not supportive". Being dismissive of something or someone, or not agreeing with someone for that matter, does not mean a community or person is toxic. It just means you don't agree or support someone or something, and instead you have different opinions and support different positions.

NasaSpaceFlight forums' L2. I've never been in there, but everyone who has says that it is the best forum on the internet.

> most well moderated free forum

It’s the most well moderated free forum that has a broad scope of topics. Many of the major domain-focused forums (for cars, modeling, collecting) are well managed by moderators and a community who like to see dense value for the topic at hand, low tolerance for unrelated conversation, and see their hobby as a refuge from the noise everywhere else in life. On HN, even though nominally focused, any and all topics make it on here.

It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else.

But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.

like what example

I agree with your point of view even if I wouldn’t have phrased it like that.

I’ve read / posted / shitposted stuff on here that would get me ratiod or yalled on other social networks, and would definitely lose me friends if I publicly repeated it, or family if I pushed it politically.

I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head because I read hundreds of stories per week on here and only notice it when I see a (not downvoted) comment that makes me go WOOOOOOW.

Yeah I didn't really phrase it the right way when I posted that. But essentially my experience matches yours.

Hardware Central forums circa 1998 was one of the funnest places that I recall. It was all overclockers and tinkers. It was pretty great!

Same. If you compare this to reddit, it’s like comparing the senate to a local pub on free shots night.

Sometimes I wonder if dang ever goes on vacation. Does he even sleep or take a break?

I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.

> The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides

Oh yes, I've kept a very high opinion of this forum and its commenters once I skipped right past the daily 250+ comment posts about COVID-19 that have plagued us for 2 years. When it comes to tech, this place is an absolute treasure, but there's few things as odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.

The bitcoin craze wasn't even close to being as bad as the past two years.

odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.

What is wrong with people do their own research, seeking their own info? Health experts, the mainstream media, and politicians do not have a monopoly on truth, and were wrong any times about Covid.

Just gently pointing out that you’re inviting the same heated discussion warned about above you.

I'm just disputing the notion that only experts are right. It's not about being pro-mask or anti-mask or pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine

I read through a lot of those threads, there wasn't much of value there, just angry people shouting at each other mostly. I'm not saying it should be banned, but I too stopped reading them eventually because what's the point?

Generally because 99% of people are not researchers and when they say "doing their own research" they mean reading a few blogs and facebook posts. Reading actual papers done by researchers is a step above that, of which a few people will skim maybe one paper.

What makes you think that? How do you know they are reading Facebook and not reading the papers? From what I've seen on HN, people commenting contrarian studies have actually read them.

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