Commenting on Hacker News
superbowl.substack.com
superbowl.substack.com
I think a few years ago (almost 10, sheesh) when I started out, it was similar. Basically, most of your karma comes from a few very upvoted comments, or ones that are early and garner conversation. I think something like 3 or 4 got me to 500+ (it's been so long that I forgot the threshold for downvoting). Never had luck with article submissions but getting one to front page does give you a lot of karma too, apparently.
Also, while "upholding the median political viewpoint" is a surefire way to get upvoted, it is worth noting that that can be a moving target and changes from article to article. Poo-pooing crypto on any average crypto article will garner downvotes if it's in a thread likely to be read by crypto enthusiasts, while shitting on web3.0 on another article about the current collapse of everything crypto will engender karma from people who are skeptical. Anyway, the point isn't that there really isn't any median politics here on HN, just that for some topics, it does vary, while for some it doesn't.
either you were one of the first to comment, said something really flame-baity, or were just lucky. most of my high-effort comments fell flat, while I get a +160 from a lucky two sentences.
Absolutely true in the strictest sense. I've posted very detailed, well researched, citation filled comments in response to questions from people, and gotten absolutely zero upvotes before. OTOH, I've posted borderline flamebait comments that consisted of something like "Fuck the NSA" or whatever, and gotten hundreds of upvotes.
That said, I think that on balance higher quality / higher effort posts are more likely to garner upvotes. But it's definitely not a deterministic, linear correlation at all.
Is it the Lyceum, the height of learned, reasoned debate and intellectual curiosity? No, HN is definitely not an ideal but it is certainly better, on net compared with the alternatives, not that the alternatives are harsh competition.
[1] Serving web sites off of a blockchain somehow.
Don't overestimate that effect. I'd say a hundred or maybe two hundred is realistic, but quite often a front page submission only nets you a dozen.
Of course there are outliers in the other direction, but 500 or more is a rare event. You need to keep in mind that karma is discounted, a story that displays n upvotes will add << n points to your account.
One thing that pseudonymity will do is allow you support positions you don't actually hold. To steel man them. To really stretch your brain to find the best way to present and argue in favor of them. Doing so pseudonymously means never having to explain yourself to friends, family, employers, or three-letter organizations later.
This also works really well for positions you're leaning toward but don't know why. Or half-baked ideas you'd like someone to respond to. Or just questions that you're embarrassed to ask.
This may not fit with the letter of the HN guidelines, depending on the distinctions between "throwaway," "pseudonym," and "temporary pseudonym":
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I think it fits with the spirit. From "What to Post?":
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Anonymous posts also allow honesty which might otherwise be impossible. Job safety, physical safety, and protection against embarrassment etc are potentially easier when anonymous.
I have a generally pessimistic outlook but do see a positive here.
EDIT: oops
I signed up here because i was fedup with reddit,
I am just fed up with all the politics, Thr extreme US focus and the reddit culture. It began affecting my life, and I wasn't happy about it.
For example I knew more about the US than I should, and the constant negative "the world is ending" news from the US media were very negative.
I still use reddit, its a very good platform if used correctly(only for niches), subreddits like r/selfhosting, r/homelab and others are a goldmine of good discussions and valuable info.
But i stopped following trending or any general/humor subs, and decided to focus more on Tech, and replace US stations with world wide news , because generally all they do is doom and gloom, and us vs them.
I realize the bias of US focused news is obviously coming from the English language, but it helps to diversify, and when possible use sources in another language.
My experience mimcks OP, its a very rich and detailed platform about tech, and I think its like this because of the webiste design, and the things you have to care about to know HN.
The moderation on HN is mostly pretty good, and I think it certainly helps that the mods are also HN users.
I had my fair share of down votes, particularly about The Occupation in Palestine, but it was expected and I stand by my comments.
I signed up as an anon, because its easier to post things that truthfully represent you without being worried about how it might affect your job 10 years later, and what the new trends might be that far in the future.
I have a real name account, but its not as successful as this one, because I'm not really ready to comment on everything, also I really got lucky with that Proton post :).
Also one note, I really wouldn't be able to use HN without the Awesome app called Glider, its an open source HN client on Android, and its really really good, especially for someone coming from infinity for reddit.
Its has bugs, but in general its pretty good.
I too mostly don't use reddit for the mainstream subs, but instead of niche stuff like /r/RISCV and /r/rust.
It's all too easy to take the worst parts of Reddit or Twitter and claim HN is better, but Reddit and Twitter have a lot more self-curation than HN.
Or three or four, if you count the people who have been shadowbanned, and the people who enable viewing from shadowbanned accounts. But those two groups seem to be in the minority.
I do like the approach https://lobste.rs takes, where there aren't separate subreddits, but instead just tags for various articles. You can then browse by tags, or inversely, exclude them from the home page.
Super happy to see all the discussion in here! Will hopefully have time to reply later
I actually don't think this is entirely true. I definitely sometimes see people using downvotes as a "I don't like this, fuck you" button a-la Reddit, but most of the times I feel that HN is very civilized when it comes to using the downvote button.
I mostly see things downvoted that are factually wrong, or just generally abrasive and tone-deaf.
I am excluding my own downvotes received and given and only thinking of examples where I was a bystander (except that I probably upvoted someone to counter what I thought was undeserved downvotes).
I can't know that someone else misunderstood a comment, or that I understood a comment of course, so I just leave my own comment saying "I interpreted that this way...."
But I have seen some truely inexplicable torpedoing of the most innocuous comments. I never get an answer to "I don't know why you're downvoted..."
Please assume that I know the difference between interesting or valuable and flies my team colors, or at least gave conscious thought to it, in this talk about deserved/undeserved, understood/misunderstood.
In theory this would be good, if the way to game the score was to write thoughtful and helpful comments. In practice, as noted in this post:
> Affirming the political and moral opinions of the average HN reader is the easiest way to get upvotes.
It's easy enough to hide this text using something like uBlock, but I'd rather it were just a thing everybody could toggle. Maybe even turn it off by default.
Making the order of posts probabilistic instead of strictly ordering by upvotes would also improve the site, making the first post less significant and avoiding some of the rich-get-richer effect noted in the article.
(Then at 10,001 karma there's the ability to super-upvote a comment, contingent upon its removal to a different website where it would be REALLY relevant... Would be nice if the web could be this integrative)
I know that @dang always responds with that FAQ post saying that HN is slowly turning into Reddit is a meme and an illusion as old as the hills, but just saying it isn't does not mean that it isn't. That's the weakest argument from authority there could be. "It's not because I say it isn't."
My experience here has been the opposite. I try not to be aggressive or antagonizing here, hard as it is via text, but at times have written things that came across as rude and things that were not popular opinions.
Most of the time one or more people would take the time to respond explaining why they feel I'm incorrect, or telling me I'm being harsh. And my upvotes usually just sit at 1, despite perhaps having 5 or more disagreement comments.
Compare that to Reddit, where even mentioning anything against the hivemind, such as disagreeing with a liberal cause, will get you downvoted to oblivion, sometimes even banned.
Honestly if I didn't have emojis in Slack I'd have a much worse relationship with coworkers
I think one thing that has changed over the years is more acceptance of one sentence replies as long as they uphold the median political perspective. Things like, "this is terrible, how can this be permitted" used to get downvoted more (a lot, in fact), while I see some make it through the cracks lately, as long as they somewhat express a thought. Other than that, not much has changed. I can only say that being on HN so long makes you realize that there are memes and political groupthink here too, it just takes different forms or can be obscured somewhat by the longer more written out comments.
This sort of comment is the hot grits and petrified natalie portman of HN. Probably not good enough to consistently rise to the top, but popular enough to farm karma.
The problem, I think, is that HN is attracting the late-stage users, who see up/down as agree/disagree and not contributing/obstructing.
HN doesn't have a corollary for sub-reddits, or a personal feed, or similar. Its singular subject focus is its virtue; but, as you claim, it will fall. All things will, and the problem with HN is that there is _too much money to be made_ by swaying opinion on this forum.
You can lose karma if you reply. You can't lose karma if you downvote.
>>>> DeLaney didn't say it could have happened, merely that he
>>>> would have been happy if it did.
>>
>>> A distinction without meaning or merit.
>>
>>Wrong twice.
>
> On the contrary. It's dead spot on, in fact.
You really are a retard, aren't you?
Flame wars sucked, but I'm beginning to think it's a case of 'cutting off tails on one side kills them on the other'.
HN in particular has always given me vibes of: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734580/
I suspect the only difference is that technical topics like shiny-rust-program or webframework3000 are less controversial
Twitter is much less heavy handed with the deletion of comments but if you read the replies they are often the same ad hominem stuff you'll find on Reddit if you dare stray away from the majority opinion.
I don't consider a place that allows views different than mine to be a cesspool, or people that have different views to be defective. A cesspool to me is when someone makes a reasonable point about a subject like economics and the replies are all about his penis size, that's how Reddit and Twitter operate, not here.
Because it requires no effort. But if downvoting required at least 140^W280 char comment describing the reason... or a micro-payment...
But jokes aside this is an unsolvable problem. Though I liked /. comment marking system, but it's not that better too.
I usually make an effort to upvote comments that I thought were particularly well written even if I disagree with them. But we all have our biases, and I recognize that, as with most people, I'm likelier to upvote a comment that I agree with even if it was poorly reasoned. It would be great to be able to rate comments "+1 informative, but -1 author is being a jerk". Or "-1 I disagree, but +1 polite and respectful".
I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. Getting the UI right could be a challenge. Netflix used to let you rate content from 1-5 stars, but they later changed it to just thumbs up/thumbs down. The same pressure that led Netflix do dumb down their system might apply here.
I was curious because it seems like whenever I check the comments on a post the top comment is like "ackchyually..."
I attribute this to the quality of the source material. there's a limit to how much the linked article can reasonably convey while still being an introduction to whatever is being talked about. Very rarely, if ever, is a website article posted that requires prerequisite reading of a different article. So nuance usually gets shafted a bit, and in-depth research postponed, to keep the article easy to read.
it then gets posted here and inevitably someone has something to say about the nuance
Zipf's law.
Relatable. I rarely post or comment, as when I have something to contribute to the conversation I usually cannot (NDA, etc.). And for the times I could post, I don't really have anything of value to say; echoing into the void and all.
But then I do get value from the comment sections, oftentimes more than the original post/content.
So thank you to those who do comment and contribute!
I think the real cause of what you're observing is that users on HN go through cycles of enculturation, which can include being modded by dang (or challenged/flagged by other users) for crossing the line.
I used to feel frustrated that HN is very limited in its scope of what's allowed -- "curiosity only" which often excludes issues that really matter to me. It can take a while for users to really get that here. But on the other hand, it has allowed an extremely unique anonymous online community to thrive in its own way, and keep us coming back out of curiosity and a desire to learn.
Have you considered the possibility that the reason the myth is pervasive is because it's true, and over time HN is becoming more and more like reddit? It seems to me if the users continually complain about the same problem, maybe there's something there. "No, it's the users that are wrong!" requires a lot more than handwaving if you want me to take you seriously. As someone who's been using HN for years, I absolutely believe it becomes more like reddit over time.
Let's call low-effort comments what they are and make the conversations a little simpler.
That said, it's easy to be critical and hard to be constructive. I still come to HN regularly so there's obviously something to it. I'm not pretending to have the magic bullet to these problems (some of which I believe are fundamental/intractable).
EDIT: I find it ironic this post has fallen off the first page of HN before I finished this comment, despite having many comments and being something I find interesting.
That being said, this is a forum for VC and startup talk among other things, so it would be pretty surprising if there wasn't some astroturfing at play. Self-promotion comes with the territory. The mods are doing their best but to some extent it's in the game.
Finally, there's no irony about this no longer being on the front page. When I first clicked into this thread, I was surprised it was FP still, because it had twice as many comments as votes and that usually trips the flamewar detector. I think folks are generally unaware of the systems that make HN tick, and that can make the experience pretty confusing.
Sure there is. It's an interesting conversation to me and it's being pushed away from the front page. I didn't say it was foul play, I said it was ironic. The algorithms are so fearful of controversy they push away interesting topics.
Also, I've emailed the mods many times before. My experiences have been mixed.
That's just one of the tradeoffs. HN optimizes for curiosity, which does sometimes mean using blunt automated tools to fend off negative subjects.
Fundamentally, I think over-meta-commenting on the state of HN is considered boring here (at least by the mods), since it's been covered so many times before.
Reddit became very homogenized because of how quickly the left wing activists were to downvote, report, flag, etc. It made it impossible to have any discussion where you were right of far-left. A lot of those users have made their way over to HN, where it's even easier to have multiple accounts.
Yesterday someone posted a link to CBS News article about a Chipotle being closed after the workers tried to unionize. The article was very matter of fact and sparse. No editorial, no details about what sort of negotiations might have broken down. There was little to discuss about the article and I suspect it was posted by someone naively sympathetic to any labor organization effort trying to spread fodder to label Chipotle as a union-buster. The article still only has 17 comments. I commented asking why this was posted to HN and my comment was flagged in less than 30 seconds. So I commented again, and someone replied that its pertinent to startups because of how automation will cause job losses. The news article did not mention this. My second comment was flagged shortly thereafter.
HN will keep becoming like reddit because there is no recourse for the activists flagging comments or downvoting something they disagree with to hell. HN was already poorly moderated in that there is one moderator. This trend will continue and even the people who might agree with the activist will get bored and leave since there will be no intellectually stimulated conversation to have.
I'm not sure where the honest people go next. Maybe I'll just go outside, its pleasant out.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob[0] illusion[1], as[2] old[3] as[4] the[5] hills[6].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
I get that quoting a request on the site info page could come across as modding you, but that wasn't my intent.
It might be an interesting conversation to have: has HN trailed Reddit over time in some of its more negative aspects? The guidelines dismissing this I think is wrong.
I think we're reaching the next phase of the Internet, where big platform influence wanes, and where hopefully small communities figure out how to better govern themselves against nefarious actors.
We should lean on many of the older (proven) community standards again in online communities, and bring back displaying BOTH upvote and downvote data like we used to see... We also need to emphasize more choice and less algorithmic control over what trends on sites (from a "customer satisfaction" perspective). Letting real human readers decide what's relevant and best...
The only way to effectively manage a horrible inauthentic user plague/threat is by crowd sourcing real and authentic human beings that have a solid stake in maintaining positive order. Also, avoid embedding ads in everything as well as selling promotional services... It really does morally corrupt sites and apps.
When I encounter egregiously toxic posts, I email our lone mod warrior, Dang (hn@ycombinator.com) to ensure he has the opportunity to review and take whatever action is appropriate.
The daily post volume on HN is so high, it's challenging (to the point of being impossible) to moderate it all alone. Plus it's a generally thankless, horrifyingly soul crushing job. So I try to help out where I can, when I'm not the one causing the trouble :p :cry:
IMO HN would do well to ban political and social-movement posts entirely.
- When the statement is obvious, you mine as well not say it at all. On a lot of Reddit threads every upvoted comment is basically some variation of “This”, “Yep”, “I agree” (sometimes literally those). It’s absurd, there’s no discussion and the entire point of the comments section is wasted. (Honestly, a lot of Reddit is just the same posts and arguments over and over)
- When the opinion actually deserves nuance. When people throw around phrases like “the US is a third-world country”, “Google is an awful company only focused on greed”, “never trust your employer”. No, these statements aren’t 100% true, Google is a greedy company but it really isn’t just a money-making machine, it provides a search engine and mail and office software and video platform that you probably use. Additionally, when the statements are political and derogatory (“all X group is bad”), you start to criticize people who don’t deserve the criticism.
That is to say, a lot of "nuanced" arguments are just as morally emotive as short punchy ones. The latter might be less persuasive, but I'm not sure many people are changing their minds on moral or ethical debates these days anyway.
It's not always about changing your mind. Nuanced opinions help people understand issues better. If you write a long post talking about value driven at scale at Google vs a predatory advertising market, you can help folks understand, say, what a Google competitor would need to harness to compete effectively. But when you just say "Google is a scourge to this planet", nobody comes away from the conversation better informed and the poster gets tons of HN karma for posting the median view.
Moral opinions are tricky because they feed directly into and out of concepts like integrity, fidelity and quality, which are favorites on HN and can be discussed technically as well as morally. But we don't really learn much about that razor edge in general education so it's not as easily avoided.
1. Fanboys - if an article about an apple product is posted, the very idea of constructive criticism is somehow an affront to Steve's ghost. Same can be said for everyone except Google which seems to be the universal punching bag regardless.
2. Shilling - I'm glad that you are the creater of BloatJS and are willing to answer any questions that show your product in a positive light but you are also on the front page of /r/technology and 20 other blogs because you are trying to get VC funding. Maybe a few of these would be fine but it's hard not to see this suspiciously sitting in the top 5 on any given day and then see the author fumbling to answer the universal question of "what did this solve?"
3. Astroturfing - pick any major article, pick your poison, you will find the comment section littered with suites of all shapes and pay doing damage control with unsubstantiated claims that then cause argument loops that derail useful conversation. Someone will ask for a summery and a well thought out response will get a few bumps, meanwhile Tom who works in marketing has 136 replies to his "rebuttal" that things are fine at BloatSoft and word to the contrary is simply twitters fault.
It's not just HN it's any site that gets sufficiently big but the saddest part for me is how transparent it is. The size causes people who don't use these technologies to lurk around all day and people who make them to defend it all day and the margin of actual people who don't have some axe to grind gets fewer and fewer until they, intelligently, realize one day it's all fluff and not worth their time.
People get called out for just reading the headlines of articles but when half of them are false advertisement and a good chunk of them are just literal ads no wonder...and mercy be upon anyone coming to the comment section for clarity.
[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...
The biggest thing I learned is don't play devil's advocate. Even if it's sincere, don't try to empathize with the other side of the argument. Try to figure out what the "average" (internet points-voter) thinks and say it loud, say it proud. One of my biggest upvotes was on r/politics post, where I posted a direct, forceful and unbeknowingesty satirical support of socialism/socialist policies.
If you're on a media subreddit for a TV show. If there's an obvious character to quote or show trope that people like in response to a post, post that quote/trope.
Some of my biggest downvotes were explaining to a person who asked in a neoliberal subreddit "Why do leftist politicians" say things they know aren't true or can't justify, and pointing out that they are incentivized to exaggerate, precisely because they don't have political power. I guess I figured out later it was a rhetorical question.
And alot of this is in good faith. I'm honestly interested in understanding and discussing the realities of peoples political motivations over and above my own beliefs about them.
Or do it well. Most of the time, “playing devil’s advocate” is just hypocritical trolling, so we’re more or less trained to assume bad faith. Which is an unfortunate bias, but that’s where we are.
On the other hand, posts really need to be very bad to get greyed out. Even if you get a few downvotes, it’s not a huge problem.
On reddit and twitter, I usually see the opposite of hypocritical lock-step adherence to a narrative, with any nuance and criticism being disallowed and attacked. I tend to assume bad faith for anyone completely taking one side of any complex (and therefore controversial) topic, on the internet.
Related, I really liked the feature on Slashdot where "friends of friends" could be given more visibility, and a karma boost. If I friended you, I would then be exposed to your friends, which I would probably end up valuing, resulting in an amplification of a certain type of mindset across the site. It was a nice way to boost rationality. It would also be a terrible way to make an echo chamber, but to each their own I suppose.
I don't even wish for a site that would only show me my "blessed community". I like the general commentary to be pretty widely scattered, but I (1) don't want to miss the larger bits of signal, and (2) want to improve my overall cost::benefit ratio. I also definitely don't want the base level to be too widely scattered, or more specifically, too low of an average value.
My most downvoted post was a post about tournament card games where I was actually correct, but no one liked the answer regardless. It is also one of my most awarded posts.
Why would sociopaths making fintech fraudcoins not defend their cryptoscams in public? It would be job one for something whose value is completely fabricated and perception based.
I'll upvote you for limited counterbalancing.
That's just the US night-owls being helpful before turning in for their daily sleep.
Then the grumpy I-need-coffee crowd comes in swinging.
(only partly kidding)