Hacker News Reader

Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

HN makes it easy to stifle dissent with "flag" and graying out a comment until it is "dead". That's why I always browse with "showdead" set to "yes." Most of the dead comments deserve it, but some of them are quite interesting but don't match the values of the HN community. I've been "killed" a couple times when I didn't think I deserved it. I'm a contrarian by nature, but I value HN too much to feel bad about it. There are other places to discuss sensitive topics.

View on HN

> There are other places to discuss sensitive topics

Curious to hear about those other places.

Reddit has a system that works better for controversy. Then if I really want to discuss a crazy idea I go on 4chan/pol/. There are a small percentage of really bright people on 4chan/pol/ who don't fit into normal society (mostly autism it seems) that can sometimes offer some surprising insights. People always focus on the racism on 4chan, but I ignore it because a lot of the time it's an identifier. You have to show some willingness to say things offensive to the normies to prove you are one of them. I'm not willing to do that so I get told to go back to Reddit often. It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.

The problem is, shitposting internet racism is a gateway to actual Nazism.

There are about fifty Nazis left on the entire planet. If it's a gateway, someone bricked it up a long time ago.

If you're a teenager, which I'm not. And like I said, I don't post that stuff. I ignore it and then hope for an intelligent response to something I said and often get it. Barring that, 4chan is sometimes funny because it's so off the wall and out of left field.

Nitpick: "Nazism" (espec. capitalized) is a particular brand of white-supremacy racism. One which (by the book) held most white people to be non-members of its Master Race.

Vs. there is lot of racism on the internet which is "non-white on non-white". One example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

If all it would take to become a Nazi is reading Nazi opinions, don't you think we'd have a lot more Nazis?

I don't doubt there are people with reprehensible views on 4chan, but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.

> but it's a bit uncharitable to the reader to suggest that browsing 4chan will put them at the precipice of becoming an Actual Nazi.

What else, other than "reading Nazi opinions" do you think it takes to become an "Actual Nazi?" It's not like the ghost of Joseph Goebbels flies in through your window and bites you in the neck and now you're a Nazi. Radicalization works by normalization, through repeated exposure to and gradual acceptance of propaganda, and gaining sympathy and trust for a community and its ideals.

>normies

lurk moar

>It's uncanny how they know I don't belong there and not just because I don't say hateful things. They are very sensitive to tone.

it has nothing to do with the frequency of your hate -- I could tell you don't belong just because of your word choice here.

there are things one picks up about board culture when browsing for a respectable amount of time, and it shows in the speech patterns of their posts. amplified by high post frequency and anonymity making it the only identifier, users get _very_ good at spotting when somebody either doesn't know the culture or is relying on an incorrect/incomplete summary like you are doing here.

I think a topic can be extremely sensitive and still be discussed on HN as long as it fits a certain accepted narrative. The worry is this asymmetry.

> I think a topic can be extremely sensitive and still be discussed on HN

I don't agree. All it takes is 4 people to downvote and flag you and you're dead

Enough consecutive downvotes to make the score to go to -4.

I didn't realize this but it would be easy to get around with alt accounts

I assume that the HN mod team (or maybe just dang) can find out if you are doing this. The HN submission algorithm is very sensitive to small numbers of upvotes early on in a submission's life. Using a few alt accounts to boost your posts would have an outsized effect here.

Not sure why only a few alt accounts instead of perhaps thousands would be used by someone who would want to influence what topics get discussed and what don't. Also not difficult to use a reverse exponential decay function to modulate votes.

How does one get a few thousand accounts with more than the karma limit needed to be able to downvote?

Auto submit tech news articles periodiclly?

I think they look for cliques in the graph of people who upvote certain content. Even with "natural" vote times, you may get caught doing this over and over.

This is one of the ways that Reddit and Twitter search for bots too.

I mean we have super sophisticated botnets causing havoc on major/state-linked social media platforms, I think they can handle HN.

you dont need botnet that much, when most of member of a group you belong are conditionned to react (in a pavlov way) to specific trigger.

Social engineering at it's finest.

While others can vouch for you to resurrect you from death

That's never happened to me. Once I'm dead I'm dead. I sometimes get my satisfaction later on, for example when Bitcoin was popular on HN I was one of the few people early on to call it a waste of electricity. Now that's not so controversial.

But the vouch button does exist, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work for vast majority of dead comments, since they probably wouldn't be dead in the first place if enough people upvoted them.

I guess I don't have enough karma to have a vouch link. The comment by bombcar in this thread is dead and there's no vouch on it.

I think you need to click on the comment timestamp to view the comment in isolation for "vouch" to appear.

Ok, now I see it. Thanks, learn something new every day

Vouching does rely on someone to take the extra effort relative to a downvote, so I think it's safe to assume vouching is more rare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com