Ask HN: Has there been more conspiracy comments on HN lately?
I am seeing more low quality comments in the last few months with baseless claims. Has any other hn readers been seeing this? Curious to know from long time (>3 years) hn readers.
If Facebook is mentioned, there is always someone saying how terrible Facebook is, even if it's an article about how Facebook's datacenters run their air conditioning. They just can't help but post about hating Facebook.
Similarly, any mention of certain topics result in someone spitting out the related conspiracy theory.
Perhaps those posts are inevitable, but I wish people downvoted them due to not being relevant. It seems they trigger the right emotional response to get upvotes.
I don't wasn't to live my life in a constant state of outrage, negativity, and hate. Sometimes I want to be open minded, curious, and enjoy learning.
When asked why I’m not on (happens extremely rarely), I say it is against my moral conviction to be a member, and they don’t ask what I mean, because they know.
Thus, I can live a positive life without evangelising my own choices.
If a company is doing something genuinely terrible, isn't it better to continue to call them out on it even when doing that might be "boring and exhausting" to some people? If some number of people are reading those comments and learning from them, and others are gladly reminded of something they'd forgotten, is it worth having some number of other people who now have to scroll past a comment that bored them?
I think that a lot of those types of comments are so visible because many people are finding them useful and/or important and so they are getting upvoted. I do see a lot more dead conspiracy theory posts.
Personally, I feel that there are very few means to hold a company meaningfully accountable, and the few we do have are very rarely used or used successfully. Companies spend billions on efforts to manipulate how they are perceived by the public. We operate under a system that heavily favors the corporation and leaves us disadvantaged. One of the few tools we have at our disposal is our ability to inform each other about what companies are doing and how it might impact us. I'm grateful to those posters who do what they can. Even if it's something I've read 100 times before, if the problem is real I hope people don't stop talking about it, and I hope at least a few people grow sick enough of talking about it or hearing about it that something gets done to fix it. With luck there will be no more reason to talk about it and everyone can move on to talking too much about the next thing that needs fixing.
(Ok, there are some comments about "birds aren't real" on a high ranked post right now, but that's a joke.)
They tend to eventually be flagged (though not always), but the overton window has also generally moved on this site to becoming more accepting of them.
If you want an example, I picked a thread out via google. It's particularly high density, because that's all you can easily find with google. You'll need show dead -> on in your settings to see the worse comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406207
>If a user has 31 Karma, they can flag submissions.
(I constantly throw away accounts whenever they reach 1-3k karma. It doesn't mean anything and it brings out the true nature of people when they believe they have the upper hand.)
>despite being littered with comments that were flagged/unflagged
I don't think that's a factor affecting ranking - big amount of user flags (for the whole thread) and "flame-war detector" ("when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score") do affect ranking negatively though, so I guess dang manually removed downranking factors for that thread.
It's not just dang modding anymore (citation: an email to me on Nov. 4), as I understand it. So it sounds like someone else made that call if that's what happened.
The majority of HN's rules were violated repeatedly all over that thread, including the submission itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. But the problem is that rules also exist around meta-discussion of HN's own discussion quality, and it's a poor experience when discussion quality is slipping if there's not also an avenue to reasonably meta-discuss why that's the case, either as a consequence of how the platform is operating or as an outcome of society's direction in a broader sense.
That said, are there any comments in particular that you think step out of line, or is it most of them?
like I said, surprised this lasted as long as it did. This thread should've been dead before even landing on the front page.
Thus, without any examples your question is impossible to answer.
You call those comments "conspiracy comments", I call them comments with alternative views and as we learned through the pandemic, the people banning and downvoting the "conspiracy theorists" (who were actually spreading facts/truth) were in the wrong and they still can't admit their mistake and it's same thing with anything political.
You question why would be Russia firing rocket at Polish farm - bam, conspiracy theorists, Russian troll! Next day, oh well, shit happenes, Ukraine just made mistake, let's forget about it and let's forget about those conspiracy theorists from day above, but let's keep their downvotes so they won't dare to spread their opinion.
I'd prefer if HN went back to technical topics away from political nonsense which has hardly anything to do with technology. I especially don't like the raising amount of self/metaposts like these with questions how you spend your free time, how long is your... and other teenage topics, which is quite surprising considering recent poll where vast majority of users should be above 25-30, so one would expect certain level of maturity.
A broken clock is still right twice a day. It's my observation that the conspiracies of the last few years have been almost entirely debunked. When someone claims they were "proven right", their evidence usually circles back to the same conspiratorial source that made the claim in the first place.
Heck, some guy on YouTube did that already and documented himself posting 20,000 posts in a few days using a fine tuned model.
One thing that gets me is that, putting aside the question about whether one side or the other is right, the culture war stuff is just incredibly stupid. It's like people have gotten a lobotomy and their ability to do critical reasoning and respond to empirical data has been replaced with just pure tribal identity. My sense is that this is happening across the country (and perhaps to some extent the world), and HN actually has it easier than a lot of other places.
Culture wars expose fundamental value differences. Like when someone says “we should eliminate prisons” what’s the rational debate to be had about that? Leaving aside right or wrong, clearly people on opposite sides of that issue just see the world and human nature fundamentally differently.
I don’t think it’s really about “tribal identity” because culture war issues actually expose intra-tribal schisms. I’ve been a democrat most of my adult life but I can’t wrap my brain around some of the stuff that’s been normalized in my Romney 2012 suburb.
This rapidly brings in the low quality/conspiracy/baseless claims stuff.
In my experience, it is already calming back down.
Just with that single case study of a topic, yeah there's a downhill trend to be noted.
Edit: oh hey, the flagging actually worked this time. lol
That's not the definition of "conspiracy" I'm familiar with. Perhaps OP could provide some examples of the conspiracy comments they're referring to.
But they do have evidence. And boy, do they want to tell you about their evidence, and point you to their sources.
There is a growing amount of users that are coming up with interesting comments
"conspiracy" is usually something a reader do not understand, lack details, knowledge or simply just the context, or is confused about something, it's ok, it happens
Use that as an opportunity to challenge your method of thinking, acquire new knowledge, and develop argumentation skills to challenge something you feel is wrong
Argumentation remains the best weapon to fight misinformation
It's not interesting if everyone thinks the same
As long as we remain civil, we should encourage each other to challenge our views and ideas
Argumentation does not fight misinformation. Study after study shows that people rarely change their minds, even when faced with seemingly incontrovertible evidence. We have an innate bias to accept information that confirms our beliefs and reject information that does not. No amount of argumentation will sway a convinced flat earther or QAnon believer.
I haven't lived in San Francisco in decades so I find those discussions uninteresting. Those can either show the demographics of the HN audience or the Bay Area oriented tech world, or both.
Have never seen climate change denial on HN. When the COVID pandemic started HN hosted quite a few conversations about origins, severity, treatments, vaccine effectiveness, etc. That toned down over time but I still see posts almost daily about the possible origins of the virus, which probably interests some people but seems mostly irrelevant to me.
Despite commonly expressed beliefs to the contrary here, HN is also an echo chamber even if different and sometimes better.
Out of curiosity, do you have citations for these studies?
You can do your own research if you don't find my "repeating something" persuasive. As Dr. Johnson put it, "I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
I didn’t, actually.
> but I have read articles and books by actual scientists because I have an interest in cognitive biases
Yes, I was hoping you’d be able to recommend some, but thanks anyway.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
The doubtful are often the most passionate advocates
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761038595...
The act of debate tends on average to reinforce existing beliefs not forge new opinions.
Slowly educating or misinforming a forum or newsgroup over a couple of years by sharing dozens of interesting links and writing a book’s worth of novel analysis is a dying hobby.
OMG we are going to hell
I don't qualify as I'm a recent observer
cast me as one who has not vaxxed