Zed follows up on the search for Matt

Hacker News keeps surprising me. Months ago I thought it was going downhill, but it seems to have stabilized a bit since then.

Reddit still has stuff that's worth reading, but damn, you have to search now. It's a pain.

Not 100% convinced about comment voting promoting group-think: I try (and sometimes fail) to vote on comment quality even if I disagree with the points made. The discussion in this place is routinely exceptional in quality, and it seems to me the few occasions on which the case for group-think could be made could equally be explained by the fact that commenters sourced from such a narrow demographic are likely to do a fair bit of agreeing.

That said, I'd be aghast if we ever descended to the level of reddit.

The irony is that we said the same thing as early redditors about digg.

Part of me likes to believe that the mere fact that so many of us worry about this issue, wish to discuss how to prevent it, and so forth may end up being enough to keep it from happening.

I see so few comments here that deserve significant down voting, but the ones I come across that do have already been trashed to oblivion. Hell, I've had quite a few of mine own comments absolutely crucified and I feel no need to argue most of them. Comments aren't what I'm worried about, it's submissions.

Anyway, on the topic at hand: I agree that Zed did the morally right thing in the situation. Was it what I would have done? Probably not, but only because I don't much care for solving mysteries given almost no evidence or reason to believe something is actually wrong. As for reddit and "social news" sites in general, I stopped actually reading the comments long ago. I liken it to reading comments on Youtube; there is absolutely no redeeming value in it. HN, on the contrary, tends to have more value in the comments than the actual article some of the time. It's very surprising and may be the only thing keeping my rampant cynicism about "intelligence on the Internet" in check, as far as discussions are concerned.

"It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think."

Hmm...what's the benefit of comment voting? What's the signal carried by a high vote on a comment? I guess the intention is "this is worth reading/this is interesting"?

I wonder how the crowd would react to having agree/disagree/interesting/uninteresting buttons? Would that pull some of the 'noise' out into the agree/disagree axis, leaving better signal in the interesting/uninteresting?

If nothing else, it would give the software some traction on finding people who vote disagree+interesting which might help weighting/filtering.

I think the problem is humor.

It's fun, it gets you lots of upvotes because maybe it makes someone smile. But it's too damn easy. It short-circuits real discussion with pop culture references and snarkiness. Conversation is quickly suffocated when solid posts are blanketed with 4chan memes as responses.

What if the number of points for a comment were not the first item in the first line above the comment itself? I am of the opinion that moving the 'x points' text elsewhere, or perhaps hiding it until one has voted or replied to the comment, would be useful. Even simply moving it to the _end_ of the line could help to force people to think about the comment before they think about how everyone else loves the comment.

I have seen that question ("How do we keep our community from collapsing into mediocrity?") asked tens of times, and the answer has been the same every time: " ".

There doesn't appear to be a way, or at least no large community seems to have ever found it on the scale of multiple years.

(I don't mean to advocate that one give up when I say that. What I'd really like to see is some real thought put into it. My real point is all the obvious solutions have been tried, and tried, and tried, and..... if anything's going to work it's not going to be the obvious.)

I agree.

Yeah, because Zed now has a name and number of someone's ass to personally kick. I eagerly await a follow-up, YouTube video, and plausible movie deal. :D

I agree. Especially since there's a socially conditioned stigma against falling for a false alarm when trying to help. It seems to be seen as a display of hysteria on the helper's part. That's why most people act "too cool" to actually do something - better not risk that precious reputation.

Better a few false positives than a false negative.

I think the will to eschew manipulation of others is an admirable one.

You've reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately and feel like writing down.

If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground. You haven't gotten rid of X; you've fragmented your consciousness so that you're no longer aware of X, which makes you think X is gone when really it's continuing to operate. And X can work a lot more mischief now that it's autonomous from the part of you that wants to regulate it.

A straightforward example is the religious fanatic who suppresses his "demonic" impulses. We all know what such people tend to really be like.

Perhaps a more meaningful example for this forum is the kind of person who wants to overcome his fear by motivating himself to think he's not afraid and by executing certain actions to prove it. The trouble with doing this naively is that you can end up not with an absence of fear, but with unconscious fear, which continues to prevent you from doing things, only in ways you can't explain.

Of course, literature is replete with examples of this dynamic. The bottom line is that you can't minimize X in yourself by trying to eliminate it. It seems that a better strategy is to stay aware of X as it is happening. That way X and the part of you that is against X remain in the same field and there is a possibility of integration.

So, counterintuitively, if you really want to minimize something in yourself you have to accept it.

Did you read the commentary about they types of comments his post attracted on reddit? Or some of the commentary about this phenomenon here?

Do you think your comment is more typical of HN or of reddit?