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Comment by chrismarlow9 | Hacker News Reader

My experience in the past 5-10 years on Reddit is:

- the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth.

- the users can be very easily gamed in comments to vote one way or another just by the initial voting being negative or positive (aka most just vote with the trend)

- the opinions all come from a bias of urban and major metro area people. It's painfully obvious they don't understand any mindset outside of this one.

- it wasn't always this way.

I agree with you, the quality went down as the quantity went up, and it may be possible to use the comments, but using the vote data as a signal of truth is going to produce a terribly narrow minded AI.

View on HN

> the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth

Probably the best example is legal type advice.

Personal example: The whole situation with internet archive and their e-book lending process. I was vocal that they didn’t have a leg to stand on and would lose. The comment was just about the legal situation.

I was downvoted to hell for that opinion and identified as some sort of book publisher advocate/ internet archive hater. As was anyone else predicting a loss or just raising questions.

Personally I love the internet archive, but I didn’t think they had a chance at winning.

But go by the comments and it was a slam dunk win because of some idea of “freedom” the comments and voters had. And yet they lost the lawsuit…

Interestingly, here on HN the response seem to be a generally more balanced. That’s not an endorsement of HN all the time, but it was an interesting contrast.

I see the same thing with the situation surrounding the game "Dark and Darker". The TL;DR is that the game is likely stolen intellectual property and there is a lawsuit directed at the publisher and one of the developers. The lawsuit will likely prevent the game from being released, so the prevailing opinion on reddit is that the whole thing is an unjustified shakedown, despite the copious amount of evidence that the publisher stole intellectual property.

I struggle to find the right word for this, but I find that Redditors with 10K+ comment karma have an "attitude" that pervades how they respond on virtually every topic. There's this sense of faux-civility and if you have an opinion that slights them in some way the mask comes off and you end up with hostility or sardonic replies that completely misconstrue your point. Then there tends to be a dogpile with downvotes.

Yes, I know reddit can be valuable for niche and non-contentious topics but such examples are becoming increasingly rare. Snark and combativeness pervades the site and it seems to be a function of the voting system and monkey-see, monkey-do from how commenters are rewarded in the default subreddits for this kind of behavior.

I dread AI models being taught to comment like a redditor.

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