I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic (2022) | Hacker News Reader

I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic (2022)

kg.dev

16 pointsitsuka8 comments

My perspective: HN tends more toward pedantry than toxicity. But unless one has an extremely fragile ego, perhaps there’s something to learn from sharpening up one’s arguments. I find HN far less toxic than other discussion sites. I don’t doubt there are reflexively toxic contributors here; but a reasonably strong culture keeps it mostly in check.

Agreed - within a specific context I don't find the comments described in the article to be toxic. Obviously not always the right approach with loved ones but in a mostly pseudonymous space where people largely have a shared understanding of what to expect, those types of comments sound perfectly reasonable. There was no name-calling or unnecessary ad hominems. This is where we come to debate, not to provide emotional support (for the most part, although that can happen as well).

That said, I do still think it's important to soften the language wherever possible, if only to strengthen the impact of your argument. Saying "I think you're wrong" vs. "You're wrong" can represent a world of a difference in how much of the meaning of your message is received and the productivity of the ensuing conversation. Any amount of defensiveness or perceived aggression can quickly snowball and derail.

The silent/drive-by voting is perhaps the only part of HN that feels toxic. And I'm guilty of it too. If voting were restricted to those who post replies, especially downvotes, that would solve it.

I find this overemphasis on politeness and kindness (endemic in the great white north) makes it impossible to have a real, meaty discussion. We can't have serious discussions about problems if we're always worried about hurting each other's feelings. Facts are facts, cannot be replaced by feelings or beliefs, no matter how much wishes so. So, no, let's not water down the discussion just to preserve each other's egos, either in HN or in real life.

I agree that the voting can feel icky. It's just too low-content and ambiguous to be that useful of a signal. I think number of replies would be a better signal, but it's also easy to post something inflammatory and get a ton of knee-jerk replies. Though maybe under a reply-based scoring system people would learn to just let those comments die.

With regards to your second paragraph, I think the problem is that most real, meaty discussions are not a simple matter of factual right and wrong. If it really is that cut-and-dried then there's usually not much conversation to be had. When it comes to a lot of interesting discussions there's always going to be opinions and perspectives and feelings involved. Respecting that will get people to open up more and put more effort into explaining their point of view, and will result in less defensiveness and people trying to "own" each other. It feels good to do a big show of rhetoric and really drive your point home but it's almost always detrimental to reaching a shared understanding.

HN is the only social network that I still use, if you can even call it that.

Effective moderation, thoughtful content, and a simple design that gets out of the way.

It's the only content source that hasn't been poisoned by demands of increased user engagement and tracking.

Please don't ever change, HN.

> As a 20-something-year-old tech bro, I’m no stranger to this attitude of “I’m smarter than you, so I’m going to pick your ideas apart and tell you exactly why you’re wrong.” It’s a mindset I’ve moved away from since I first recognized it in college...

And yet, this 20-something-year-old tech bro still thinks he's smart enough to lecture the HN community about how toxic we are.

I've learned a lot here by watching people with opposing viewpoints try to pick each others' ideas apart. As long as that's done through well-reasoned civil conversation rather than hurling insults, I think it's one of the best parts of HN.

> And yet, this 20-something-year-old tech bro still thinks he's smart enough to lecture the HN community about how toxic we are.

Agreed, rather patronizing at that. There's nothing wrong with arguing the point, as long as it stays on the point and does not become a personal attack.

I think there's less toxicity here than this person points out.

The one thing you would notice about this website if you view it as often as scrolling the new posts constantly like I do is that there is a problem with reposting or people not being aware that the thing was already posted and a general laziness about checking if a thing was already posted. Also a whole lot of trend following in the guise of original thought. Especially with LLMs and machine learning in general.

There's also the really strange phenomena of people just posting links to Wikipedia for a thing with no context, and I always find those very hilarious because I wonder what the person posting it was thinking and what they were trying to communicate by posting it.

There's also a thing that you notice where everybody on here pretty much just follows a work week schedule and most of the posting happens during the week and weekends everyone's off basically from hacker News. The heat map is very predictable. Even Time Wise, during the day for the United States is where the majority of the posts happen and during the middle of the night early morning stuff just trickles in. There's almost no reason to ever look at the front page on here because you could very easily keep up with just reading new.

Hacker News in general is very tame. It's very predictable. And it's kind of not actually all that innovative with original thought, except for very rare exceptions on occasion. But it's the easiest "social network" link posting and commenting website to get along with by far.

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