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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

So in regular one on one in person conversation, you can show your "presence" by uttering a simple "mmhmm" or "yeah" or "I understand" when someone is telling you something above your expertise. Humans like to be heard even if it's just an utterance. There's nothing like this online though. Imagine if we allowed posts on hackernews where you just say "cool" or "mmhmm". It adds no value to the conversation. So rather than being quiet and being silent or adding no perceived value to the convo, we come up with misguided opinions because "at least someone needs to hear me" is a thought that goes through our minds.

I mean heck, I could have not written this post.

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This is a more articulate description of something I’ve been thinking of for a while. Tweets, and maybe just internet comments in general, are like a stream of consciousness momentary thought response. Rarely is it a fully formed opinion, but instead it’s an instantaneous opinion that might have left as quickly as it came. Someone insults my cup holders, and I kind of like my car, the cup holders are fine, but for an instant I feel slighted. Then I see they have so many upvotes, and their wrong opinion is being spread. Now it’s my duty to inform the world of the quality of these cup holders, and defend my honor. They can’t just be wrong, they have to be completely wrong, so out comes the exaggerated response. And then, as quickly as it came on, it’s forgotten, and I don’t even notice the next time I use the cup holders that they are kinda shit.

That’s common, but it’s also an artifact of how few topics people are experts in.

The chances of two people on HN happening to both be experts in superconductors or even condensed matter physics / automotive design / … is higher than normal. But there’s a rapid drop off in expertise so most people commenting don’t really understand the specifics.

So, rather than people arguing about the tradeoffs of cup holder placement and material choices etc it just devolves into “Ug like tribe! Things good! Back off!”

With Tesla it seems to revolve around who has Tesla stock, who drives one, who doesn't and who doesn't have Tesla stock and then finally there is your personal attitude towards Elon Musk. That gives you an eight way fight with every faction behaving utterly predictable. I suggest we enumerate the factions and add them to our bios that way we can at least discount that factor.

I think this is a really good analogy for exploring my emotions on the topic.

There are people who make utterances because they want to show they are paying attention, and there are people who make them because they cant stand not being heard. To me, the latter is more distatsefull than the former.

I think it is gross that in the attention economy, the drive for existential validation is reduced to posting "cool" to be seen, and clicking an upvote feels like being part of a conversation. In some sense they are, but it just a very streched and hollow manifestation of human interaction and participation.

My likely arrogant and possibly hyprocirtical conceit that I think what I post into the void is more interesting and substantial than "cool". Still, that doesnt change my feeling on the subject.

This is why I love love love reaction icons. First used these a lot in Slack but now I want them on everything. People can feel like they've acknowledged something (and even provided their sentiment to it if they want) without having to feel like they need to provide an opinion.

100% agreed. Reaction emojis are a huge innovation in online participation, and they serve a lot of the same functions as non-speech behaviors do in group conversation.

I'm in one large Slack where people have contributed an extensive library of custom reaction emojis and it's great. The place has a strong culture and a lot of great in jokes all expressed in relatively few pixels of screen real estate and relatively few seconds of comprehension. It also diverts a lot of energy from what would otherwise be low-value comments.

I thought that's what the upvotes are for.

Upvotes are for what you consider interesting or added value.

That seems to be their theoretical use, much like the downvote is theoretically supposed to be their inverse.

In practice though, it seems that the users of most online communities seem to treat them as an "agree or disagree" button, with dissenting opinions typically being either forced out of a thread or languishing due to the upvote-downvote tug of war generally suppressing a comment's rankings.

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