Hacker News (HN) – Part 1: analysis
blog.osm-ai.net
blog.osm-ai.net
I find myself doing this, but I chalked it up to aging and the reality that I may eventually have no choice but to work for one of the companies I have ridiculed online.
I am curious, why is that? Is the medium less safe than before (e.g., unpleasant interactions)? Or is it a high effort to engage in a discussion, and perhaps there are other priorities now?
Perhaps something else
1. I use my real name, which has a strong cooling effect on the kinds of stuff I write. I'm not going to get into a flame war or say career-ending things under my real name. I do this deliberately to force me to keep my responses as high quality as I can.
2. As I temper what I write based on today's norms and taboos, I also have to think about (guess) what might be taboo in 10, 20, 30 years. Assume HN will be searchable forever. People today have a habit of drudging up things that their opponents wrote decades ago, and measuring them against today's (more restrictive) yardstick. I've told jokes back in the 90s that were benign and funny then, but would get me fired today. Imagine people decades from now reading the innocent things I am writing today and how they will be offended by it!
I am still a bit conflicted tbh about what to do concerning that. The accounts don't really get deleted, and it is not far-fetched to imagine tools that correlate the styles accross multiple accounts (so, one mistake, and the identity is unveiled).
Perhaps a similar effect eventually takes hold on many of the contributors, and for the ones who can't moderate themselves to the culture here, I guess they'll recess into lurkers or simply go away elsewhere.
This is my sense of why pg picked a balance number, not a + and - number separately.
Well, it is just outliers in 2023. This is an upward trend since 2020.
> but the binning is also a full year and the 'idle year' is counted in a weird clippy (i.e. looking at calendar year rather than elapsed year) way
Granted, and I acknowledge this limitation. My idea, however, is that when studying many users in the same manner, this will even out. Why? Because a full calendar year implies somewhere between 0-2 elapsed years. So the average elapsed year, over many users, is 1 year.
I double checked. I don't really see an issue. The only specific thing that affects 2023 is that I removed the users seen / last seen in 2024 (since it is not complete year). The aggregation is simple also: count the users first seen, grouped by year. count the users last seen, grouped by year.
There was a separate issue though (I didn't filter out the "dead" and "deleted" stories / comments). I fixed that and updated the article. Some values changed, but the patterns and conclusions stands.
Just to double check we're talking about the same thing: The red line is 'users who have been inactive for a year or more, at the time of the aggregate point'. So, for instance, for 2016 you'd have a point for 'users with a year+ inactivity, counted from 2016 back'.
That will be great! Please don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything I can help with.
> Just to double check we're talking about the same thing: The red line is 'users who have been inactive for a year or more, at the time of the aggregate point'. So, for instance, for 2016 you'd have a point for 'users with a year+ inactivity, counted from 2016 back'.
Not quite. It is means the user has been last seen in that year (2016). By "last seen" I mean the user last shared story or comment (separate graphs) was that year.
> So to be part of the red value for a given year, you have to be seen in that year and then what? Be idle for a year after that?
Exactly! Last seen: this is year of their last contribtuion (story / comment).
A user shared their first story in 2012, and last one in 2016: 2012 is when they were first seen, and 2016 is when they where last seen. So, on the blue line, they are part of 2012, and on the red line, they are part of 2012
> What's the connection between seen-ed-ness and idleness?
If I am last seen in 2016, then I am idle since then, no?
That is correct.
> What happens if you cut off the data at 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, etc and plotted those graphs? You'd see a different (rather than merely truncated) graph, no? Maybe even a different trend. So if my understanding is right, this is a pretty wiggly metric. The history of something you want to use as a historical trend line should not change as you append more data.
I see your point, but I don't see how it is avoidable. From my knowledge, any user churn metric will suffer the same effect: If you consider a user is churned after two weeks of inactivity, then this will change if you change the cut-off (the last two weeks of the this month? the two weeks before them? ...etc).
Even if you measure the "elabsed time" instead of "last seen", the cut-off will change your curve.
Extreme example: If you assume a user is churned after 1 year of inactivity (elapsed time since last activitiy), then a user that shared one story in 2007, and then a second story in end of 2023, will apear as active. If you change the cut-off from 2023 to 2022, then the user will appear as inactive.
You can define a metric such that future data doesn't affect past data. Here's a straightforward one: a user is inactive at time t if they haven't posted in the period between t and t - k where k some constant time period one picks. So let's say k is a year and you're looking at active users per year†. So in your last example, the user would be counted as active in 2007 and 2008, counted inactive in 2009 to 2022 and would count as active in 2023. If you truncate the data at 2022 nothing changes.
† year is probably too big of a window for this (I'd take something like a month) but let's stick with it for now
1. I am making a proxy for churn (last seen == end of subscription in this product).
2. You are looking for active users (yearly / monthly / ...)
I think your suggestion (point 2) is definitely an important view, but it doesn't conflict with the need for point 1.
Sorry if this is self-evident, I will just leave this link for reference on such metrics: https://userpilot.com/blog/product-engagement-metrics/
In any case, I am happy to help: if you would like an export of the data, or the DB dump, let me know. And I very much looking forward for your analysis :)
It would probably be useful to separate the churn of throwaway accounts and the ones that cross some engagement threshold - 50 comments or something like that.
I will look into that. Cheers
Leave the emotion out of the equation, and HackerNews becomes way calmer for you.
The same story you submitted that failed gets talked about/discussed when submitted by another -- eh! All the smart people shred your comment -- ah, let's take a walk.
from my perspective, it's relieving to see that the number of users has remained mostly constant in recent years. of course it's selfish to think in this way, but almost no "social media" or UGC-based platform that i've used has actually become better or more useful to me as it became (much) larger.
this kind of fast growth in users (beyond some size) often leads to a shift in the culture that made preexisting users participate in the first place, leading to a loss in overall quality of the platform as a whole. if the growth is gradual enough, then new users eventually figure out how to fit into the culture or leave.
i guess i've said nothing that isn't obvious to people who have used a computer before, basically "yay no eternal september for HN yet", but i digress.
I was watching The Synanon Fix on HBO, this weekend, and towards the end of the first episode, we see the original addicts, being replaced by the more lucrative "lifestylers," and I suspect that the next episodes will be downhill, from here.
The app I just wrote and released, is picking up steam, but slowly. That's deliberate. We're not doing any promotion, and it's giving us a chance to make course corrections. By the time people start piling in (and they will, but it will never be more than a rounding error to many social media apps), I think it will be in extremely good shape.
In my own analysis, comments in a thread have a recent-user bias and roughly 30-40% of an article's comments will come from the last 3-4 years of users. I found this to hold true for many large threads over the past 5 years, though I haven't yet exhaustively demonstrated this yet simply because I don't do HN analysis that often.
What that means practically is that the folks who post on this site are constantly changing. I also, generally, find that the most contentious threads on this site tend to have a relatively stronger recency bias among its posters.
By that regard, eternal September is ever present: the posts on this site weigh toward recent posters. I'd be curious to see if that effect can be explained by throwaways and sock puppet posters but I'm not sure of any reliable way to identify those especially as historic karma counts aren't kept for users.
While I have more robust models that work a lot better, a very simple method I've found is that the more recent the upper percentiles of posters are on a thread, the less I will like it: to me Eternal September is here. Of course my user here is ancient from 2009. The numbers just quantify that there's been a change in audience since I joined, a wholly unsurprising fact.
basically, quality(new user + time) = quality(old user), as long as the proportion of new users/old users remains small. of course it's subjective as to where you put this value though. i just think it hasn't been reached yet here.
What I assert based on data (simply map the comments in to the join date of their authors and make a distribution) is that most large threads with a lot of discussion on this site have a recency bias: newly joined users post a disproportionate amount on the website. At any given time, any given thread will be more heavily commented on by newer users. Given that observation, Eternal September is largely personal: do you still value the content on the site given that recent posters create more of it. For me the answer, as borne our in data, is no. I find from ~ 2016 a change in the types of discussions on the site and find that the newer the poster distribution skews from that time period onward the less interesting the discussion becomes to me. That's really all. I'm glad that you still find value in the site but that makes sense: you're a newer user. Of course this may be your second or even nth account in which case I'm obviously wrong, but what I can be certain about is myself and my own preferences, and even those change over time.
so i think we agree on everything, except that you're comparing pre-2016 to now, vs. me comparing 2020 to now, which leads to the opposite conclusions. excuse me for being a part of the less interesting era of posters ;-)
When I joined HN, hacking was mostly for nerds. The real important tech people worked on chips or devices and the money makers were in finance. This has changed. With it has come an interest in lurid tech coverage, like the existence of sites like "Techdirt", and something about software has led to the growth of a tabloid style news interest in it in a way that never happened for hardware (probably an artifact of the rise of tech being concomitant and convergent with the evolution of the Internet.) There's also been a lot of other changes going on in the greater world as the internet has become a larger part of our lives. I suspect those changes outside "in the real world" that eventually finding itself into here.
For me the antidote has been more focused conversations on other sites like Discord or BlueSky but this is all very personal.
> newly joined users post a disproportionate amount on the website.
What is your definition of a new user?
> For me the answer, as borne our in data, is no. I find from ~ 2016 a change in the types of discussions on the site and find that the newer the poster distribution skews from that time period onward the less interesting the discussion becomes to me.
I am curious: Can you elaborate on how such analysis is being made?
A poster that joined in the last 2-3 years.
> I am curious: Can you elaborate on how such analysis is being made?
Try doing analysis on the time at which posters in a thread joined this site. I weigh their dates based on the number of times they comment in a thread. If you do that you'll see a recency bias. The mass of the distribution is clumped more heavily in the last 3 years since the article's submission. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. People are probably much more energized to comment when they first join and eventually get bored and stop. You point out a really similar effect out in your own analysis about posters that stop posting after a year.
I have made some casual observations that it would be nice to know whether the broader data supports what I have seen. For instance, one weird thing that I have noticed, is that antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile. It may just be by imagination.
Possibly more importantly, but also something should be approached with caution and sensitivity would be analysis of comments to identify people in mental distress. I know of a few HN users that have taken their own lives and have wondered if there was enough information in their comments to allow someone to provide pre-emptive support.
While it's definitely preferable to encrypt private communications among all people including the "nothing to hide" types who generally behave well within societal norms, the types who don't behave as well feel a greater need to encrypt.
My hypothesis is broadly similar to yours, that comments like this come from individuals with a more adversarial view of the world.
Tbh, while I was working on this, I did struggle with forming hypotheses to test, or even a suitable manifold for the different items/users (e.g., I didn't know some of the users share the PGP keys). Unsupervised methods were not very satisfying in uncovering such hypotheses as well.
There is also the point you raised about how to share (or what to do with) some of these correlations. For example, concerning mental illness, as much as I would love to uncover that due to my sheer curiosity, I am really concerned about what I would see.
Brand new account commenting with very low value but not worth flagging. For example "I read the article yesterday" or "Why is this article even on HN?". I've seen a couple that had negative karma on the first days. Often though it's simply spam and the account soon gets shadow-banned though I don't understand the process that does that. Example user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151
I think part of the confusion that I had was that I didn't know about the downvoting option at the beginning.
I think it will be really great of HN releases the scores of the comments.
I think the tradeoff there is that the HN submitter crowd are very fast to the draw. I'll often encounter a story elsewhere that I want to hear from HN about, so I'll do a search and find it was submitted 15 minutes ago, or even days ago (and I wonder what RSS fueled craze people must go through to find and post things so fast). Of course, for me those are the best cases, because I can go through and read what people think and reply without having to wait for the uptick. But no karma for the slow.
I do agree with your point, but unfortunately I was limited by what is available from the APIs: the upvotes for the comments were not provided. I couldn't find a proxy for it either. Thus, I couldn't include it in the analysis
You could say, there might be people who keep posting stories even though the don't get upvoted, but that would be kind of irrational. If the community doesn't seem to be interested in what they post, they will stop doing so sooner or later.
Probably many people stop sharing in this case indeed. But for those who don't, I guess the idea is: eventually, if you keep sharing, you can collect upvotes here and there, and eventually the karma will go up
On a similar note, sometimes i wonder where the high profile users who leave the platform move into (if anything), there doesn't seem to be a lot of options. Do they switch to alt accounts? turn into lurkers? maybe go off the grid?
At this point there’s too much noise on the internet for good long term, long form discussion like we had on irc and forums and frankly I’m not sure where that lives today.
HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang
"[..] frankly I’m not sure where that lives today"
I wish I knew.
Being a digital native (albeit an old one) and never having been very social in real life I notice that this trend drives me increasingly into real world interactions. I always found trade fairs, conferences, meet-ups and especially networking events a bit ridiculous and yet I attended more of them after the pandemic than in the decades before and very strangely I enjoyed it.
"HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang"
Amen to that!
You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun and for what, so you don't bother anymore.
And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.
But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse.
Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse.
Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.
But it's important to remember that it's a balance that you can't see. If your comment has a 1, that could have been 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes in the time since you posted the comment. And if you wait awhile, more often than not it will go back up. I've had comments hit a -2 and then end up being a 5, or even more. It's all organic.
It's best not to overreact because you happened to look when the balance was a little more negative than positive, and it's useful to consider the possibility that there are 9 upvotes and 10 downvotes to make your comment sit at a zero.
I empathize with what you are saying in the parent post about being cautious not to create a firestorm of people who are offended by your post. But this is really only an issue early on when your karma is low, and that's when it feels the most negative. Sometimes I post things that folks don't like, getting a -1 or a -2 or even -3- but ultimately the impact of that comment to your karma is capped. I don't think it's possible to, say, get a -57 (your current karma) and zero out your account.
EDIT: Oh, according to HN Undocumented, it actually does reduce your user karma even if the comment itself can't go past -4 [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...]. But it is important to remember that by that point the comment is dead and only users with showdead turned on can even see it anymore. And of course flamewar protection can disable the downvote button (at least the convenient one) when it is triggered, and as a story itself ages downvoting and even upvoting gets automatically turned off.
After you've been posting for a long time and your karma grows into the thousands, having a post be unpopular is basically a non-issue. Obviously you should still adhere to the guidelines and not get yourself removed due to misbehavior, but you just don't have to worry about it much.
Still, this community works best when we take HN's guidelines to heart. Everyone wants to be treated with kindness and the benefit of the doubt, and trying to build that into your own posts helps maintain that community.
One can start to feel a certain pride in that. (Of course, that shouldn't become the purpose of commenting.)
Especially when the comment is either 100% factual, e.g. “1+1 does not equal ‘an Iguana’” or where someone clearly states a personal opinion “I’m not partial to eating Iguanas, myself”.
HN is great for what it is. Gathering 2 cents from everyone. I've only had a great time adding my positive 2 cents, and I continue to enjoy learning from everyone else's.
So now my parent comment is +5 and the comment you responded to is 0. Of course, though shall not mention downvotes is one of the cardinal rules of this club, so warranted again I am sure. Guilty as charged.
I appreciate the empathy. If more people would just lay out their counterarguments and objections, that would be discourse. But so long as downvotes are used the way they are, any discomforting or nonconforming facts will continue to simply be downvoted, which is no environment for challenging existing ideas. An environment for whatever these environments are.
And as long as any system relies on dictatorship and censorship, as all of these systems do, there will never be true intellectual discourse.
Yes, there needs to be a way to encourage responsible behavior. But that is not done through censorship. Not even through democracy really... as modern politics shows.
Then what would? Not a topic of discourse here. Sadly.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
The guidelines want you to be kind, which is orthogonal to right.
I’d say it’s mostly orthogonal. It’s easier to be mean and right than kind, which is probably why there are so many more comments that are. A very rare some of the time, being right also requires a dose of meanness, which is a lot less fun for everyone involved.
Ok that’s interesting, a new definition on me. I see orthogonal as attributes at right angles, a measure of perpendicularity. I don’t see it as an indicator of attribute independence.
So if kind and right are orthogonal, this means you can (mostly) be one or the other but not (usually) both.
But a quick google shows your usage is common/normal. Hmm, lovely English. TIL something. Thanks for explaining.
Edited to add: consider "independence" and orthogonality in vector spaces, if you want to get mathematically precise about it.
(not suggesting HN ever takes this route)
However, you often can't retroactively determine someone's intent over the Internet. Therefore, you have to start somewhere. If you're a cynic, I guess you assume everyone is out to offend or hurt others. But as an optimist, I tend to assume good faith unless proven otherwise.
It's a problem where the solution is not obvious. There is perhaps an an opportunity to cycle through a series of candidate solutions.
I imagine something like placing a single comment at the top of comments selected from some formula of view-count and score, so that comments at least get some views to get the chance of being upvoted to the point of being seen by the wider community.
It’s also up to the commenters to strategically place their comments if they care that much. No one forces you to write a toplevel comment when there are already 80. If you have something to say in that situation, and you really want a lot of people to hear it, and you’re pretty sure it’s a good fit for HN (the hardest part), then it usually pays off to post a reply instead. You’ll need to morph what you’re saying slightly so that it doesn’t sound weird, but there are tricks to do so.
I still mourn the death of traditional internet forums. There you had long-running threads of proper discussions and exchange. After some time you got a sense of community and started to see the personalities of each individual. And if things ever got out of hand, you had moderation that would keep everybody in check.
But that was when the web was P2P.
Reality is that those fall into the same buckets as well - and each over optimized on some emergent characteristics of their userbase
I think the answer for me is: be done with debating altogether, especially on the internet
My tools are sharp enough and at this point I don’t need to go to anonymous internet arguments to refine my philosophy
Over optimized, or perfectly optimized? I'm sure that people debate whether to use #pragma or #define HEADER_H_ on these things, the debate will be better when done amongst two highly skilled C++ developers who care about the corner cases.
That's why I said niche. The broader a community, the less useful that debate will be, if it even qualifies. Having a fresh CS grad explain that #pragma once is supported in the latest Clang, MSVC and GCC and thus there's never a reason to avoid it are right for whatever small university project they are building, but a seasoned developer is annoyed they still need to target an ancient RHEL release on their mission critical open source project. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is actually a thing, I figure by now #pragma must be good to go even on older LTS distros)
Wow! I didn't expect that! I love these discussions and comments :)
I will do my best to go through all of them :)
Cheers everyone
Edit: oh I missed a 9 in looking at an earlier link, it’ll be a little more than a day from now, unless sama announces a new product, triggering a comment storm.
This is interesting. I find it's very difficult to predict which links do and don't perform on Hacker News, resulting in quite a diverse (to me at least) series of stories. Thanks for the analysis.
There's already been evidence that analysis to identify and attribute authorship across accounts can work surprisingly well.
It doesn't need to be a leaderboard for "all the time", but over a recent window of time.
> Karma conflates comment karma and post karma, so that’s not really the same thing.
I agree, but the limitation that I faced is that I don't have access to the comments upvotes, and I didn't find a satisfying proxy for it either. That is why I dropped it from the analysis.
But I think it can be improved: personalized feed, allow following certain users, ...etc.
I have to imagine that people for whom there’s a primary motivation to be a “winner” in points must quickly lose interest? But maybe I’m just naive to how motivating status could be…
I also don't get the sense that people habitually check the karma of people they are reading or replying to anyway, so it doesn't in and of itself grant much in the way of sway or gravitas in the community. That's much more about being notable or recognizable (other than the obvious "post good comments and stories").
And sure, it does help the sense of "being part of the community" to get to 500 where you are trusted to downvote, but let's be real- it only takes a few good story submissions to get you there if you want to get there fast. I only have 3 submissions that aren't Show HN or my own stuff, and 1 of those is 194 points (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38626454).
And I only posted that story because I was hoping Matthew would elaborate on his position here on HN (as well as wanting to hear what HN thought of his take), since he is a well known HN user.
I still find HN amongst the top places for engaging discussion. It's within the comments, not the postings, that I find eclectic nuggets of gold and learn new things. Moderation is generally very good. At least 10 books I've read in the last year came from HN comments.
One thing I would change is the up-down voting. It adds little. Because I use a text only browser I (assume) don't see voting. So it never occurs to me and have never voted any comment up or down during my stay here. However I find gratuitous flagging and down-voting without the courage to venture a position to be very negative. It simply stymies more challenging discussion, and seems a knee-jerk reaction by an invisible cadre of anti-intellectuals.
Well you would still see the effect of voting. As for the points on comments, only the poster can see it (other than the placement effects, and that low point comments become noticeably grayed out). If you enable showdead (in your settings), you can also see comments that have been flagged or downvoted to death, which I do leave on myself (cause I can take it!)
> However I find gratuitous flagging and down-voting without the courage to venture a position to be very negative. It simply stymies more challenging discussion, and seems a knee-jerk reaction by an invisible cadre of anti-intellectuals.
That's an easy stance to take, but I think it's more nuanced. Sure, when there's no explanatory replies at all it's frustrating to understand the manner in which other readers disagree. But when someone repeatedly posts statements that are very commonly posted by others, and with a basic look around at other interactions is obviously unpopular, disproven or even problematic, it's not exactly the responsibility of passers by to have to consistently regurgitate the same rationale for why it's unpopular or problematic every time the user posts- if the same debunked, disproven, or otherwise disagreeable arguments show up every time an article about Product A hits the front page, I don't think it's fair to measure how just, intellectual, or morally correct the two sides of the disagreement are just by how willing they are to expend energy arguing about it.
In fact, the person with the less popular opinion is going to have an incentive and desire to post assertions of those opinions a lot more than others will have the energy to challenge them.
Also there's no sense posting a sibling reply that says the same thing. If one person already has a reply capturing the essence of what's wrong with the comment and the comment is still being downvoted, it's probably because other readers agree with the reply.
Finally, as I posted elsewhere, a lot of folks see the first changes to their comment's score as indicative of the overall community's opinion but that's rarely the case. Sure you may get a bunch of downvotes in the first hour of posting it, but then over the next few hours that balances out and goes in the other direction. And, complaining about downvotes usually gets more downvotes.
Yes I do. But I don't see any buttons to vote other's posts. Presumably those are one of the few things that use JavaScript on HN. I don't miss that. If I want to interact with another comment I reply, which I think is the right thing to do, or just move on.
> That's an easy stance to take
Do you mean it's simplistic? I don't find it "easy" to be left with a low opinion of fellow posters.
> when there's no explanatory replies at all it's frustrating
Exactly, that's what I dislike. But let's talk about why that's "frustrating".
> statements that are very commonly posted by others
I wouldn't say that characterises my comments. I always try to add something original.
> it's not exactly the responsibility of passers by
We disagree here. Yes it kind of is. Nobody is compelled to vote. It's much better to get a reply, even a negative one, than a vote either up or down. The only reason it even matters is that I learned downvoted posts become invisible, which seems like a form of censorship, no?
> I don't think it's fair to measure how just, intellectual, or morally correct the two sides of the disagreement are just by how willing they are to expend energy arguing about it.
Now we're getting interesting. I strongly believe in the principles of disputation - that is to say - conversations always have a deeper "Socratic/Hegelian" purpose to learn and change, not to "win" or "sway" some barometer. That's why I make the effort with people. I suppose I consider it good manners to reciprocate, and in my mind I equate voting but not commenting with laziness. Therefore I do make a moral judgement about that I feel comfortable with.
> changes to their comment's score as indicative of the overall community's opinion but that's rarely the case.
Sure. Though as I said, popularity contests are not what concern me. It is the deleterious effects of oblique censorship that accrue from casual, unreflective downvoting that seem like fault of HN.
The frustration comes from putting the effort and thought into a comment, only to see it hidden from others by a minority that dislike what is being said.
Like you I notice that after many days my most downvoted posts fly back up to very high values. But that's irrelevant because my focus on that subject has moved on and the opportunity was lost to interact with others because a comment was hidden from them. The vanity of "overall score" doesn't figure in my reasoning at all.
I mean it's an easily justifiable take. You could call it simplistic, but I think that's not an exact synonym for "lacks nuance"
> I don't find it "easy" to be left with a low opinion of fellow posters.
My meaning is that it's easy to take the stance that a downvote without a comment is never justifiable, but yet I think there are valid cases where it is, which is what I was getting at.
> > statements that are very commonly posted by others
> I wouldn't say that characterises my comments. I always try to add something original.
I've only read the comment I'm replying to. I didn't go read your comment backlog and tailor my response to how I perceive your behavior. I'm sure your posts are just fine, after all the one I am replying to is a pretty good comment. And I don't see any signs of downvoting.
EDIT: Oh, no it's been downvoted a bit, my bad. It didn't stop a discussion from happening though. I do want to clarify that I'm coming in here to discuss what you've posted, not speaking specifically about whether this post should be downvoted. It's probably somewhat unfair that the original post here is downvoted, but that's almost certainly because folks have the same opinion that I do, that it is in fact warranted to downvote without comment sometimes. And, by luck of me coming in here, I have satisfied your request about getting context on why you're being downvoted!! But to help out, I gave you an upvote :-)
> > it's not exactly the responsibility of passers by
> We disagree here. Yes it kind of is. Nobody is compelled to vote. It's much better to get a reply, even a negative one, than a vote either up or down. The only reason it even matters is that I learned downvoted posts become invisible, which seems like a form of censorship, no?
Censorship comes from a position of power. No one user on HN has more power than you, save for dang, who is known to wield it very well.
It's kind of strange to declare the ability for the population to influence what words sit at the top as censorship. After all, downvotes have the inverse effect of pushing the more interesting stuff up, while acting as a way for the community to temper itself, and act as a signal that you're going to have to do better to prove your point than what you did. Because of HN's format, I do not want to have to see 400 comments saying "I do not agree." with no further commentary. If we eliminate the downvote, then that will be what happens.
And the reason I'm certain it will happen is the same reason that I mention the disparity between the desire for holders of unpopular opinions to flood spaces with those opinions and the relative lack of energy of people to continuously fight those unpopular opinions. If 10 people post the same uninformed comment, I can certainly respond to every one clarifying their ignorance, but a lot of people are going to read that comment and miss my clarification. I do think it's important for the rationale for downvoting to be present, but I just contend that there is not an absolute that says we should simply put a small asterisk next to each thing that is unreasonable and hope that everyone reads the full context.
> > I don't think it's fair to measure how just, intellectual, or morally correct the two sides of the disagreement are just by how willing they are to expend energy arguing about it.
> Now we're getting interesting. I strongly believe in the principles of disputation - that is to say - conversations always have a deeper "Socratic/Hegelian" purpose to learn and change, not to "win" or "sway" some barometer. That's why I make the effort with people. I suppose I consider it good manners to reciprocate, and in my mind I equate voting but not commenting with laziness. Therefore I do make a moral judgement about that I feel comfortable with.
This is all fair, and is very true in a Socratic dialog, but that's not the nature of online forums, let alone a tree structure like HN. This is not a 1:1 ordered structured dialog. If I want my opinion to have more sway, I can post it as a leaf node on every part of the tree. If I do that, should I expect you to repeat your rationale for why I'm wrong on each leaf post I make? And on top of that, ignorance is often more common than enlightenment. Especially for heated or otherwise impactful stories, it is very common for the same argument to be posted by tens or hundreds of independent commenters, all in good faith. While yes, in an ideal world each one of them deserves to know why they are being downvoted, it's also expected of them to read at least some other parts of the comment tree, where arguments similar or identical to theirs have indeed been responded to with Socratic fervor already, several hours ago.
> The frustration comes from putting the effort and thought into a comment, only to see it hidden from others by a minority that dislike what is being said.
This gets at a strategic thing that some don't realize about HN: you do not, and in many cases probably should not, post at the top level. Posts at the top level which are at the top of the feed usually have been there for awhile-- they have a gravity by way of having a lot of points. Often, there will be whole pages of subreplies on them. You don't need a single downvote for your toplevel comment to be at the top for 1 minute and immediately drop to page 3.
Instead, discuss on the leafs, or make your opinion known somewhere else in the tree. When you do that, your comment can only drop to the bottom of that tree node unless it is killed by flag or downvote. If you have a 1 point comment that gets no activity, it will just sit in that tree.
Furthermore, if you approach writing your comments gracefully, in a way that gives other participants the benefit of the doubt, and has humility in case your wrong, it is exceedingly rare to be downvoted to death. In my entire time on HN across thousands of posts, it has happened to me maybe once or twice-- and I am not always as agreeable as I'm being on this post.
> only to see it hidden from others by a minority that dislike what is being said.
I do also want to remind you that your comment points are a balance. If you have a 1, that can be 1+0-0 or 1+10-10. If 10 people like your comment and one person dislikes it, that's still 10 points. It is a balance system.
> Like you I notice that after many days my most downvoted posts fly back up to very high values. But that's irrelevant because my focus on that subject has moved on and the opportunity was lost to interact with others because a comment was hidden from them. The vanity of "overall score" doesn't figure in my reasoning at all.
Yeah that's true when it's a top level comment. Again I advise only doing top level comments strategically. When it's a leaf node, shown as one of 3 comments in reply to something else, you are not losing anything-- only when a comment becomes [dead] is it removed from the tree. And I for one will still see your comment, because I have showdead turned on. I recommend it! Truly TOS breaking comments are removed anyway, and it's a good way to understand what the overall community will push out of the tree.
It got downvoted almost certainly because they implied that doomer is the opposite of productive. Would this have been the right place to start a whole debate about whether folks who are realistic about the climate crisis are productive members of society? Probably not.
Sure, they might not have meant it that way, and sure, it's one thing at the end of their post that honestly shouldn't have killed it, but human nature is such, and that probably tells you people are tired of hearing that kind of take.
You see, that's fascinating!
At least for me. Because it acts like a sonar ping revealing the hidden landscape of cultural assumptions and prejudices beneath the surface here.
Also, maybe you're completely wrong. Maybe the reason the comment was attacked is something else.
That's why it amplifies the gripe about blind-downvoting. Surely it would be much better to be able to click on the [dead] link and see "Reason: I dislike the implication that a pessimistic outlook correlates to non-productivity".
Absolutely, total guess here. It's reading the tea leaves of group behavior.
Not to get too philosophical but it comes back to the question of "why we're here".
What I said when I started this discussion remains true. I take the responses people give here seriously (not personally), as in I'll file them in my org notes with extra commentary - the kind I wish I could distil by analysis like; "dude seems really delighted with this idea and is the third person who likes it" or "fell on deaf ears again; reformulate".
Clearly everyone comes to a forum for different reasons. Some to have their ideas validated. Some to look for inspiration. Some to just pass the time idly. Some to pick a fight. Some to spread their views. Some to heal and comfort....
So the machinery will not work perfectly for everyone. My complaints then, are about the machinery and how it (mis)shapes behaviours, not the people. People will be active or lazy as the tools afford them.
But then, I'm probably a weirdo outlier in my reason/use of forums like this - because I use it instrumentally to "people watch" and get to the bottom of their emotional and ethical relation to technology. (And a little confessionally - to share/sympathise)
The more mundane and selfish use I have is to promote the Cybershow (blog/podcast) I work on. Generally I find that well received because "self promotion" is something everybody shares these days.
Anyway thanks for the tips. My feeling remains that the down-voting as currently formulated harms discussion. It needs some tweaking.
Anyway, yeah it's been enjoyable for me too. Thanks for the good discussion :-D
It's not, it would make for a much noisier and much less interesting forum. The whole 'receipts for (or instead of!) downvotes' thing is driven by the (entirely real) unpleasantness of getting downvoted. Nobody ever asks for receipts for upvotes.
It would be better for me, and for the reasons I participate.
> much less interesting forum.
For me it would make it much more interesting
> Nobody ever asks for receipts for upvotes.
Then let me be the first. Most sincerely, I am equally dismayed by having a bunch of random upvotes and no explanation of why that particular point hit home.
Maybe I need to say it explicitly "Why is this being upvoted?" That could lead to some interesting discussions.
Just think of it like here's the balance of thumbs up and thumbs down, and go from there. We don't live in a world where we have perfect information, unfortunately. If you get downvoted on something, feedback that in to the next time you mention it. It may be bad form to complain about downvoting but it's not bad form to start with "I think this is an unpopular opinion (though I'm not sure why yet) but..." and hope that folks bite and tell you why.
It's in your profile, unless I'm misunderstanding the mechanism you have in mind.
Right but the forum has been around for 15+ years and also aims for interestingness for the many users that are not you.
Well that's not true. I've said that I believe getting detailed feedback from a known respondent is better than anonymous up or downvotes, and that since downvotes affect visibility if ones aim is to improve the quality of posting/writing then it's a superior form of feedback.
You call it "noise".
I think that's just where we'll have to differ.
Might I also say that it being a "very, very common" suggestion might bolster my point rather than subtract from it. We're all believers in supply and demand here, right?
Anyway I must hush my tongue as Dang is wagging a finger at me for being too mouthy. :)
respects
It is well known that Hacker News owner company, Y Combinator had Altman as his CEO before he joined OpenAI.