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Comment by gentle | Hacker News Reader

I'm always fascinated by the posters here who insist on second-guessing the writers and the scientists who spend their whole lives studying a topic like this.

No one needs to read your post fessing up to your profound ignorance and the fact that you didn't really read the link.

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I second this, and it tends to be a sitewide issue. HN has really changed over the past 5+ years: went from healthy or interesting skepticism to reddit-style snarkiness and shitposting.

From the guidelines [1]:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

(With that last sentence linking to 9 examples in [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You don't think it's changed? You've been here about as long as we have. At some point you can't rely on it being a noob illusion if a place actually does change. The guideline is not a magic incantation that prevents it from never becoming false. Snarky replies used to be routinely downvoted swiftly, now they are not.

I don't, Meta discussions like this have happened since forever on HN. And attempting to curb them is a good thing.

OPs "comment" on what should be correct behavior on HN is now the top comment and surpasses by far the few people that he is critiquing. And hence our discussion now is all about this meta thing, which means we are not talking about the article.

that is not new

I mean, I can scroll through the hacker news history to 2016 when I started reading, and the comment quality and submission quality is much higher IMO.

As I've said before, there's a reason why my entire social group of programmers (and a lot of programmers I've met from outside it) refers to this pejoratively as The Orange Site.

Might be weird-colored glasses, but I've been here slightly longer and no, I don't think it changed much either.

(Or it could be that I changed along with it, so I don't notice.)

It definitely feels much more homogeneous than it did 10+ years ago. I notice now that in discussions on for example women's rights we exclusively have men talking about how they perceive women to be affected, but "back in my day" it was not uncommon for actual women to share their perspectives. HN has become such a cold house for anyone outside the preferred demographic that they seem to have almost entirely left.

The downvoting here (as well as comment scoring) is probably my least liked thing about the site. It exacerbates the already prominent issue of hivemind and seems to actively lower the quality of discussion. People seem to mostly vote based on emotional reaction. On paper, a downvote just doubles the value of a vote. Meanwhile the graying of comments that never deserved to be downvoted to begin with is infuriating and seems to mostly stifle interesting conversation.

Personally, I advocate for abolishing the downvote and the scoring and switching to randomized comment order.

I'd argue ranking comments per se isn't the issue, it's whether the culture is preserved that encourages useful application of the voting system. Whether any community can preserve their desired culture is arguably the most important factor and it's what the grandparent post is essentially referring to.

On HN the main goal of upranking is if one comment is more interesting/informative than another (or as a group test to see how robust its argument is if the voter has no experience to judge directly). Downranking ime isn't meant to be the method used shift the order of comments but rather to discourage a post that doesn't fit the HN culture/guidelines. OTOH most popular gamified discussion systems don't discourage use of reactionary downvoting, which can creep into other posting cultures.

The problem the grandparent post raises is if signals that voting users would ordinarily use to shape the continued posting culture (eg: downranking comments that don't fit in tone/substance) aren't used like they were intended to be and if the guidelines discourage meta discussion then there isn't any other avenue to inform users what the desired culture should be in practice.

Certainly one can post non-meta comments showing what type of comments one would like (and thankfully for most strictly tech topics here it's still reasonable) but if the culture shifts enough among the silent voting users then the concern is this erodes the quality of discussion as the signals for what is wanted/not wanted get skewed.

Ah yes, wise words from the inflammatory DOGE poster who’s getting flagged and downvoted.

I’m not arguing either side. Just saying that the meta discussion is a discussion that the guidelines try to discourage.

IOW, it’s not really relevant to the article, so it’s not promoting curious, interesting discussion.

So both this discussion as well as the snarky comments you’re arguing against are both not following the guidelines of trying to keep discussion curious and interesting.

There’s always been some of that but it does feel like it’s getting worse. I think there’s a general shift in how people approach Skinner-ized apps and social media, where a couple of generations have been trained to prioritize a number going up, but also something about how politics became both post-factual and unavoidable even in communities which used to avoid it, all of which has driven a lot of former contributors away.

I’m not sure how to rebalance things - and certainly won’t claim to be perfect about not taking the bait myself – but it seems to be slowly starving a lot of communities which don’t have some in-person anchoring.

> Skinner-ized

What does this mean? A quick Google search didn't help me

Arranged like a Skinner box -- something which dispenses reward stimuli for desired behaviours with the aim of maximizing those behaviours.

Interestingly, a Skinner box can be made to dispense rewards randomly after a while, or stop dispensing them entirely -- but the desired behaviour is likely to continue. Think doomscrolling, slot machines, loot boxes, dating apps, etc.

A worthwhile survey of this I was introduced to in my undergrad: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad...

mlekoszek answered very well, so I won’t duplicate their comment but I will note that I used to work with a bunch of neuroscientists and a number of grad students were recruited by tech companies specifically to use their knowledge of human behaviour and addition to boost “engagement” and revenue. There was some talk about ethics but even back then people knew those companies meant it about as much as big tobacco had.

You might read the guidelines, much older than five years, about saying HN has changed, and also saying it's more like reddit.

I don't think I've ever been on a forum that doesn't have comments to that effect regularly.

"It was better a few years ago, it's all going to hell now, we're becoming Reddit/4Chan/Slashdot"

It's the internet forum version of "the youth has gotten lazy, it weren't like this when I were a lad"

I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then.

In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite.

The thing that amuses me most is at the time there would have been a lot of "pro communism" in my responses on anything society related even though I knew absolutely nothing about communism and even less about economics as a whole.

I think this is just the way semi-anon discussions with big age and generation gaps go.

If you live long enough, you might look back at your understanding now and say the same thing. Maybe what we should learn is not to be so certain about our current knowledge.

> In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite.

Me too!

> I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then.

BBS were cool(er) :-)

This is refreshing to hear compared to all of the "HN is becoming Reddit, omg!" comments and threads that pop up every couple weeks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380385

From 2008 :)

Unless, of course, it continually has been becoming Reddit, but Reddit has been constantly changing too ;)

That's hardly isolated to this site. COVID did a number on us.

Fwiw, people have been saying this since the site started. Don't worry. There will always be a safe space for rich assholes to divorce themselves from reality and romanticize their exploitation.

I'm probably guilty of making comments that read this way at times, but it's almost always out of curiosity and a dash of invoking Cunningham's law.

Lately I've started feeding my questions into LLMs to explore these ideas. Given that I will almost certainly never make a decision where an improper understanding of astrophysics is at fault, I'm willing to run the risk of hallucinations leading me to improper conclusions. :)

For the morbidly curious: https://chatgpt.com/share/67dc94a3-07c8-800c-bdbf-039dd2ce50...

(It's funny, I've seen people say that they generally don't even bother with spell checking questions to LLMs because it doesn't seem to make any difference. I was tempted to rerun this before posting to fix the disorganized thoughts in my questions, but I ain't got time for that.)

I love this chat. This is exactly the kind of chat I’ve had with ChatGPT about things like Native American reservations, their history, etc.

Stuff like this is what I love most about these LLMs.

As someone who minored in astronomy and especially loved stuff about stellar life cycles, I didn’t see any red flags in what you were told.

Nice! It's like having a patient neighbor that knows a lot about some topic but, you know, don't bet your life on it being accurate haha.

Thanks!!!

The acronym RTFA is probably older than the mean age of the posters here, for a reason

> the fact that you didn't really read the link

I think this is due to a big flaw in the link aggregator website model. In the forums of yore, we had a post creating a discussion that was a must read, and everything was contained in the same place. Links were part of the post but as side dishes sprinkled over the OP.

In the aggregator model, which is arguably a dumbed-down model of forum, there is no OP. Or more accurately, what can be interpreted as the post is the title of linked content, not the linked content itself. Clicking and reading to an external link is a burden and a disconnection to the discussion on the aggregator. In the end, a lot of discussion occurs based only on the content visible in the aggregator, that is the title. One might regret it, but it's the format pushing this behavior.

Also since there is an endless stream of content instead of threads being dumped, I feel comments are more fire and forget.

PS: did not read the linked post.

Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong.

Also you don't sound "fascinated", so if you're complaining at least be honest about it. There are many more descriptive words than "fascinated".

> Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong.

Isn't that what's they're supposed to do? "Hey we found this thing, here's how we did it." Next week: "Yeah I checked your data and got different results, let's figure out what's different." A few months/years later: "We've figured out where the problems were and now have a better understanding of this."

Yeah - people forget that the true advantage science has over other methodologies is that it accepts that what is believed today could be proved wrong tomorrow by new data.

There are no absolutes, we're just formulating theories to best fit what data we have now, and, if new conflicting data (or even existing data that was misunderstood/misread/misclassified as being irrelevant) disproves our theory we formulate a new one to try and account for the extra data.

Someone I know put this well: "science is just as gullible at following the latest trends. The difference is it corrects itself, where trends never do."

I like that - and it's true, eventually science will correct itself, even in the face of ridicule from its own stalwarts (eg. the way that Robert Atkins was treated by the scientific community, right up until his theory [which was recycled] was proved with empirical data)

I think this is a real problem but your post is an exaggeration. There are cases of fraud in science. There is a reproducibility crisis in some areas. There are political angles and rent seeking wrt grants. But how widespread is it? You're assuming it's close to 100% without evidence. I don't claim to have the exact number but intuitively yours is extraordinary (so it would need extraordinary evidence). I think these issues affect some areas much more than others and some regions more than others. I still believe science is the best way of enquiry for the natural world.

I'm not assuming it's close to 100%, I'm countering the GPs criticism of people who are skeptical about the title. He's saying "how dare you question these science experts!?!" And I'm saying the reason people do that is because scandals like LK99 erode the credibility.

I think on average trusting the experts is the right thing. And by the way LK99 is not even particularly damning, as far as we know it was science working as intended

> Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong.

What do you feel when you post that?

I feel like my tax dollars are wasted and the college students are being lied to with their ever-increasing tuition that somehow promises them a future when their departments are led by liars.

Those are not emotions. What I meant is (I don't mean to ask twice, I'm just clarifying), what drives these comments? Anger? Hate? Is it for the lolz?

It sounds like you just don’t like American universities. Good news is you don’t have to attend them or send your kids to them. There are plenty of universities in the world that are not American.

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