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Comment by mhl47 | Hacker News Reader

Side note: What is going on with these comments on Mathstodon? From moon landing denials, to insults, allegations that he used AI to write this ... almost all of them are to some capacity insane.

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Almost everywhere on the internet is like this. It's hn that is (mostly!) exceptional.

The “mostly” there is so important! But also HN suffers from other problems (see in this thread the discussion about over policing comments, and calling fast hyperbolic and inflammatory).

And don’t get me started in the decline on depth in technical topics and soaring in political discussions. I came to HN for the first, not the second.

So we are humans, there will never be a perfect forum.

> So we are humans, there will never be a perfect forum.

Perfect is in the eye of the moderator.

Have you opened a twitter thread? People are insane on social media, why should open source social media be substantially different? x)

I refrain from any of those X, mastodon, etc. so let me ask a question:

are all equally bad? Or same bad but a different aspect? E.g. I read often here that X has more disinformation, and right wing propaganda, while mastodon here was called out on another topic.

Maybe somebody active in different networks can answer that.

Moderation and the algorithms used to generate user feeds both have strong impacts. In the case of mastodon (ie activitypub) moderation varies wildly between different domains.

But in general, I'd say that the microblogging format as a whole encourages a number of toxic behaviors and interaction patterns.

Mastodon depends a lot on which instance you're at. Smaller more focused communities can be truly excellent, way better than bigger social medias.

The open ones where anyone can sign up have been a horrible experience to me. It's left me feeling that mastodon is bloat and a forum would suffice.

X doesn't let you use trans as a word and has Grok spewing right-wing propaganda (mechahitler?). That self-selects into the most horrible people being on X now.

I find the same kind of behavior on bigger Bluesky AI threads. I don't use Mathstodon (or actively follow folks on it) but I certainly feel sad to see similar replies there too. I speculate that folks opposed to AI are angry and take it out by writing these sorts of comments, but this is just my hunch. That's as much as I feel I should write about this without feeling guilty for derailing the discussion.

No wonder. Bluesky is where insane Twitter people go when they get too insane for Twitter.

That is how peak humanity looks like.

The truth is, both deniers and believers are operating on belief. Only those who actually went to the Moon know firsthand. The rest of us trust information we've received — filtered through media, education, or bias. That makes us no fundamentally different from deniers; we just think our belief is more justified.

Some beliefs are more supported by evidence than others. To ignore this is to make the concept of belief practically useless.

Yeah. My point is you have not seen any of the evidence. You just have belief that evidence exists. Which is a belief and not evidence.

Yes, we have seen evidence: videos, pictures and other artifacts of the landing.

I think you don't know what evidence means. You want proof and that's for mathematics.

You don't know that you exist. You could be a simulation.

But isn't that the same kind of evidence that the deniers also seen? They also saw some images and videos and decided to conclude the other way around.

The fact that I know I exist is the only thing I know for sure. Whether I am simulation or a soul or whatever word you want to call it is irrelevant.

Just to carry this line of reasoning out to the extreme for entertainment purposes (and to illustrate for everyone how misguided it is). Even if you perform a task firsthand, at the end of the day you're just trusting your memory of having done so. You feel that your trust in your memory is justified but fundamentally that isn't any different from the deniers either.

This is actually true. Plenty of accidents has happened because of this.

I am not saying trusting your memory is always false or true. Most of the times it might be true. It's a heuristic.

But if someone comes and deny what you did, the best course of action would be to consider the evidence they have and not assume they are stupid because they believe differently.

Let's be honest, you have not personally went and verified the rocks belongs to Moon. Nor were you tracking the telemetry data in your computer when the rocket was going to Moon.

I also believe we went to Moon.

But all I have is beliefs.

Everyone believed Early was flat 1000s years back as well. They had solid evidence.

But the humility is accepting you don't know and you are believing and not pretend you are above others who believe exact opposite..

It's a misguided line of reasoning because the "belief" thing is a red herring. Nearly everything comes down to belief at a low level. The differences lie in the justifications.

As you say, you should have the humility to consider the evidence that others provide that you might be wrong. The thing with the various popular conspiracy theories is that the evidence is conspicuously missing when any competent good faith actor would be presenting it front and center.

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