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Comment by california-og | Hacker News Reader

Back when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.

In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive!

Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see:

https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt

Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.

View on HN

The cynical doomerism of reddit is like an infectious disease that ensnares you in their pit of misery with it's initial blast of catharsis. People whose lives bring them out of that swamp leave reddit and stop contributing, so it's mainly populated with miserable cynical doomers all jerking each other off about how screwed they are. Most of them are teenage/college kids working bottom rung jobs/entry level work/unemployed, with all the naivete that comes with it. Stay away from it.

As someone who’s on Reddit a lot, I completely agree

I was chronically on reddit daily from when Digg collapsed until they pulled the API. I was long overdue to leave by that point anyway.

Now in the last couple years, both my sisters have discovered reddit, and hanging out with them is like the god damn /r/all comments sections all over again. So insidious.

I am very much in the same boat. I still browse every now and then, and now it feels like I can spot a redditor from two opinions/values in a conversation. It's definitely turned more mainstream and more indoctrinating. If Fox News turned our parents political, reddit is doing it to our generation.

I think often times they’re not wrong but then again what do I do with this constant barrage of cynicism, can’t change much anyway

Cynical doomerism isn't limited to low pay jobs. Another super negative place is Team blind, where a lot of contributors are extremely well-paid.

I don't use Blind often, but whenever I do I always feel better about my job afterwards. Yeah, there are definitely parts about my job that suck, but at least it's not that bad.

their cynicism is perfectly understandable once you correctly identified the demographics (which you did), so I'm not sure why you're holding pessimism against poor people with a bleak future; like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts, as there are far more people with "bottom rung jobs" than software developers and VC investors in the bay area.

Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever. I wouldn't call this a "bleak future". I was definitely poor when I was 18, but I wasn't pessimistic. Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a mistake.

"Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a mistake."

Is pessimism a consciouss choice?

You can develop pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook is, it's a conscious choice to not try to do better.

Being pessimistic about pessimism is individual-damaging and socially ruinous.

One can develop pessimism about pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook on pessimism is, it's a conscious choice to not try to figure out the different meanings of that word and how important it is for the proper functioning of democracy.

Maybe read Orwell for a glimpse of mandatory optimism:

"The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one... Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.

with some it's an celebrated lifestyle: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPCJpclgW04/

Indeed most choices we think we "make" are unconscious choices due to our environment. That does not mean we cannot introspect and learn and consciously change them.

I am much more pessimistic generally than I was 20 years ago. But that's something I work on, not something I accept passively as a fact of life.

Yes. It is mostly because of environment, and you can change your environment.

> Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever

Thank heavens young Americans can look forward to a $63k/year median income when they are employed full-time.

Social mobility is decreasing since the 1980s. This is increasingly closer to not being true anymore.

Yes it has decreased from an amazingly high level to only a reasonably good level compared to most of the world's population.

This is no reason for abject pessimism at 18 years old.

I'd like to challenge that. Historical comparisons aside, looking just at today, if you're saying that social mobility is very good in the USA compared to most of the world, what are you basing that claim on?

I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the latter. I found out there is something called Global Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the US in 27th.

I'm basing on my assumption vast majority of the world's people would love to be 27th.

And this is borne out in emigration patterns and visa applications...

It feels like we expect to be #1 in every category and we're unable to recognize that the US has it pretty damn good in a lot of important ways. Envy is the thief of happiness.

Also looking a bit more at the GSMI: a lot of those criteria are based on current social welfare benefits received by the population. Many of which programs are not sustainable in the long run.

Of course the US has less of a social safety net than Norway, a petrostate with trillions of dollars in a national oil endowment, and ~half of their GDP is from fossil fuels. I don't know that I'd want to move to Norway for the kind of "social mobility" that I'm after.

Or maybe it’s just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism.

The subtext is that most Redditors have significantly better lives than 90% of people on Earth.

Life is bleak if you perceive it to be bleak.

It depends on how you measure quality of life.

I can't afford the yacht lifestyle enjoyed by Jeff Bezos, so my life is ruined. #EatTheRich

More like the super rich have huge influence over politics and can buy media companies to push their preferred narrative. Elon being the most visible example.

Who at this point trusts any media anymore?

I'm not a member of the richest most powerful group of people ever, and my government falls far short of the ideal I envision, therefore I cannot possibly enjoy my life.

See, that's just using the same measuring rod. If you measure quality of life by income, yes, even poor Americans live good lives compared to the rest of the world.

There are many other factors you could evaluate it on, though, and many of them are harder to quantify. Stuff like personal agency, status, leisure time, social life, community cohesion, etc.

Who in the world has it worst? I want to make sure I listen to the right person.

You act like this is an enigma. Let’s start with people without college degrees and no family history of college degrees.

Surely there are people who have it worse than that, no?

It isn't necessary to identify the world's most unfortunate person to recognize that most redditors have privileged lives, yet choose to wallow in misery.

I just choose to not let what redditors do bother me.

To wit, the vast majority of them have:

- easy access to clean water

- sufficient calories

- safe shelter

- education (presumably they can read and write if they’re on Reddit)

- internet access

- free time (can’t be writing nasty comments on Reddit if you’re swinging a pick axe in a coal mine)

Many of these things can’t be claimed by millions in the world.

And yet, it’s one of the most cynical, negative places on the internet.

This is not the 1950s. Most American's have internet, where they can see average people living lives around the world. Their houses may be a bit worse, but their cars are normally newer, they have internet, they have FAMILY. They have vibrant COMMUNITY. They have free time.

Are you not agreeing with their point?

Everything you listed are reasons NOT to be so cynical

You mean most Redditors live in a country with a higher GDP than 90% of people on Earth. That doesn't necessarily translate into 'significantly better lives', especially in a country with wealth gaps such as the USA has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA

> like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts

TRUTH.

I don’t think Reddit is representative of poor people. It skews educated and white collar.

My original home on the internet is metafilter, where I've been a member since 2001. For an extremely long time, it was the internet's best kept community, imo. Unfortunately, it also seems to be falling into pure doomerism, especially as the user base has declined over the last few years. The overall population is definitely on the older side at this: I was one of the younger users 25 years ago, and probably still am.

Which is to say, the feelings of doom are quite widespread. There's a good argument to be made that it underlies the rise of trumpism: people in the sticks feeling abandonment, resentment, and doom, and expressing it at the ballot box.

There were a lot more reasons for a positive outlook for the world 25 years ago. It significantly predates Trumpism. Some people see 9/11 as the turning point.

In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.

The assholes on reddit aren't the problem, often they are the people who are closest to breaking free from the swamp (yes, some are just assholes).

The problem reddit has is the celebration of it's doomerism, even in the small hobby subs the vibe is still present. The highest upvoted comments are so nauseatingly repetitive and formulaic, ridden with whatever the contemporary dogma of reddit is, substantiated by snowballs of echo-chamber fallacy with pebbles of truth in the middle.

Consider /r/BuyItForLife ... nothing close to what you're describing. If you want a different experience, you need to be more selective.

Why would young people with dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system possibly be miserable? That doesn't take too much to understand.

They’re miserable because they think this way. They think this way because they spend time with others spreading cynicism. Dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system is a point of view and a talking point and in reality not true for most people. If you know even a little bit about history you likely won’t have this perspective. Get off social media and look around at real life and you’ll see all sorts of great things!

I don't use algorithmic social media and I'm looking at dozens of history books in my shelf as I type this. I can do without the patronising tone, thanks very much.

Then you’d at least be aware of the standard of living even the poorest among us enjoy compared to someone in say manchuria or eastern europe in 1941. The irony of the grandchildren and great grand children of actual holocaust survivors claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.

Realistically, we know that no-one’s level of happiness here in the present is determined by standards of living in Manchuria in 1941. You can argue the point intellectually that we are all very well off compared to most humans who have ever lived. Nonetheless, psychologically speaking, people’s satisfaction in life is determined by more local comparisons. (If new historical research showed that Manchurians in the 1940s were actually having a whale of a time, would that make you correspondingly miserable? Of course not!)

> claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.

But that's not what I'm saying, so there's that.

Anyway, everybody (barring the global ultra-poor) is obviously aware that their standard of living is much higher than that of most of history. This is not novel, not hard to realise, and certainly not a discussion-terminating point.

In the Western world every single generation since WWII has roughly speaking lived better than their parents. For people currently in their 20s, this is on track not to be the case. The "democratic normalcy" is under attack. Wealth inequality was reaching literal Gilded Age levels... and has now barreled past that with no sign of stopping. And yes, algorithmic social media running anger-maximisation machines on a planetary scale. Shall I go on? The point being that "medieval peasants didn't have microwaves" is immaterial to the discussion.

Also climate change, which the world seems unwilling to take necessary action to mitigate. Are climatologists feeling good about the future?

Young people protested Gaza, climate change, racism, massive wealth disparity and they just don't see the results. Governments, economic systems and societies just keep the status quo.

Young people are always the ones protesting against whatever they consider the currently big injustices. They rarely achieve something, but I think it’s great that they do anyway. It shapes their priorities and experiences. In just 20 years, they will be the ones governing and by that time they will have the chance to see whether they were right about whatever they wanted. Most likely they will learn that what looked like the end of the world back then turned out to be just another overblown issue which eventually sorted itself out. And they will go on to mostly perpetuate the status quo with just a few changes that happen gradually, like the acceptance of LGBT and elimination of most institutional racism in my lifetime. When I was young we all thought that in the future , there would be too many people on the planet and not enough food for everyone. Job prospects were low due to tremendous competition as baby boomers made sure there had never been so many young people before. Some people believed pollution would get so bad that water would become as valuable as gold. This sounds ridiculous now but was dead serious back then.

This assumes the world is still trending in a positive direction. I'm not convinced of that anymore. The scientific consensus is climate change will get worse and make things hard on human civilization. Doesn't need to be the worst case scenario. Looking at geopolitics, we see a rise in authoritarianism and a breakdown in the western liberal order since WW2. Also a rise in the popularity of the far right, and some of the gains for LGBT and against institutional racism are being reversed. Wealth disparity is also increasing, so is polarization. We can't know whether there is a global conflict around the corner. It happened twice before. There were many positive people in the roaring 20s.

As for environment degradation in general, just because prior predictions were wrong doesn't mean the biosphere isn't still headed in the wrong direction for sustainability. Maybe we have the right governance and economics to adapt in time, but that's not a guarantee.

Being positive about everything seems like a really privileged position. It also maintains the status quo. If you're Ukrainian, how positive would you feel about your country's future? How positive is Europe about NATO and it's future with the US right about now. How are Canadians feeling about their neighbor to the South? Are they confident future US elections will self-correct?

Maybe over the long term it all works itself out and human progress continues to the stars or whatever. Or maybe we're going to be part of a Great Filter intelligent species face because of short sightedness and powerful technologies they unleash. Or maybe we'll just muddle along with some gains and then losses. Civilizations rise and fall, we really don't know how positive the future will be.

There are always people convinced that everything is dire. When I was a teen the popular one was that working for any kind of future goal was pointless because there was going to be a nuclear war that destroyed humanity.

There have always been wars and skirmishes around the world. Ukraine and Gaza are today's. There will be others tomorrow. Different tribes of humans just don't get along, never have.

If you think the environment is bad now, you should have seen it in the 1970s. Chemicals dumped everywhere, rivers on fire, cities choked in smog.

But the long term trend is always positive. Things are better now for more people than they ever have been.

I'll never forget one of my freshman "intro to engineering" courses in college the professor spent probably 15 min on the very first day going on about peak oil and how we were all doomed. He said this to a class full of kids enthusiastic about their future who want to build and make the world a better place. To this day, it was the single most toxic thing i've ever experienced and this was in the mid/late 1990's! If only one kid took his brain/soul poison to heart it would be a tragedy.

Yeah peak oil. I remember books on the bestseller racks about that one.

I was amused when the Peak Oil site The Oil Drum shut down because of the dwindling number of contributors of "high quality content".

There's a middle ground between doomerism apathy and optimistic status quo that problems aren't that bad so business as usual. People become pessimistic when they see societal structures that prevent actions dealing with serious problems. You don't have any justification or saying the long term trend is always positive. The future has many possibilities, not all good. The human past is a mixed bag. Trends are trends until they're not. Past wrong predictions are not guarantees those or similar predictions won't come true in the future.

We really don't know that democracy will always prevail, that capitalism is sustainable in the long term, and that our current global civilization is immune to collapse. We don't know there will never be a nuclear war or that climate change won't hit the wrong tipping point. We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.

I agree, we don't know. But you can orient your life around the negative, find every excuse for why you are not succeeding or happy, spend too much time complaining about it all, and never make any progress. Or you can assume that things will work out eventually, pursue your goals, and probably end up in a better place.

> We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.

Right. We don't. And we never did. What I was saying is that when I was young, there was plenty of reason to believe everything would go to hell soon... and we were wrong, things got a lot better. There's just no way to know.

The last Romans living in the Roman Empire in 400AD may have also concluded that their problems would eventually be solved and they would continue thriving, just like they had for a thousand years. But they would be wrong. Just go back to 100AD and they would be mostly right: they still had a good 300 years in front of them (so they would never see a collapse, nor their children and grandchildren).

So yeah, eventually things will undoubtedly take a very negative turn. The question really is, will that be in 10, 100 or 1000 years? You don't know, I don't know. But given the above , I think it's fair to conclude that by being positive you're almost always correct.

This is a repeating cycle however. The boomers where all hippies riding the wave of a future utopia where everyone is making art and dancing with each other all day. Screw the man, grass and love all day!

Getting older what I have realized is that the enthusiasm of the youth is born from the lack of experience, lack of responsibility, lack of anything to lose, and a position to really only gain from any changes. When you are young you are largely a spectator to the game, and just like any other game, your views will change when you become a player instead of an armchair expert.

The worst is going on any city's subreddit. You will think it is a terrible place with the worst drivers, crime, terrible schools, no jobs, and loneliness. And if you try to contradict that with some positivity you will get attacked.

Country specific subs aren't better either. They slowly changed from comfy places to talk about laid back topics to a full on brigaded cesspool where only the most polarizing opinion thrive.

Reddit literally is what you make of it. Unlike HN.

Only if you create an account and start subscribing. If you just visit and browse you end up at all/popular which, when I still visited it was very predictable content any given day.

you can hide a fair bit with ublock origin, if you dont mind using old.reddit

  old.reddit.com##div[data-subreddit="politics"]
  old.reddit.com##.linkflairlabel[title="Politics"]:upward(.link)
  old.reddit.com##.link:has-text(/Trump|MAGA/i)
  old.reddit.com##.link:has(a[href*="foxnews.com"])

although i have hundreds of these filters and its still not great, but its better than nothing

Its not the doomerism that bothers me. Its the hivemind mentality and brain dead comments and zero critical thinking, and the absurd negativity and judgment of everyone and everything, and the politicalization of all the main subs (top post on pics is pretty much guranteed to be something Trump) Even as someone thats far left I cant stand Reddits mentality.

15 years ago there were nice discussions happening on reddit, now all the comments are one liner stupid jokes from people who never even bothered to read the article and people calling you a bootlicker if you don't agree with every nonsense against Trump/Musk/some billionaire.

Yeah you can pretty easily spot the chronically addicted redditor by their copy/paste standard rejoinders, memes, and cliches.

Also, more and more of them are bots which are trained to regurgitate themes that get a lot of engagement.

Just pick your subreddits more carefully, and your experience of reddit will be extremely different. Mine bears absolutely no resemblance to what you describe, likely because I never go near the "top level" reddits, and stay only with the subreddits that matter to me.

This is currently the top reply to the top comment. It’s classified at 89% negative by this model: https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...

Ironically, the above comment scored 99.9% negativity.

Controversial content is discussed more than positive one, that's a well known phenomenon from gossiping with friends to discussing politics online to whatever.

I always bring the same example: if one of your best friends has troubles with it's partner you'll hear for hours. But when things go smooth they have nothing to say and you have little to add.

It depends on the platform. Most of the platforms reward content engagement, no matter if the content is positive or negative.

Engagement means money. Even if this is bait content then you get rewarded (on TikTok, X, YouTube, you directly get cash).

Even here controversy is indirectly rewarded here because it creates engagement, and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone;

You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.

These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

[...]

and it helps to bootstrap your project or grab new customers for free (at most 1 day of writing the bot script).

Let's say, you want to launch a new Juicero, and nobody knows about it yet, it's great to be able to push it on the homepage of HN, otherwise nobody is going to notice.

I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a boost.

Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.

I am genuinely none sure.

I would tend to think that this goes naturally:

you get boosted by a circle of people you know, and who wants you to succeed, because if you succeed they will get money), so there is the incentive in some way.

but it's still plausible that getting a boost on HN is part of the package (but I am not sure it is needed, because of this natural push that you get from let's say 100 people around you).

What you said about capitalism is true, I noticed it too, and it sounds even strange to me, as we are literally on a board that is initiated by a capitalist fund.

I've seen plenty of anti-Capitalism comments on HN. To be sure, not the popular opinion.

One thing I've noticed over the decades here: anti-capitalism used to get you flagged to death in the past... but since Covid and especially since the Russian invasion and associated price shocks / cost-of-living crisis, it takes a lot to even get downvoted.

The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

> last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of a good side to it all. Work from home maybe?

It’s back a ton of progress on many fronts. Counter examples welcomed.

> The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

IMO it's more the HN userbase has expanded, a lot, and now includes a lot of people who aren't the same tech enthusiasts the site had historically. Yeah, I know, eternal September and all that, but to put it into perspective: Trump's first election victory got 2215 comments[0], his second election victory got 9275 comments[1]. There are some mitigating factors here--iirc HN was having downtime issues due to the traffic in 2016--but HN was already pretty popular among tech enthusiasts 9 years ago, and it's grown 400% from that!

I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057647

> I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.

"Eternal September" explains (correctly IMHO) why there are more people of a different background, but more people doesn't explain why it is very noticeable that downvotes and deathflags don't happen as frequently as before.

> Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.

If that is an example for how your usual comments look like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the site.

"you're posting too fast; please slow down"

I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.

I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not whoring.

And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on, bandwagoning—antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.

I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to what I actually believe in order to call myself out—or, you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too—it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and champion it.

In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment in the thread, I don't comment.

I think it's 500 points, or at least it used to be.

Just checked, 1 point can upvote but not downvote

At the end, just saying that the best way to increase engagement is to increase bait / rage. Ironically that increases retention on the platforms too, so they don't need peace, if there are juicy flame wars.

It probably still is. I have a bit below 500 points and I can’t downvote.

(I just helped push you closer to the mark.)

I like to defend the devil here as well, because I see it as an interesting challenge / puzzle. It is very intellectually motivating and difficult to find compelling arguments that can move someone's opinion. Like verbal judo.

We might be called contrarians.

I'm okay with that.

> These points have utility: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

<1: Troll

<10: Throwaway

<60: Troll

<300: Probably a throwaway. Quality varies widely.

>500, <1000: Normal people

>1000, account less than 6 months old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory.

<1000, >10,000, account less than 5 years old: Mostly normal users. Quality isn’t generally great.

<10,000, >30,000, account 10+ years old: Usually the best quality posts; karma and age suggest consistent contributions overtime without any of the personality disorders that go with being terminally online.

>100,000, account <5 years old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory. Lots of flagged submissions about US politics.

>100,000, 10+ years old: Domain knowledge expert. Usually an older user with enough of a reputation that a subset of users know the user’s real identity. Will occasionally post absolutely unhinged comments.

This is hilarious, particularly the last sentence.

The absolute key feature is the domain experts, not the karma. Any time any subject comes up, someone appears that knows everything about the subject and lives in the field. It’s the single best thing about HN by a million miles.

The domain experts present here is pretty amazing i have to agree. I love when you get a comment that's like "oh, you have that wrong it's X instead of Y. I invented this technology 30 years ago, here's the reasoning behind X..."

You can have millions of upvotes just with jokes.

I remember a guy that had millions just because on any reddit AMA asked "tits or ass?"

The commentor was talking about HN karma, not reddit.

You're right about reddit karma though. One of the good things about HN is that throwaway joke posts like that are downvoted/flagged/otherwise discouraged. I can guess the top comment for any given Reddit comment section with like 90% accuracy just because it's going to be the most obvious joke possible based on the submission title, and Reddit users love upvoting those for some reason.

You can also have hundreds of thousands of downvotes if you work for EA and are completely tone deaf.

https://fandomwire.com/karma-slapped-ea-with-the-most-downvo... (there are probably better articles about it out there, I quit reddit a long time ago)

> and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone

Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.

> You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.

I don’t think that’s right. You don’t get points for replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get also affect your overall karma, though you don’t seemingly have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I’m not sure of the ratio (half? one third?).

> These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

I don’t think that’s right either. Once you can downvote and flag (500 karma?), more points don’t give you anything extra. Personally I rarely check someone’s points, only when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers and other obvious bad actors.

> This is why I am collecting points on all my fake accounts, because once I have collected enough karma points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using these shadow accounts.

HN has voting ring detection. Though I can’t speak for how effective it is.

There's a saying : No News is Good news.

Unfortunately "No News" doesn't make for a very good website.

I'm tired of this point being repeated. This is not universally true. I'm in communities where the more active discussions are not ragebait.

I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.

There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and controversial content has multiple psychological effects of high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect and toxicity breeds retention.

We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing than to agree and add much.

And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.

It depends how you want to measure engagement and activity. Quality of discussion is something to consider. It's very difficult to have a proper discussion when all of the responses are the same expected replies to low-effort ragebait.

>I'm in communities where the more active discussions

And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/

>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.

This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.

How can you know the moderation style of the spaces I visit, when I haven't even linked them here?

Because you exist on the planet Earth with humans.

For any forum to remain positive the following occurs.

1. the forum population is tiny and self controlling.

2. There is a lot of moderation to keep it from turning into a burning garbage dump.

3. There are no other choices, the above two is all that exist.

Again, how can you make these assertions without even knowing what these communities are?

Are your communities non-human?

Yes.

> And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.

So? You have to do that because it takes one toxic person to poison the well. HN is aggressively moderated to get rid of articles and opinions that don't belong too. Without it, it would be just a constant stream of self-promotion and politics.

The point is that in certain other places, someone (the moderators) worked to nourish a positive culture and it worked. HN didn't and it shows. I don't think that negativity is necessary to keep the forum interesting. Especially given that HN's negativity really isn't all that insightful. A lot of negative takes are bad, and many of them are written without reading the article, or by cherrypicking a single sentence and attacking that.

>HN didn't and it shows

You don't get tech without negativity. And honestly HN is very tame compared to most forums when it comes to the deeply negative.

The problem with maintaining (only) positivity in tech is you turn into $large_companies marketing department. We have to step up and say security flaws exist. That companies outright lie. That some idea (when it comes to programming) are objectively bad.

Hence why the OP is here on the thread talking about what negativity means in this particular case, because it also counts criticism.

> You don't get tech without negativity.

This is something we tell ourselves to rationalize bad behavior. How come that 3D printing forums or woodworking forums or car maintenance forums can exist without toxicity, but tech somehow can't? There are people pushing products everywhere. You can ban marketing content or set ground rules for it.

Further, performative cynicism really isn't that helpful. It's not insightful to hear that every company is evil and greedy, every personal project sucks, every scientific study is wrong, and every blogger is incompetent.

I'm a bit confused, you say that "HN is aggressively moderated" and in the next paragraph seem to imply that they don't do enough?

If anyone wants to get a taste what an unmoderated HN would look like, check out /new and see how much garbage is submitted.

I'm saying it's aggressively moderated in some respects (off-topic content, politics, etc), but it's not moderated to root out a certain breed of snarky, I'm-smarter-than-you negativity. Many other forums police that second part and are doing just fine. This includes forums dedicated to technical hobbies.

In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep rationalizing it.

I remember working on a technical blog post for my company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could. And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to expect in our industry.

That’s a factor, but the Reddit hive mind can take even non-controversial posts and turn them into a toxic, cynical cesspool of comments.

When I was still visiting Reddit my subreddit list was short and focused on a few hobbies and tech topics. Even those subreddits had become overtaken with cynical doomerism and toxic responses to everything. For a while I could still get some value out of select comments, but eventually everyone who wanted real discussion gave up and left. Now even when interesting or helpful topics get posted it’s like the commenters are sharks circling and waiting for any opportunity to bring doom and gloom to any subject.

This is well known, and why forums that wanted to maintain their quality would consistently lock such threads going back at least 20+ years when I started using forums. Reddit, Facebook, et al, do the opposite. Its why they feel so bad to use over time - they are engineered to tap into this and to promote it. HN thrives because they very consciously do the opposite.

I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.

I personally only really noticed that I did not like the "after dark" style reddits. But I would generally try to ignore anything political, and focus on like craft/hobby content, media (but not tabloid style), and things not a commentary.

Reddit (or socially generated sites) are really a mixed bag.

I think what became interesting and I nailed down with others was any hobby forum became toxic and lost its utility in direct correlation with its popularity.

For the most part I pinned it down to casual engagement from non hobbyists introduced noise and anti information at scale.

For example in r/cars a site that talks about vehicles the vast majority of commenters do not own, comments become about the “simualacra” of having an exotic (comparing specs debating reviews etc). Where as Ferrari chat forum is about the utilitarian ins and outs of actually owning one (financing, maintence, dealer issues etc).

This seems to apply to all hobby forums when grow in popularity to the point where engagement rewards contributions from non hobbiests over real ones.

My final takeaway was that the nature of the internet being a simulation inherently rewards non real content over real. (Fake news is inherent to the internet) And karmic systems specifically reconstruct and enforce that simualacra.

An adjacent problem is when enthusiasts in hobby subreddits become a bit too enthusiastic about the hobby which sometimes develops into an unhealthy obsession that the community (un)wittingly becomes a part of.

I recently bought a pair of boots from a reputable brand. So I of course checked out the subreddit for the brand and while many posts are good and the community is receptive to questions but posts by weirdos with like a dozen+ pairs of $300+ boots dominate the discussion.

Can these people actually afford like $5000 worth of boots and all the accessories they come with it? Maybe. Maybe we’re all participating in their shopping addiction when they post pictures of their stairs covered in boots.

Either way there’s something unsettlingly unnatural about their posts, and I don’t mean in an astroturfing sort of way.

> Either way there’s something unsettlingly unnatural about their posts, and I don’t mean in an astroturfing sort of way

the mentally ill are, well, mentally ill after all.

This is a part of the simulacra due the karmic re enforcement and feedback.

The person is buying the 10th boot because of the feeling they get showing it off and getting karma on the forums.

This is crazy represented in watch forums where broadly in the real world no one cares an iota about watches but inside the forums it becomes insanity.

I feel like this goes back to the "trick" of getting your questions about Linux answered. Basically, if you just asked your question "How do I do X on Linux?", you'd get no response. But if you said "Windows is so much better than Linux because I can't even do X on Linux", you'd get 5 different ways to accomplish your task before the end of the day.

Nothing gets people engaged more than making them angry.

I feel ironically obliged to mention Cunningham's Law

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

A 45/65 balance feels like it's at the optimal balance for interesting. Users are expected to continually upvote more and more boring posts if the user pool grows with noise. If the system stabilizes to 50/50, the content would trend toward mediocre but harmless.. Ergo, HN really is a cut above social media.

This totally matches my experience and is good way of describing OP's negative subreddit filtering.

R/weightlifting used to be total cesspool of rumors and gossip about athletes and coaches, but at some point the sub course corrected and got more heavily moderated. The result is a completely uninteresting feed of technique videos that are actually just kids showing off their latest PR.

However, the sub also aggressively reenforces that mediocrity. I posted what I thought was an interesting video of Lebron James doing a weightlifting drill, (with much lighter weight than a competitive lifter) and commenters jumped all the way up my ass about it being off topic, but also how Lebron has terrible weightlifting technique. No compelling discussion about weightlifting for elite athletes in other sports was had...

Unrelated but I still use rif daily. You can patch the apk using Revanced to use your own API key rather than the original developer's key. With the rise of AI, I've block a bunch of subreddits that have become infected with obvious engagement bait posts all with similar structures, writing styles, and tropes.

"Am I the asshole for leaving my spouse because they pushed me down the stairs and murdered my dog? He's also a member of an ultra-nationalist terror organization and doesn't put his cart away at the grocery store.

My friends and family have chimed in with mixed sentiments on social media. Some are praising me and others are telling me I'm wrong."

The account will of course be brand new and all of the top comments will be accounts that solely respond to similar bait posts on similar subreddits. It reminds me of subreddit simulator, it's bots talking to bots. My personal conspiracy theory is that reddit encourages this AI bait slop because it drives engagement and gets people to see more ads. The stories are like the soap operas I sometimes watched with my mom growing up.

What! You can still use rif like that? That's interesting. I completely stopped browsing Reddit on my phone after it went away (though maybe that's for the best...)

I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, I've been using RiF since the API changes ...with a small 4-month l break last year when I was automatically flagged as bot API traffic and instantly permabanned with no warning. Reddit's built-in appeals went unanswered and ignored. Luckily I live in the EU, I appealed under DSA and they unbanned me after actual human review right before the 1-month deadline.

Could have I created a new account instead? Maybe. Did I want to check if DSA actually works in practice and can get me back my u/Tenemo nickname that I use everywhere, not just on Reddit? I sure did! Turns out Reddit cannot legally ban me from their platform without a valid reason, no matter what is in the ToS. Pretty cool!

Back to using RiF with a fresh API key after that and haven't had any issues since.

Oh, that's actually even cooler. I had no idea that was a thing we could do under the DSA. Where would one go in case their rights were being violated? (Because it's all nice on paper, but if nobody actually enforces it ...)

I switched to RedReader, which Reddit decided to still allow.

Same, and what made me finally quit reddit for good was realizing that on a given r/all page I was blocking 98+% of the content, to the point where it made me question why I am even bothering.

I went through a similar process recently mostly by hand and found the same result. After blocking negative vibes, my only "subs" were intentionally "wholesome" subs like animals/feel good news etc.

>also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.

I also found this but realized this is a good thing(!) if your goal is to reduce Reddit usage.

That being said, a little negativity might be warranted in order to be a part of the discussion. Otherwise you're just opting out completely.

I also found it a very good thing. After the API use ban, and losing my blocklist, I couldn't go back to browsing normal reddit anymore and was finally able to quit after 10+ years. And, it has made me very resistant to joining or doomscrolling any other social media too. I think the hn model is decent because it doesn't optimize for engagement but for intellectual curiosity, whether it's positive or negative, which leads to mostly earnest and interesting discussion.

Blocking subreddits is still possible with just the webpage btw. Go into the sub, click the 3 dots up top, choose "mute subreddit".

I do the same as you. If any post is harming my mental health, I just must the entire sub. But then weirder and weirder stuff just keeps surfacing. Some of it is funny though; like it keeps showing me alien subreddits now, which I find funny because I'm pretty sure 65% of the comments are just satire.

Most ideas are bad, so maybe negativity should be common?

To meta-steelman: if one steelmans a bad take, then the negativity becomes even more valuable.

It's probably not a good approach to life though. Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about, better to focus on the good ideas, or at least the finding common ground with the good intentions behind bad ideas.

I'm as guilty of negativity as anybody, maybe even more than most, but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.

> but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.

harm??? so only happy thoughts from now on?

I cut people a lot slack that might be dealing with a lot of negative issues in their head. If they want to drop out and spend the next year hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, cut off from the outside world, I'm going to respect their choices.

Negative emotions take their toll, too much will age you prematurely. It's not a black and white thing of course, there's a balance to be struck.

I generally agree. Offline (ask my family) I'm Pollyanna.

It's hard to let bad ideas go unchallenged though. Places like Reddit? Sure, brigades, bots—it's tilting at windmills to try to add balance there. But HN is a community I still care for. I still respect the comments (and commenters) here.

(No, commentator is not a word—despite what Apple's dictionary is telling me.)

What do you call the people who provide commentary on e.g. live sports? Oddly we don't use that word for people who leave internet comments, but it seems like it would fit pretty well.

(See also: commentariat)

I disagree. Life is a tightrope of limited duration and small missteps can be disastrous. Take risks, but tilt the odds in your favor by making the optimism as pruned by correct negativity as possible. Do not waste time optimistically on something that has little chance of success, or that has already demonstrably failed. Above all, do not get trapped wishfully believing in things that are wrong.

>It's probably not a good approach to life though.

It is 100% how adults approach life.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/

>Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about,

At the same time you have to stop bad ideas in their tracks otherwise they spread like bacteria on an unclean counter, and the internet typically does a bad job of stopping them unless moderation is heavy handed. This leads to a never ending circle of discussion of bad ideas.

Won't lie, I haven't read that paper, but I doubt it contradicts what I'm saying, which is that it is unhealthy to be stressed, and arguing with randos on the internet about shit that doesn't matter most of the time (and which both of you are almost always powerless to do anything about) is going to have a negative effect on your long term health outcome. Every minute that you spend annoyed about reddit user ballLicker6969 saying something ignorant is a minute of your life you'll never get back.

Bad ideas in politics should be argued about, particularly if they are gaining traction and have backing, because then there's a decent chance they will become policy. People who tune out of politics because of polarization and toxicity are letting the bad ideas win.

Bad ideas in fields of expertise need to be discussed to the extent of keeping the field free of bad ideas as much as possible. Biologists will sometimes point out why intelligent design is not a good scientific theory for example.

That’s a fair point, but I think we can distinguish between critical thinking and negativity.

We can rigorously test an idea or decide it’s not for us while still maintaining a supportive environment.

Often, the most helpful feedback isn't ‘this is bad,’ but rather ‘here is a different perspective to consider.’

I like your attitude.

Most things are inedible, yet we treat food poisoning as unacceptable event. Places serving expired food get shut down. Yet preparing speech and sights we feed others is a lost art. When I read how people wrote 100 years ago I feel like a brute

I'm very confused by this analogy.

Not the OP, but I'll try to unpack it for you.

Reading online, listing to public discourse, etc. these days is like taking the Tide Pod challenge; people feeding you inedible or even toxic garbage that superficially looks like candy. If we fed others actual food with the same care we employ when producing "food for thought", we'd all be, at best, very, very ill.

When compared with what people wrote in the past (especially through a survivorship bias filter, where the best writing is preserved longer and distributed more widely) what we produce today seems crude and disgusting.

Thank you for putting it this eloquently.

Even stranger, for me, is the current prevalence of collective shunning, the so called cancel-culture, that is triggered by the most diverse reasons, but seemingly never buy the negativity and toxicity of the discourse. It is always lone individuals leaving because of that. But as soon as another reason - political, cultural etc. — is added, there is a collective exodus and condemnation. twitter/x is good example.

I think this is a common view, but it assumes that most of one's negative hot takes are good. And frankly, I've seen HNers being confidently wrong more times than I can count.

The critique of negativity assumes the positive takes are good. Why the asymmetry? It feels hypocritical.

Had the same experience with rif/res, and on X. If you go into algorithm-heavy sites with the intention of actively curating your personalized algorithm into your areas of interest, the sites can work quite well. One click blocking of subreddits and topics/posters sends strong feedback to the algorithm to readjust. I really don't know how people can use sites in any other way. For YouTube, I have filters and blockers set up such that I don't even get recommended any videos, and don't see any videos to click on unless I type in a search query or receive a notification from a channel to which I am intentionally subscribed. Facebook was/is broken beyond all repair, though. I recall that you could not remove posts from random groups and people from your feed, even if you were not friends with them or members of those groups.

Sometimes, I will see a screenshot of someone using reddit or YouTube "unfiltered" and it's night and day, full of slop and ragebait everywhere. No thanks!

My only difference of opinion with you is that I don't find positive content boring. I find positive things exciting and engaging! Negative content just makes me want to tune out, for the most part, unless it's some cathartic or amusing scenario like the recent thread here about SO imploding lol.

I didn't mean to imply that I find all positive content boring — just the kind of positive content that would rise to /r/all in reddit at that time, which was mostly quickly digestable content (like animal pictures). And it was also boring in the sense that it was much "slower" to change within a day than the unfiltered /r/all, so I would largely see the same content for a lot longer.

YouTube is also similiar. I need to be quite careful what to click so "my algorithm" stays interesting and wholesome. If I click on any remotely baity and negative video, the recommendations algo picks it up almost immediately and devolves into garbage.

nit: 35%

I did something similar and ended up opening only /r/AskHistorian posts...

Unironically, how are history-related questions not negative? I’d imagine people would ask questions about some dark events.

I was blocking subreddits recently and was contemplating if /r/historyporn because of the amount of photos of dead bodies and politically-charged discussions that sometimes unfold

If you block /r/history, you would prove the aphorism, "One thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history"

So a nice bubble? :) ( I actually mean that positive )

If you had a no tolerance policy then over time you ban every single sub. 99.99% positive would still mean they could get banned, under this algorithm.

You're also comparing Apples to Oranges by comparing zero tolerance records for subs vs average across all posts of hn.

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