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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

The root cause is not incivility, it's inanity. Why do we have threads about these not-exactly-revolutionary things sitting all over the front page? Who votes for this stuff?

The Surface one up there is just some guy's blog review. It's not poorly written, but why are we reading randomly selected Surface reviews? There's an entire post right now that is basically a Samsung press release via CNET, describing some (totally unquantified, of course) minor uptick in sales for the latest Android phone. There is literally nothing to talk about there except to proffer essentially baseless flames, praise, or speculation.

I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. "Intellectual curiousity" is not referring to what you have every time a phone comes out which is 20% lighter and 10% longer.

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It contradicts the definition of civility to say that the root cause of it is things that annoy you. Civility only comes into play when things annoy you.

The HN frontpage has its ups and downs and has for a long time. If you don't like the stories, it's not going to improve the situation to be uncivil in the comment threads. It just provokes people to reply in kind. And a fluff story on the frontpage (assuming it is) is not improved by having a flamewar appended to it.

Isn't cooperation the real basis of civilization? Rules of civility/politeness help of course, but without a basic respect for others, it's not enough. A civilization that stops cooperating soon stops existing. I think the dismissive top comments are a symptom of this lack of cooperation and respect.

I think a second difficulty is that HN has both the "intellectually gratifying" and "startup news". Unfortunately, almost any technology/market news is related to the latter. I suggest bifurcating the frontpage, into something like fascinating NewScientist/Atlantic/Slate/Feynman/Hamming etc vs. pragmatic technology/market. Though some would qualify for both, it's usually very clear when a story isn't intellectually gratifying. This clarity makes it easier for HNers to upvote/ignore appropriate material. Good fences makes good neighbours.

"Isn't cooperation the real basis of civilization?"

Yes and no:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory

Human interaction and human civilization exist across multiple layers of abstraction, and different layers have different properties and operate on different principles. (To give what has to be the most vague and least useful answer possible.)

Look. It's not that hard. Don't like the story don't click the story.

How about "this doesn't belong to the front page" flag for the stories?

Clearly it takes very little effort to upvote a fluff story to the front page and to keep it there. It takes substantially more effort to pull an interesting story up from the New page. For example, I am routinely disappointed with the Front page content, and yet I am very rarely browse the New page. Moreover, this is not going to change, because I know myself. I am guessing I am not alone. There's lot more people who would be willing to clean up the front page from the fluff than those who'd be willing to patrol New page in a search of fitting submissions. Just give us a chance.

The problem is that the 'fluff' category is subjective. Obviously the upvoters didn't think it was fluff - or they wouldn't have upvoted it. If we had the doesn't-belong flag I can guarantee that we'd rapidly see different flagging cliques like:

* anything apple related

* anything microsoft related

* anything not related to coding

* anything not related to startups

* ... and so on ...

Take the MS Surface reviews for example (bias disclaimer: I'm a Linux/OS X guy). I personally found the pro- and anti-reviews that made it to the front page both interesting, but I'm guessing you'd class either or both reviews as fluff.

Not because though either class of review was 'right' - but because of what they revealed about the product related to the reviewer's values. In the same way that I can read Roger Ebert one star film review and know that I'm going to love it (or a four star that I'm going to hate). Reading different reviews from people with different perspectives is interesting to me - not fluff.

I, personally, think the surface is going to be a huge success since MS seem to have been bright enough to make a tablet that's not aimed straight at the iPad, but with some strong design values that are going to meet the needs of a certain chunk of the market much better than the iPad does.

That - to me - is an interesting conversation. I've been chatting to folk on these topics elsewhere. But not here since it's filled with the equivalent of "You're a fanboy", "No - you're a fanboy"...

Which is sort of sad.

What about allowing downvoting of stories (maybe not below 1?). Upvoting is subjective too, and while flagging may be to strong for something so subjective and ill-defined, maybe it would help if people could downvote a story so that it disappears from the front page faster.

It seems likely that downvoting won't help any more than upvoting or flagging. All would be done on people's personal preferences. All would result in lists that will annoy some folk.

As I see it the problem is not that 'fluff' gets to the front page. The problem is that the hackernews community is now sufficiently large that there are groups who have very different ideas of what 'fluff' is.

"Fluff" is all that relates to the mainstream tech news. Basic Litmus test - is it something that Engadget/Arstechnica/etc would pick up? If yes, then I'd rather not see it here.

Alternatively, since the comments on HN can be of a value - have a separate section for mainstream tech subjects. Like the Ask page. And call it Fluff :)

Basic Litmus test - is it something that Engadget/Arstechnica/etc would pick up? If yes, then I'd rather not see it here.

And that's a perfectly reasonable litmus test for what you consider fluff/non-fluff.

It doesn't work well for me (for example - I personally like the arstechnica stuff I see here. I don't follow, and don't have the time or interest to follow, most of the arstechncia stuff that gets published. The stuff I see here tends to be the stuff I'm interested in. On the other hand I could quite happily never see a techcrunch or verge post ever again ;-)

I'm sure there are a bunch of HN posters who would disagree with both of us (and a bunch more that would agree).

To misquote Walt Whitman - HN is large. It contains multitudes :-)

If I was going to bet - I'd say that HN is going to end up in one of three places:

1) Things stay pretty much as they are. The admin folk add in new tweaks around post promotion, voting, karma displays, voting on new posts, etc. The community continues to grow. As it does the majority view of what the site "is" will change. This will annoy some folk who preferred the 'old' majority view. Where this ends up - something like slashdot.

2) HN fragments. Tagging / sub-groups / whatever. Some way for folk to focus on the stuff they're interested in and ignore the rest. They'll still be trolling/flames - but it'll be more obvious since folk will need to explicitly search it out rather than having stuff that runs counter to their world view hitting their front page. This ends up more like reddit.

3) YC/PG/whoever decides what HN should be. We acquire moderators with banhammers of doom - possibly recruited/promoted by the HN community. Much more focussed submission guidelines. Lots of self-policing and strong and rapid responses to closing/flagging posts. Associated accusations of bias / censorship.

I suspect we'll get (1) or (2). Especially with us being a rather geekish site - and us geeky folk do love trying to solve social problems with technical solutions ;-)

Of course it would be personal preference. But the way it is now people still upvote certain articles based on personal preference, but there is no way for the "opposite" group to express their personal preference by downvoting, thereby potentially cancelling out the people who upvote out of personal preference. So you get a sort of upward bias for these emotionally loaded articles.

I'm not saying that allowing downvoting will perfectly cancel this out, but at least it may do so to a certain degree.

How about "this doesn't belong to the front page" flag for the stories?

Anything belongs to the front page by virtue of getting to it. You can argue that the community is broken because it upvotes stuff you don't want to see, but that's a battle you just can't win.

Basically, you're suggesting that in addition to there being a button for "I find this interesting!", there should be another button for "No, you fools! No!".

> there should be another button for "No, you fools! No!"

I have that button, it's called "flag," and that's exactly what it's for: Posts that are popular but toxic. If a post was unpopular, you wouldn't need to flag it.

Beware. I got my "flag" taken away a year ago, because I too thought what you think.

I haven't flagged any of these posts.

Why do you get to be the arbiter of what is "toxic"?

Why does anybody get to vote in the first place?

An upvote says "I find this interesting", but you're only speaking for yourself. If you deem something "toxic" to the community, it implies you know what's best for everyone involved.

Whoever has enough karma to flag posts is as well.

> Anything belongs to the front page by virtue of getting to it

I'm not sure I buy that argument. A simple counter-example is duplicate submissions. Yes that story may be front-page news, but that doesn't mean that each submission about it should be. There are probably some other trivial examples too, and personally I think that low-quality news is low-quality regardless of how many people vote for it.

What frustrates me the most is a bad blog post about math or science that makes it to the top 5 on the front page with no comments.

Clearly no one is reading the story, and is just upvoting it because they want to believe that it's something they're interested in.

Things that annoy us may end up teaching us more than things which we love and feel connected. Civility is a precursor to learning opposite and different things. That said, I see a different reason on the flame wars on gadgets and OSes here.

On HN, some people's connection to their OS or gadget may seem to stem from their love, emotions or their distorted consumer perception. However it may indeed be the sign of a "fierce struggle" among different ecosystems on who will dominate the future. Operating systems and hardware ecosystems are the bases on top of which, many other technologies reside. A lot of people here, have invested time and money in certain technologies. Some of us have even started companies focused on certain technologies. For example, if iPhone5 or iPad Mini or Surface is a success, then an iOS App or some Windows skills may pay back better soon.

In conclusion, the loss of civility may be the result of an intensified struggle in recent years, for returns on investments on different ecosystems.

It's actually people like me who are the problem, and I have to learn to control myself.

When I read a great essay by Marco, or Gruber, that is substantive, well written, and speaks to something I truly believe in, I have an instinctive twitch to upvote it. This is particularly true when I recognize that a lot of effort has gone into an essay like Gruber's recent "MacBook Pro Retina Essay", but, I'll even admit to even doing it with marco's silly blog entry about his trip to the Microsoft store in the mall - that really had no place on HN. (And, I say that coming from the position of listening to every one of his podcasts, reading his blog, and as a loyal instapaper and "The Magazine" subscriber)

I (and, I would kindly suggest), others need to learn to control our base urges to do this, or I agree, we'll need to lean on moderators to fix it for us. Save us from ourselves.

Just because we (sometimes strongly) agree with it, we find it interesting, and it's well written, does not mean that it's fodder for HN.

And, we need to learn to write more like grellas, or patio11 when contributing to a thread - put some time, effort, and research into providing information on something that we know about, and can really educate others, with new, or insightful information that people are universally interested in.

Our (my) tendency to feed the echo chamber only brings the level of discourse down, and there are (many) other outlets that would be more appropriate venues for such threads.

I don't think it's useful to ask people to talk like someone else. Patio11 and grellas are but facets of the conversations that go on here. I personally, and I stress the personally bit, rarely find any value to either of their views or writings. I, again personally, think they are the echo chamber. I frequently find myself almost diametrically opposed to their viewpoints or find what they say to be inane or obvious or just a brain dump of nonsense.

But that's not what's this is about. I understand others find what they say to be enlightening and excellent. I understand that there's plenty of people here who enjoy what they write and there are lots of people who highly value their contribution. And I completely admit they'll write something that I find thought provoking and interesting. Something that might challenge my world view. And so I appreciate reading it even if sometimes I think 'stop upvoting these HN celebs just because they spoke'.

What I'm trying to say is that you and the OP shouldn't presume to say what the HN audience wants. The point I'm trying to make is that we all like different things.

What determines what we like is upvotes. That's just the way it works. Some things get upvoted that you don't agree with. Hard luck. We have no better way.

The only components of grellas's/patio11's writing I was suggesting we emulate was "put some time, effort, and research into providing information on something that we know about, and can really educate others, with new, or insightful information that people are universally interested in."

If anything, I think it's important to encourage writers having viewpoints and positions diametrically opposed to mine, but at the very least, a broad assortment of clearly presented information from a diverse community is what's important.

The "universally interested in" part was trying to address the habit we sometimes have of writing from a position that only those, who are of the same political/bias realm will appreciate. I'm not suggesting we drop the Haskell, or financing-startup articles just because not everyone on HN is interested in them.

But if you do write on, say (to take something that I hope nobody is sensitive about), financing startups - don't write something like, "Only complete idiots will accept a cap on convertible notes right now" - recognize there are other perspectives and contribute in a way that brings the level of discourse up, not down.

  > What I'm trying to say is that you and the OP 
  > shouldn't presume to say what the HN audience wants.

That's exactly the decision that up voting gives us: Each up vote is a tiny fragment of a dynamic editorial policy, and the result of that policy is the top stories on the home page. While each individual can decide who the HN audience is (either themselves alone or some idealized audience) they are making that presumption.

Very thoughtful comment. I think this instinct comes out in spades with politics: people feel very "rah! rah! Go team!" about some articles, but in reality they just lead to flame wars.

Well I for one vote for Surface reviews and similar articles. And I think there is a lot to talk about with Surface, both on the product in itself and on the product as a signifier. Surface is a major product release, and iconic of a big shift in corporate strategy by one of the largest tech companies in the game. Surface is Microsoft's first step as an Apple-esque high-end device manufacturer. It speaks to the evolution of Microsoft specifically and to the continued development of post-iPhone UI and consumer tech in general. So there is a lot of interest riding on how Microsoft has executed the Surface, how well Windows 8 lives up to its promise, and the problems, potentials and future development of the platform. And Marco's review touched on all those points, as well as the issue of Microsoft's retail strategy and the Microsoft-Apple rivalry. Then consider that all of these issues plug into even deeper trends of the growing relationship between IT, everyday life and popular culture, including Apple's successful fashion-isation of technology (always a hot button for the traditionally specs and functionality oriented IT enthusiast crowd.)

So it's not surprising I think that people are interested and emotional about these issues. It would be surprising if they weren't. But just because they are appear populist does not mean they aren't rich potential sites of inquiry - it just becomes harder to explore why they are interesting when the debate so easily spins out of control.

Yes, I agree that there are things to talk about related to Surface and to Microsoft. But I disagree that either Marco's review (for reference: http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe) or the currently popular review talk about them. Neither of them discuss Microsoft's general strategy hardly at all (Marco slips a few paragraphs in at the end, but it's not exactly the focus of the piece), and they sure don't talk about deeper trends regarding anything cultural whatsoever.

You're being extremely gracious by describing Marco as having "touched on...Microsoft's retail strategy" -- what he actually did is insert about ten jokey comments showcasing what he perceives as their incompetence. It was pretty funny, but if you re-read it, I don't think you'll honestly claim that you learned something credible or useful about Microsoft based on his description.

If you want to write a blog post connecting Surface to other components of Microsoft's strategy, and you have some interesting things to say about that strategy or about culture or about whatever, that sounds potentially cool. But these posts are really, really not that.

These articles just serve as arbitrary entry points into specific topics. The article itself is irrelevant, it could just as well be a (link-less) "Tell HN" post saying "Discuss product/event X".

If there's a insightful article worth reading about X, good, post it. But I think people often actually prefer to have articles that aren't inherently worth to serve as a blank slate for all kinds of (stricly speaking) off-topic debate about a certain product.

Well, then we're at our point of disagreement. I value HN primarily for discovering high-quality writing and thought that I might have missed otherwise. As for discussions, there are lots of technical posts on HN in which informed experts come and participate, and those discussions are great. But I have no interest in either participating in or reading "off-topic debate" about a new consumer electronics device, which is going to involve a lot of people who are no more informed than me rehashing arguments made five years ago. I doubt I am speaking only for myself by saying so.

I'm sure you're not. But I think neither are the other guys. In either case, I've found it fairly easy to tell into which camp an individual story falls. A generic product review or a link to the manufacturer's device home page isn't going to be an inherently valuable article and so I skip it when I'm not in the mood.

In fact, a large number of comments is usually a bad sign, regardless of the article, it's the stories with a few dozen comments that tend to have the most interesting discussions.

This is an point which should be considered. Contra the middle-brow dismissal of every article as a useless mud-bog, some might ask: is there a lotus flower 'round here somewhere? To do so, though, you probably need the right environment, a bit of imagination and/or some good seed.

Sorry, I was speaking generally about the interest surrounding Surface, not trying to imply that Marco's article is a thorough investigation of all this stuff. You're right, it isn't. Re-reading it, what strikes me is that he is quite dismissive, cruel even, of everything Microsoft is doing - jumping to see the negative and showing very little willingness to see anything positive. Perhaps I was too quick to defend him in the original thread, though maybe some of his points were valid and the negative response from HN was a bit too strong a counter-reaction.

Honestly, for me articles like this are really an ersatz susbtitute for actually going to Microsoft stores/using the Surface/getting a closer look at Microsoft corporate culture. Not living in the States and not having much disposable income I take what I can get I suppose. I'd write that blog post but without such experiences and resources I don't think I'm qualified enough for anything other than internet armchair pontification ;)

>I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places.

Those threads are not useful in the sense of spawning civil discussions, but they may be useful in the sense that it keeps people heavily engaged on HN. I can imagine someone running HN thinking "Hmm, the site is kind of dead when the front page talks about Haskell but the site explodes when Apple and Microsoft fans wage war."

From the point of view of someone (YC) trying to get as many possible eyeballs to look at their stuff (YC investments), allowing this sort of thing to continue seems like the logical choice. Are the raganwalds of HN going to leave because of flaming Apple threads? I doubt it. So it'll probably continue.

Alright, enough conspiracy for one afternoon. :)

There is no need to artificially keep people engaged by encouraging useless, off-topic content. If it's necessary to dilute articles about intellectually worthwhile subjects in order to have them here at all, then this community should shrivel and die and let another better-designed, better-focused or better-populated one take its place. HN doesn't even run on ad money.

I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers.

Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.

It should be noted that Hacker News used to be called Startup News. That special blend of 'hacking' (programming) and entrepreneurship is what makes HN unique and worth having around. Once you leave that behind all you have is /r/programming.

I'm aware of that, but programming is not the same thing as hacking.

I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking is "tinkering" that directly involves programming.

I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.

To expound a bit more on what I said in my earlier post: the way I see it, hacking could be described as the 'outer edge' of computing/programming. Hacking is getting systems to do things they weren't intended to do. When that overlaps with a social environment the line does become very fuzzy, but for digital systems it ends up referring to programs that have some surprising and unexected attribute (examples include being tiny, being exceptionally fast, running on obscure, difficult, or new hardware, using new techniques or algorithms, being written in 'alternative' langauges [like brainfuck], performing unintended tasks [like privilege escalation or tetris-in-sed], and various others), and is more specific than "programming", which is increasingly often a very practical topic, as computers are embraced by more and more industries and fields.

A "hack" is almost by definition, then, not for profit and not well-funded, because it is on the edge of what's possible and quite often far outside what's useful; good business knows better than to invest in high risk, low-return projects. Compare this with the idea of Y Combinator, which if I understand correctly funds companies with high-risk ideas in the hope of achieving high return-on-investment via runaway successes. But most YC companies I hear about have minimal technical progress associated therewith. Social progress seems more their goal, in the majority of cases.

And please don't let it seem that I'm denigrating either mainstream programming nor funding ugly-ducking companies for social change. Hackers don't pop out of nowhere, and most can agree how important social change is. But I think it would be great to have a place to discuss hacking, and Hacker News definitely attracted many (myself included) via the implicit siren-call of being such a place. Given that it is so-named, we can work to make it live up to that standard, unless there's some other community I'm missing where such things would be more appropriate. If this is still exclusively Startup News: let pg rename it that, and don't waste hackers' headspace and search engine result space.

Personally I come to HN every time a new thing comes out because I specifically want to know what this circle of people think of it. There is a unique and informed perspective here.

People identify with brands and criticism is taken as a personal attack on one's own value system.

So-called objective reviews are in truth more like the proselytizing words of rabid fundamentalists.

You can hide the discussion but you can't moderate the religious flames of consumerism.

Does the first HN guideline still apply? There has been a significant increase in political submissions (not about some new phenomenon):

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is possible to click "flag" on them, but I try to only flag things that are blatant; this seems more like naivete.

The balance between user voting and mod/admin curation is a tricky one.

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