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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.

So what they're doing is leaving low value comments and then they're probably the same people flagging it as "controversial" or "flamebait" when there wouldn't be any of those things if they didn't leave those comments. It's incredibly bad faith behavior (by some of them, not you to be clear).

We're at the precipice of AI unravelling the fabric of society. Many tech issues now are so consequential that the politics simply cannot be ignored.

I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.

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> I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.

This little part is the whole thing! Political discussion is really much more interesting than say, product advertisements or corporate announcements. And better aligned with the spirit of curiosity and hacker ethos too.

Why not flag both or neither as "trampling curiosity"? Inconsistency and hypocrisy is worse than any policy or preference could be.

Why no topics tags so that nerds/hackers/curious can sort themselves away from the hustle/biz/finance types? Well.. platforms do not want to empower their users.. they want to herd them and force-feed them and profit from the engagement boost that bad feelings create. And boom!, just like that tech is suddenly political again, now we can all pick a side, cue the cliches, vote with your wallet, if you don't like it leave, make your own why dontcha, and yada yada.

> people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things

I think that's probably overinterpreting. No doubt there's a long tail of weird behavior, but the fat part of the distribution is covered by a simpler fact: humans change when emotions get activated. People who have interesting things to say when their curiosity circuits light up have entirely different things to say when their amygdalas are inflamed.

Edit: their right amygdalas, that is! it isn't clear to me what the left one does but it's a puzzle why everyone says "the amygdala" when we all have two.

I mostly avoid this place these days, but there are certain topics where people hyperrationalize, i.e. they (silently) accuse others of being reactionary because an argument looks like reaction to them on the surface.

I started self-censoring on HN because I knew some very normal and on-topic things to say would be voted to oblivion because they had the shape of a controversial topic that the average HN commenter can not relate to except through some mainstreamed right-leaning cultural narrative. The mere mention that I was an affected party in some culture war adjacent thing was treated as if I had invoked a thought-terminating cliche. It was very... anti-curious.

So I principally agree on the conclusion, when emotions get activated this site gets worse. I just see the impact differently - anything that deviates from the libertarian-right leaning default is pushed away. I'm still relieved I had my pseudonymous account with a lot more HN internet points wiped and don't have to care about this site on an emotional level anymore.

> One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.

Interesting to see that others are doing this. I started this habit because I got curious to see what bad/downvoted/dead commenters would say elsewhere and noticed this same pattern. It’s not on all of them (some accounts seem to post comments that get killed in every thread they reply on which makes me think those are troll accounts), but it happens enough that it was noticeable. Not sure how I’d describe this category of user. They aren’t trolls but they are clearly doing this purposefully.

Firsthand data point, as of today: I set up a fresh account and immediately learned how sharply the experience differs from a seasoned one. Show HN is blocked site-wide right now (the /showlim notice), a plain story submission of mine was killed in about 15 minutes, and an Ask HN was flagged within 60 seconds of appearing — zero prior history on the account each time.

None of that feels malicious on the flags side; the spam load must be brutal. But the effective rule for a day-1 account is "flagged before read," regardless of what the content actually says, while a month-6 account gets judged on the merits. Worth knowing for anyone lurk-learning the culture: the trust is in the account history, not the individual post.

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