Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Internet discussion, quite frankly, sucks. It's driven by emotions and not logic. People are crass, rude, and take snipes they'd never do in person.

It used to be people wrote long letters to each other, like with a pen and paper. In that format, you had to make a case and defend it. In the new format, if you're writing more than 3 sentences you're a regular Tolstoy. The format has gotten shorter, the response time more immediate, and the audience less educated.

I remember when C++ was finally overshadowed by newer languages like Java with fancy IDEs.. Old timers quickly found a lot of complete crap coming out from programmers who never had to do things "the hard way" If you never had to take the time to think about classes before you wrote one, everything is a class.

Likewise if you've never had to take time to think about what you're writing before you comment, everything is a short, knee-jerk response.

Combine all of the above factors and you get an endless stream of tripe. It's the uneducated talking to the uniformed about topics that make them unhinged.

It's interesting that somebody associated with Twitter would make that observation. The format keeps getting shorter and shorter, and the time frame more and more immediate. Can't he see the connection?

Not all internet discussions are like that, and in-person discussions sometimes are like that. Long letters were always very rare; a prolific letter-writer in the 1800s might have written hundreds of them in a lifetime, but a more typical number might be ten. I think the majority of human discourse throughout the millennia has consisted of things like schoolgirl gossip, parents scolding their children, "ain't-it-awful" discussions in bars, and requests for phone numbers shouted over loud music in dance clubs. What you're observing is that more of that stuff is being done in writing instead of by voice.

People do seem to be more willing to disagree with each other on the internet, but that doesn't necessarily worsen the quality of the discourse.

So all that has happened is that the Internet has allowed schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars to be broadcast on an international scope and compete with professional journalism and scientific discourse. I suppose that cannot be helped with the democratization of the media. Still, if the common man is going to have that kind of power, should we not urge everyone to use it responsibly, and to try to raise the level of discussion, especially in what is supposed to be a professional context such as software development. Of course, that is what Hacker News is attempting to do; I'm hoping it will work.

The way I see it is that the internet has allowed professional journalism and scientific discourse to compete with schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars.

One problem, though, is that the needs of these forms of communication aren't really the same. In a low-latency medium, for example, it's difficult to avoid strong structural biases toward both recency and immediate responses; these are both corrosive to the quality of the discourse. (I think these structural biases mostly account for the very low quality of professional journalism, but they are even stronger on e.g. reddit or HN.

pg and I have written some things about this:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January... http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html (under "Fluff Principle" and "Comments")

I find the comment on C++ interesting. Having worked in Flavors/CLOS on Lisp (Lisp is slow was a criticism then also), I found C++ a step backwards not realizing that at the time C++ was just an attempt at codifying what programmers were already doing with macros in C. But with C++ a lot of what OOP was meant to be was lost. Java was somewhat of an improvement, GC, single inheritance, etc.

C++ didn't really lift the programmer away from the machine, so poor programmers who never learned proper memory management, etc. could cut themselves up pretty badly. Coplien's book on how to do symbolic programming correctly in C++ was a positive development but I suspect likely lost on most C++ programmers.

I couldn't agree more with your comments about the quality of discussion. I can only add that as an older programmer I'm also disheartened by the ignorance of history. In my generation calling someone a dirty hippie was fighting words and I had thought we had learned to be tolerant of others. When I see the vicious and nasty remarks people make about Richard Stallman I can only surmise that they have no clue as to the work he has done on the tools that we use daily. Emacs is crufty and shows it's age but contains a lot of fantastic ideas that have made it the timeless tool it is.

But this is human nature. My mother used to tell me to never say anything to or about someone that you won't say to their face. I plan on pointing this out to this fellow Zed Shaw should I ever have the pleasure of meeting him :)

So, it's actually relevant to the topic to point this out: Once you meet Zed Shaw you will realize that he may have been trying to write like he talks. It just didn't work very well. Zed Shaw in person is a hilarious, charismatic trash-talking New Yorker who is also an intense hacker genius. If you understand both New York-style trash talk [1] and intense hacker geniuses, you will understand Zed Shaw. He seemed like a nice guy, the couple of times I met him.

But the trash-talking aspect of his personality doesn't translate well to a text-only online persona. The body language and expression and tone and intensity and back-and-forth are all lost, as is the context: He can't tune his approach to his audience, because he doesn't have any feedback.

He seems to have figured that out now and is making a deliberate attempt to change his online persona.

One big problem with the internet is that you must develop a completely different online voice from your offline voice if you don't want your words to be taken the wrong way. Your work online is decontextualized in a way that your own words are not.

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[1] Try to remember that when an East Coast working-class person says fuck you they very likely mean "have a nice day". Though it depends on the delivery.

I can see the connection, but I myself don't use Twitter that way. I write a full blog post of content, then edit down to 140. It's surprising how little needs to be said to make a point, when it comes down to it, and how strong a point sounds when it's been compressed that far.

Yes, that's really what good writing is about, get anything written and then revise, revise, and revise.

I recently discovered this cross posting feature posterous has with twitter, so if one has the distilled post down to 140 and then puts that as the subject, readers who don't see the depth of the point and/or just wish to hear more can link to the full version. I think you've touched on a nice approach to using some of these new tools to improve the quality of communication.

tl;dr

No, just kidding. People have been speaking in short sentences for a long time. Your model is too simplistic - writing letters is a less a discussion, and more debate. Ordinary everyday conversation is shorter, and possibly, more inane.

With discipline, I think, and an appropriate community (like Alex mentions) reasoned debate and discussion is possible, without writing pages and pages. See, for example, HN. (Yes, people write comments of this length on other sites, too. No, they aren't always as reasoned.)

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