Hacker News is depressing
threads2.scripting.com
threads2.scripting.com
I used to. I used to love hearing really smart people help out with whatever was puzzling me. Perhaps I can get back to that.
But damn, this is a negative bunch. Whatever topic, whatever opinion you have, it's somebody's hot-button issue and somebody else doesn't understand what the fuck you are saying. Sometimes this is the same person. Most times this is dozens of people.
At MicroConf a few of us were talking about the kind of junk traffic that HN sends any more. "It's like having a bunch of angry nerds drive by in a bus throwing food at you" one person ventured. Another had a better analogy: "It's like having a busload of grumpy senior citizens show up at your store, picking through stuff, complaining about the prices, going on about irrelevant things, and generally being ornery, obnoxious and trashing everything that you've done."
This is not a problem of individuals. HNers are some of the best folks in the world. This is simply a problem of aggregating tens of thousands of content consumers in one spot and trying to have a single conversation. I think HN has scaled as far out as it's going to.
If I may offer a counter point. One of the complaints about users on HN is how they treat Show HNs. The worst thing is arguably working on something and getting totally ignored. The second worst thing is probably getting verbal abuse for your project, from people you respect, no less.
When this happened to me (being ignored that is), I decided to try another community for feedback. It was 4chan/g. Now 4chan has the reputation of being somewhat of a sewer, but my experience was as different as night and day. People were interested, and above all: friendly and constructive.
So why am I not hanging out in /g then? I believe that HN has a higher ratio of users who are "my kind of people", commenters who I feel I have a connection with. But as it is, this comes at a price, because HN can be a less civil place. I don't this is written in stone, however, we can and should work on improving this dynamic.
An example: many times I offer startup advice. Now, if you read my profile, you'll realize that all I can do is feebly try to repeat what I've read. I'm nowhere near an expert. But sometimes I feel that the things that I've read could be helpful to others. So I make what appears to be a knowledgeable comment in the spirit of trying to help. Yes, it sounds a bit cold, analytical, but it has that air of something that might be useful.
We got hundreds of comments like this, on any topic you'd like. Yes, we also have some world-quality researchers that come here and help out. But to the reader, it all looks the same.
We easily confuse the social nature of appearing to be critical and helpful -- let's be honest, looking smart to our peers -- with the actual value we might be providing.
HN is a place to go to read really biting comments that appear to dissect things into their core elements. But many times it's just wankers making easy criticisms from a Monday-morning quarterback perspective.
I love the open forum, and I love the personalities and people here, but as you grow, social posturing gets way more traction than actually providing value, even though both types of comments are indistinguishable from each other. That's just a function of crowds.
We do get crap articles being posted (there is less decent meat on HN)
But we want the comments to be insightful and relevant. Which basically means rewarding those who have domain insight / experience. Which is hard.
FOr example, if there is a thread on web security and cookies, I would like to see tptacek's comments near the top so I can see them
But how to automate that? Its feasible I suspect but not easy.
/b/ has the reputation of being a sewer, and people who don't frequent 4chan see them as being equivalent.
Outside of /b/, 4chan is great. In fact, one of the reasons that /b/ still even exists is that they just post in /x/ and elsewhere. Best to honeypot them.
The problem with /g/ is that it tends really hard towards mere consumer choices--contrast with, say, the /prog/ board on 7chan, or even the new /diy/ board on 4chan.
It seems that this community borderline prides itself in being so concerned with edge cases and minutia that they have no clue at all what people mean. There is no desire to see if there is truth behind the curtains, no desire to "auto-correct" a slip of the tongue. If one sentence can be attacked, it will be. If one detail is out of place, that's grounds for dismissing everything else.
Basically, if you're going to publicly throw stones, I feel it's fairly expected that someone is going to be throwing stones back your way. There is nothing perfect about Hacker News - but I don't think that Dave Winer is perfect either. Blocking off content is not the solution, however, and I'm not sure what the solution really is. Sticking your head in the sand, perhaps? At any rate, if there is a solution, I'm sure pg and YC will work something out.
> I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, supposedly "think" about me.
If that's true, why 750 words on the subject?
The issue I take with Dave Winer is that he seems to feel as though his accomplishments or contributions somehow elevate his words beyond criticism.
I will say again what I said yesterday – his post "about" Marissa Mayer was something I can only characterize as whiney. We can call it other things if that's less offensive: petulant, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, perhaps. But the sense of entitlement to the respect and admiration of other people was something that dripped off of the post, and then off of his comments, and is a recurring theme, to my eye, of the man's writing.
His poor rhetorical choices – name-dropping, specifically – overshadowed his point. That's the gamble you make when writing headline-driven link bait.
But guess what? Fuck me, because I'm just some guy on the internet. But guess what else? So is Dave.
Participating in a technology doesn't afford a permanent apotheosis to all of one's self and works. Your words must still carry their own water. There's effective persuasion and then there's ineffective persuasion. Those outcomes vary depending on the audience.
Now we all have a choice: we can tightly corral our words. We can be selective in our audience, we can dole out our rhetoric with caution and precision.
Or we can blast that shit out to the whole of the world.
Now, Dave is quite excited to tell us how he helped make such a feat possible. And the consequence of his great work is we all get to talk about it. And sometimes we're not going to agree.
Sometimes we're not going to worship.
And that's life.
I take the point very well that HN comments can be pretty toxic. But a lot of the dissent around what gets posted from Dave Winer seems pretty legit. Even PG has weighed in on his poor attitude:
So instead I'll say it here: what sucked about your comment was not that you dared criticize the Great Dave Winer. What sucked is that you did so in a mean-spirited, dismissive tone. You can get the same point across without being a dick, and as much as it may seem like pointless platitudery, saying things like, "I get where you're coming from, but..." and, "it's hard to tell solely from what's written, but my impression is..." really do let you deliver the message in a way that's less likely to offend, and more likely to be heeded.
Parsimony in code is good. Parsimony in interpersonal communication can come across as brusque, dickish, and dismissive. It's worth thinking about how what you write is perceived, in addition to saying what you want to say.
How do you think Dave's going to take this post? He writes that HN is full of people just attacking him. > The issue I take with Dave Winer is that he seems to feel as though his accomplishments or contributions somehow elevate his words beyond criticism. Bam, right in the nuts. Fuck you, and fuck your accomplishments.
I'm sorry if my post sounds mean, I really want you to have the happiest possible life and a great time here. But if his post is terrible, you don't have to pollute your head with it and pollute my head by writing mean things about it.
I don't come here to read wishy washy "great job dude!" posts, but I don't come here to gossip about how people think they've got a "permanent apotheosis" or whatever. He's just a dude on the internet, you're just a dude on the internet. Be nice to each other. Life is too short to do otherwise.
Best of luck!
This is exactly why Dave Winer wrote this post.
The thing is, he probably has a point in criticizing the community. But he has a longstanding inability to respond to criticism properly, to the point where he just insults and name-calls people who disagree with him.
This is why he wants a twitter like "block" from HN. Because he'd rather block HN and the people who take issue with his ideas than actually have an argument.
[UPDATED: fixed poor wording]
It's not about worship. It's about civility and making an effort to write comments to a higher standard.
I personally find Dave's attitude of self-entitlement to be very toxic. Coming first doesn't elevate you above reproach or scrutiny. Success and progress require questioning and even defying authority. I'm incredibly distrustful of anyone who would discourage that. So he's going to demand people be impressed – and I'm going to demand they think for themselves.
As a human being, I'm incredibly full of shit. On an ongoing basis. And often times I don't know it. So I kinda need people to point it out to me. This goes for nearly everyone else too. Anyone who says otherwise, who suggests they're above that for any reason, is trying to sell you something.
But that's also the problem. HN has a way of rewarding toxic comments. I particularly notice this in drive-by-comments where presumably-long-time users create a new account just to make a flame post. Turns out, this kind of cloak and dagger isn't even needed most of the time, because you can see how they're getting rewarded for this.
Is that really the kind of community we want to be?
I'm far from saying your standard sucks, by the way. You can sometimes come across as very harsh, and so can I - but I don't think our comments were the lowest ones yesterday. Still, I must admit that in hindsight I wish I would have done better.
> So he's going to demand people be impressed – and I'm going to demand they think for themselves.
I didn't see it that way. I think what should be demanded is a more constructive discussion with less ad hominem attacks. Constructive doesn't mean worshipping or even praising, it means discussing based on merit and facts.
I also believe we could demand less pettiness of ourselves. For example, a minute ago someone just downvoted all the comments I made today. That may be a valid interaction, but it reeks of vindictiveness. It might have been more productive to invest that same effort into posting a dissenting opinion.
I couldn't work it out quick enough to warrant further time investment, because I'm not convinced if it is actually a good solution.
Having not been in the same situation as Dave Winer I don't know how I'd actually respond. I like to think that I've been on the internet long enough to realize that toxic anon comments should roll off like water on a duck. But maybe I'd get super depressed and go cry in a corner.
I probably won't find out any time soon, because I have nothing which would gather a huge focus on HN.
Final question on the end of my ramble, is this all #famouspeopleproblems?
If that's the standard you hold yourself to, I'd encourage you to expect more from yourself.
Dude writes really whiney content. And then there's his name. That's super unfortunate. That's not, like, a slam on his family or a dig about his person. That's just a linguistic observation.
If I made compost bins, for example, that's a completely legit parallel for someone to point out, even if silly.
Except we don't. I have an upvote button, but not a downvote button. I haven't reached the magical karma threshold for the downvote button, and my account is ~3.5 years old.
I think this may be contributing to the negativity OP is talking about. I don't have the option of using the downvote, so if I disapprove of content, the only way I can do so is to post a negative comment.
I know a lot of people in the community consider this a good thing, but I think it also leads to a lot of negative comments that wouldn't otherwise get posted.
As to the upvotes you received, I suspect this happens mostly because there is no downvote on articles, and people use upvoting the first negative comment they see as a quick and easy substitute to announce their disagreement with the article in question, or even the title if they haven't read the article. I'm not sure I'd see upvotes as validation of your views, tempting as it is to do so. I've come to think voting either way here on HN should subtract karma, to make people really think about their decision to upvote and stop the flamebait and snarky comments floating to the top.
I think that's what I meant but just to make sure: when I'm talking about standards a part of it is to make an effort to contribute to a fruitful discussion. It's about trying to raise the level of the discussion rather than lower it.
I see it as a problem that polemic comments have a tendency to get easy upvotes, and that's ultimately a cultural issue around here. What makes this problematic is the fact that ultimately it's a self-defeating behavior. It's not enough to just push personal responsibility aside and point at the voting buttons as a source of morality and motivation (as I believe Danilo just did). To keep a community valuable, more effort is required than simply relying on populism and the conviction that the other users have to accomodate you.
And just because I'm probably sounding pretty sanctimonious, let me repeat that I don't think I did particularly well in this regard up to now either.
1) If someone wrote a scathing criticism about you on the internet, in a thread about you on the internet, it might be worth responding to. Writing 750 words takes a decent programmer very little time. This point seems petty and childish on your part. 2) I could not disagree more. Did you even read what he wrote? He said that he was annoyed you guys were making conclusions based on half truths and that you didn't know what you are talking about, which is factually correct. Your response is that "his accomplishments somehow elevate his words beyond criticism". So disingenuous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5739469
If you had to reach a certain level of accomplishment in order to engage in criticism, the world would be pretty dull indeed. There's also intellectual dishonesty there. Marissa Mayer is infinitely more accomplished than he but he nonetheless criticizes her in his post, especially the cheap line where he telepathically infers her associates were embarrassed when she left the call.
The fact that some other people on the Internet may afford Dave Winer more respect than you think he deserves is not a problem that needs to be solved. Even if it were a problem that needed to be solved, the "I'm gonna take him down a peg" approach creates an entirely new, bigger problem.
While that vanity gets tiring, it's not a crime.
What's maddening is your lack of intellectually honest engagement of critique on that or any other matter. And your position, implied by your comments, that others cannot disagree unless their accomplishments somehow match yours is frankly stomach-turning from the perspective of a hacker culture that's all about upsetting the status quo.
I went on at great length here if that's interesting to you:
You accuse him of refusing to engage with criticism, which is quite a serious claim in a community that prides itself on rational discourse. Other commenters have also alluded to this, though I've not seen evidence for it. There's a fine line between critical responses that you should engage with and personal attacks that can be ignored. Your comment here doesn't read like constructive criticism to me.
Share your snowflake. Doing so is what makes Winer's blog interesting. Laziness, impatience and hubris - he's like any other programmer, only more so.
Attack the argument, not the person.
The post you made comes off, to me, as an attack on Dave Winer - the person - not a disagreement with a point he made in his article. There just isn't any need for personal attacks here. If you disagree with the point he was getting at, you could have said so, and made your argument for why you disagree, without attacking Dave personally.
So what?
I generally respect and understand what you're saying, but this is a unique case.
I don't see anything unique about this, that justifies personal attacks on anybody (Dave Winer or otherwise). I mean, I get that you see Dave's post as constituting an attack of sorts on Marissa, and that you think playing the vengeance card here is supported. But not everybody saw what he wrote as particularly negative towards Marissa, and many (most) of us got that the real point he was making was contained at the very end of the original post, and were quite content to argue that point.
There's just no need for using HN comments to launch some sort of personal vendetta against Dave Winer (or anybody else) over something in a blog post.
If you have some sort of personal grudge against the man, email him and challenge him to a pistol duel at high-noon, or something. But calling him names, insulting him, mocking his name, etc. on here isn't a positive for anybody.
I disagree. I worked as a magazine editor for many years and I was a little shocked at the end, because the "real point" seemed like a sudden left turn out of nowhere. In my opinion his piece would have been more compelling if he'd left out the Marissa Mayer grievance bit and simply used the other story, the one of his post-acquisition realization that his contract naming him the Mac Strategy Guy didn't actually mean anyone would listen to him.
As written the "real point" was obscured. And I see the same pattern in his response post: Relating some story about being misunderstood and unappreciated followed by a face-saving rationale about a larger point. The intellectual points aren't about him, but the illustrative examples all scream "Can you believe these fools wouldn't listen to me?"
In the case of Mayer in particular it seemed a case of exhuming the horse skeleton to give it the proper public thrashing it deserved. I mean, he had one phone-conference with her a decade back and he can now see into her soul and know "At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think"? Seriously?
He's right though that Twitter has a big advantage in that it's easy to ignore jerks. It might be a good idea to introduce some form of following or blocking here.
"And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish."
I always think it would be interesting if that approach could be abstracted into a tool for online community 'civility management'. Could the upvote/downvote approach be amended? Could there be another upvote option for civility? A button to remind people to relax and take the angst somewhere else? I don't know. The best approach might be far removed from the users-as-voters paradigm.
One of the nice things that HN affords is that it doesn't really support filter bubbles--at least until mods or the community downvotes you to oblivion. Thus, there's a good chance that people at least get exposed to ideas they might otherwise ignore.
Hell, I can think of several posts where I've strongly disagreed with somebody else, only to be in jovial agreement or discussion a few days later. I'm not sure that a blocking mechanism is really needed; if people are being deliberate and abusive trolls, we have ways of dealing with that, right?
Maybe you can outsource comments moderation to a group of competing startups. Not for all posts but for 10% or 20% of front page posts. Maybe we will see a "pagerank" algorithm for comments or something more clever.
I don't think there's any reason to necessarily link it to banning or something, though. Just make it like a per-account killfile. in fact maybe you could even add regexes to filter out phrases or urls as well.
It's easy to forget we have a tendency to make remarks about people online that we would never bring up in a personal conversation. I'm not excluding myself here, I too feel I'm sometimes harsher online than offline - and it sadly also happened in the Dave Winer thread yesterday. People can come across in a certain way through their writing that we would never attribute to them if we met them face to face - yet that's all we have to go on in most cases.
Keeping these difficulties in mind that are inherent to all online communities, I think this article is a damning statement about our discussion style here specifically. It's important to acknowledge that most commenters on HN do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud. To make matters worse, "good" people sometimes overshoot their target because something in a news item or an article pushes their buttons, leading to a disproportionate response.
All in all I think HN has a lot to offer. I said it before, but it bears repeating: I come here to have insightful discussions with clever people who sometimes disagree with me. HN is the only community that does this for me, because I feel there are many like-minded hackers present who have a lot of value to contribute through both their work and their opinions.
At the same time I believe we should take a long hard look at these other instances where we're simply not at our best. Again, this includes myself specifically.
I think part of this is just the dynamics of community-moderated comments. In my experience, the way to get upvotes in any such forum (not just HN) is to express an opinion in the strongest terms you possibly can. "X is dead" gets upvotes. "X has some challenges to overcome, and it might" doesn't. People like and respond to simple, clear arguments that don't admit weakness or uncertainty.
This dynamic then feeds on itself, as the people who are the best at forcefully stating their opinions become top commenters, crowding out more cautious voices and providing a bad role model that the next generation of would-be top commenters follows.
How do you fix this? It's poisoned so many great communities I've belonged to, so I wish I knew. But I don't.
EDIT: I have seen one mechanism that helps mitigate this: hide the users' actual karma scores.
Karma is a scoring mechanism. That turns forums that use it into a video game (of the type very well parodied by http://www.forumwarz.com/about). Participants compete with each other to see who can get the highest score. Hiding the actual numbers from users takes some of the fun out of this, which cuts down on trolling.
Slashdot used to show your exact karma score, and they had these exact same problems. Eventually they switched to just a text label ("Excellent", say, for high-karma users) that indicated your general karmic position, and the comments got a lot better very fast. Nobody's going to put as much time in to go from "Excellent" to "Excellent" as they might to go from, say, 2,500 to 5,000.
Of the most satisfying outcomes on HN, mine have been when I've posted a reasoned, moderate comment and been upvoted. Sure, I try and avoid flamefests, and I've noticed a bit of trolling being upvoted, but overall, I think HN has risen above. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm lucky, but it doesn't seem that bad, yet. Of course, there's always room for improvement . . .
"They assumed that I was being "egotistical" for thinking that Google ever cared what I thought, and arrogant that I think they should care what I think now."
As this might be about me, as I wrote "No, it's typical for your ego."
Several years ago I've sent Dave mails with ideas, which one of them he posted without attribution or credit to his blog. With some mistakes I've made included. In an ongoing mail discussion he credited himself, including the mistakes.
About personal attacks:
The way he handled Marissa on his blog:
"All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed."
He has no problem making people look bad, especially if it helps getting attention. Getting push back he then follows up presenting himself as the victim. He has also no problem calling other peoples assholes
"Now I think there's a solution to letting the assholes control the conversation..."
in a piece about discussion culture.
Google for "Dave Winer" returns a lot of stories that are similar. Before accepting Daves view on this, I wish people would do some research into Dave Winer.
Why? What Dave Winer does elsewhere is irrelevant to the point at hand, which is about HN commenters making personal attacks on people, being rude, and posting low quality comments.
The Internet is no different or less immune to abusive discussion than every other form of human communication...but at least it's one in which it's possible for any participant, big or small, to improve the discussion, and so keeping scripting.com (assuming that he considers his writing there to be overall helpful) off of HN would be a disservice.
The Internet is a big place. If you want YouTube comments ("Lol yuo dikk yo mama haet you die of cancer!!1!" you can go to youtube.
> at least it's one in which it's possible for any participant, big or small, to improve the discussion
Yes. Let's keep working at making HN better.
Comments like this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731152) should be vigorously downvoted.
EDIT: I'm not just talking about this specific post, I don't really care when linus yells at somebody in a mailing list etc. If it's some opinion piece or fluff piece I just don't really get why it's here.
Perhaps because a subset of people find it interesting/enforces their opinions/serves as ammunation against what they dislike/etc etc ..
It might be hard to prevent.
That could certainly be implemented (either on Hacker News, or by the site owner doing a redirect to a permanent 404 based on the referrer).
But that seems like a loss. It's a loss to HN if links to scripting.com were forbidden. Also, within the thread that he is talking about there was a great deal of meta-discussion about the way in which HN was reading the article and reacting to its author.
I don't approve of HN's conduct at all, it's one of the things I detest about internet communities, and HN, though the best of them, is no exception. But asking HN to change because someone was offended by the most predictable behavior is silly.
I agree; I wasn't taking a stance on whether or not HN should do so. I was simply pointing out the irony of a blogger protesting about being linked.
Come to think of it, if it was successful this could be generalized to a mechanism that all forums could be expected to support, just like search engines are supposed to honor robots.txt
Not that I would be particularly fond of a web where you have/are expected to check with a given site in order to be allowed to link to that site…
On one hand, Hacker News, despite being one of the best of its kind, is a programming community, and programming communities (or similarly populated communities: online gaming, etc.) are possibly the most overwhelmingly negative and vitriolic I find online. (Huge exception: StackExchange.) I find it perplexing that the business & finance communities I visit are consistently more civil and constructive. Remember the developer who got flamed for creating (not promoting or arguing the superiority of, merely posting on GitHub) an sed/awk replacement? Our community is an overwhelmingly mean one at times.
(You can dress it up as engineers/developers/hackers being more honest, more blunt, less MBA-y, whatever. It's unpleasant and hurts people's feelings.)
On the other hand, in the midst of all the ad hominem of yesterday's discussion (you can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455) there was a lot of valid commentary which Dave Winer (whom, for the record, I have never talked to nor do I know his accomplishments) seemed to ignore. The reasonable extrapolation from My One Talk with Marissa Mayer was that Winer felt she was an individual whom did not respect developers' viewpoints or a more 'balanced' view of the web. Specifically, he says:
All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.
And I think it's entirely valid to say that, hey, isn't it a massive logical leap to get here from the anecdote of the 'BlogThis!" button?
Winer seems to be asking Hacker News to be polite, which I think is important: but I think it's better that Hacker News is good, and along the way it seems obvious that being polite is better than not being impolite.
On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible.
On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have. Programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else I know. And I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often. When the Linus/"Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!"[2] was posted to HN every single top comment was defending Linus' behavior.
Linus' mission and position do not excuse his language. In defending users, he's still attacking a person.
It upsets the hell out of me, and I think its a big part of why many women (and I'm sure men) prefer not to engage in programming communities. Even on StackOverflow I see people being horrible to confused newcomers, instead of steering them in the right direction.
I think rooting out this kind of shitty behavior is the most important thing we can do to advance programming communities and make others feel welcome. By miles. Especially if we want to alleviate gender and general newcomer disparities.
This article reminds me of one from 117 days ago, "What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project".[3]
~~~~~
[1] There were some remarks in the article that just left me confused, such as:
> They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)
???
~~~~~
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
Some excerpts:
> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
> It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?
> If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?
> Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.
If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.
I was horrified by the HN reactions. You can read some of them here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962912
~~~~~
One factor that I think contributes to the Asshole Ethos common among programmers is this idea that great men of genius cannot be held to the same moral standards as mere mortals. This idea, combined with an inflated sense of self-worth, makes for a host of Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds wannabes, convinced that their special nature absolves them from social norms and responsibility.
The Raskolnikov-ian egoists ought to read Crime and Punishment...
I can fortunately say that in my experience, few programmers are assholes in person. Online forums are another matter. :)
Who knows how that meeting with Marissa Mayer actually went down but there are plenty of people who have been lectured, scolded and demeaned by Dave who have probably wanted to walk out on him so its entirely beleivable that she did and he probably provoked at least some of it.
You would think Dave would, after all these years, realize that if you post stuff on the Internets people are going to flame you for it because A. They disagree B. They troll for fun C. Dave has ticked off so many people over the years they flame him because they are perma-tired of his holier than thou attitude.
No people shouldn't be rude, ever, but they are. Dave is rude all of the time too. Yea you can just like, you know, block the entire Internet and that will stop it, but at what price. I think Dave is mostly pushing for the latter, or at least he wants anyone who doesn't agree with Dave on everything to be blocked permenently from everything.
Dave, if you want, to block everyone on the Internet who disagrees with you, fine, go for it, write your own tools to do it, but don't expect everyone else to do it for you.
Now let me be brutally honest about Torvalds: Tanenbaum was correct. He is not a great coder or a great thinker, Linux as he wrote it was indeed as Tanenbaum said, a giant step backwards. Torvalds just happened to be at the right place at the right time to be at the nucleus of a nascent social movement (what we now call Open Source). What has he done lately - Transmeta? And he is well aware of this himself I suspect: the abrasive personality is his insecurity showing.
Two out of three isn't that bad.
Is it that they feel this way inherently (maybe) or that there are a large percentage of people that surround them, and/or stand to gain from them, that tolerate and allow that behavior?
My feeling is that people act the way they do because they can get away with it with little repercussions.
If you've ever dealt with a person with an anger problem you will see that many times when they deal with someone close to them they act one way (abusive) but with complete strangers they can be as sweet as pie because that person is the unknown and they aren't going to take a chance with a stranger who might react in a way to deny them what they want (of course yes there are those who act like total loose canons with everyone but most that I have observed tend to differentiate between degree of closeness).
- People get initiated into programmer culture pretty young, before they learn to stop being pretentious. They really like how meritocratic programmer culture is, but they get carried away with it the same way that people who say "gays should go to hell" or "the weak have no place in society" get carried away. And maybe some people never grow out of it because we've reached asshole critical mass and they find themselves surrounded by like-minded people; and because they're rewarded for technical merit even when they behave badly. The result is your typical Dickensian villainy.
- The meanest IRC channel that I know of, #C, is full of people who are honestly not very smart. Every time that I've patiently and kindly tried to teach someone - while the rest of the channel was busy being huge dicks to that person - I've regretted it because the person just wasn't able to absorb and synthesize information. I'd argue that you can't give a $5 dollars to every beggar, and some people should be firmly kept out of the community until they get better, so as to avoid harming the community in the long run. It's a tough situation, and handling it well is tough even for mature people. Being rude isn't an unreasonable tool if your goal is specifically to scare people away (and hopefully towards a more productive endeavor for them).
The point is that there are imperfect people on both sides of our social boundaries. But note that this is a very specific point, and rarely justifies the vitriol that comes out of people in #C.
As it stands, I code mostly as a fun thing I like to do (I work it into my day job where I can). It's something I really enjoy. I've got a shelf full of books and an interest in the esoteric. I'll like casually reading about lambda calculus and taking long walks on the beach, but when I run into something I can't figure out, I have a problem.
It's painful to even think about going to some irc channels or forums to ask for advice on something I'm writing, even when it's the most sensible thing to do. I just think about how exhausting it'll probably be to cut through the vitriolic responses and get to some useful information.
I'm typically not looking for a dissertation, even. What I'm usually looking for is "Here's what I'm writing. What am I doing wrong, and what resource/book/article could I read to best get a grip on this problem?"
I don't want to face the prospect of mental exhaustion for something I do for enjoyment.
I think language/framework evangelists usually know about this kind of thing. You never see them say "Yeah, the community is great and if you have any questions head on over to our IRC channel. They're super abrasive in there, but if you really slam your head against them, you'll probably get an answer!"
A fair number of the people in these communities that offer help are doing so to help those of us who have questions.
They can be annoying, abrasive and downright rude. If you are polite and persist most of the time you will get your answer. I went through this in the late '80s on the C/C++ forums on FIDOnet and RIME/RelayNet. I managed to persist (and get pissed off a number of times) and get most of my answers. To this day I see people from FIDOnet and RIME/RelayNet still answering questions on web forums, StackOverflow etc. Jerry Coffin is one of them and the man is a saint. Bob Stout of Snippets fame has been around forever as well. The advice I read from Joseph Carnage on RIME was some of the most valuable ever and has a lot to do with how well I turned out as a developer.
I guess what I'm getting to here is to grow some thicker skin and try not to take it all so personally. A fair number of the guys answering the questions have seen the same questions a million times and gone to the trouble to write the FAQs for C and C++ and are presumably tired of answering the same old questions. Put yourself in their place and see if your perspective changes.
I personally think that I've picked up very useful "learning skills" because I have my own social reasons for answering technical questions without outside help. So maybe your exhaustion might also be a benefit for this reason.
I joined #C to ask for some help, but people were trying to get me to discover the solution on my own, which is well and fine if you want to learn, but at that point I just wanted the trivial fix (it was something about an incorrect type, it was a 1-line fix and anyone with C experience could see it).
I asked them if they could just tell me how to fix it, because it was late and it wasn't really a good time for me to learn C, but they said something about them not being my personal tutors or something, and then just refused to help and treated me like an idiot for not knowing C.
In the end I just left the channel with very high blood pressure and asked a friend on IM who told me the correct line, and that was it.
#C: not even once.
It sounds like #C has chosen as its mission to teach people the C programming language. To that end, they see it as a derailment of their existential purpose to help people who "just want the trivial fix." To them, it's rather like going to a math tutor with your homework and saying "I don't want to know how to do it, I just want the answer." Correctly or incorrectly, they think that helping you in the way that you ask won't teach you anything, and that it will ultimately hurt you on the final.
Even among communities whose mission is to help people with specific questions, like StackOverflow, the folks answering questions still require a certain amount of buy-in: evidence that you've thought about the question enough to understand precisely what the problem is, and evidence that the problem doesn't have an easily found solution on Google. Without that buy-in, the social environment they've set up will inevitably devolve until it's really difficult to separate the genuine difficulties that can be solved from the white noise of people asking the same question over and over.
So while I wouldn't defend the people in #C wholesale, and there may be plenty of vitriol there, a refusal to help when someone just wants a quick answer doesn't sound unreasonable, and in fact may be all that holds their community together.
Or maybe it's our biggest asset. In a world filled with bullshit (how many people you think really empathize with you - vs. just going through the motions?), it's refreshing to have a little corner where they honestly tell you why your ideas suck and your background is deficient. It kind of comes with the profession, yes. Only a relentlessly critical kind of person can effectively hunt down bugs and deal with dozens of other frustrating problems everyday.
You can tell someone “you suck, go back to the corner of the Internet you came from, I don't have time for this”, or you can tell them “your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to explain why that would be great.”
The difference is almost immeasurable between those two interactions, even though they are saying the same thing.
I've made this point before regarding derision, which I think is the true issue. I'll quote myself, since I've already written the thing[1]:
“Derision is not curtness. It is not impatience. It is explicit, intentional putting-down of someone because they aren't as good at something as you are or think they should be. And it is a poison. Unfortunately, if you take it frequently enough, it becomes habit. It becomes second nature. And you stop noticing it's poisonous. And so, unfortunately, it is an oft-enjoyed poison in intellectual circles. It doesn't help anything. It doesn't help you understand the world or other people. It doesn't really save you that much time. It simply makes you feel better about yourself.”
A specific example: I was looking for some help with a bash script a while ago. I am no bash expert. I got heaps of abuse for my terrible script. At first I got emotional, and a good 75% of the time I would have stopped there, feeling grumpy and hating assholes on the internet. This time I took a deep breath, posted my whole script as a gist, and said to one of the most abusive but seemingly knowledgable IRC citizens, "Ok, I see it's not as robust as it could be, so I would appreciate some help. What am I doing wrong? How can I improve this?" The script was much improved in robustness and readability.
I got a good script but I was drained by the effort. If I had gotten your second response instead of the first, think of how much time and good will would have been saved.
Being respectful and understanding is not a waste of time, and being rude is not cutting through the bullshit. Your point regarding derision is spot on, except I don't think it makes the derider feel better either.
'Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naïve, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.'
You don't have to be a fluffy bunny about everything.
You stop and realize that your momentary investment in sincerity and tact reap rewards for your personal image, which people want to work with you, who is going to feel like taking a bit of extra time to help you out when you need it, and the general good will and atmosphere of the community, which inspires growth and adaption while lubricating the flow of ideas (as another response said; I'm stealing that).
"You're useless. For god's sake stop contributing until you get your sht together"
rather than:
“your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to explain why that would be great.”
I don't have a good explanation why that is. Maybe it's because I feel some condescension in the second while the first one is just plain raw "I don't have time to deal with your sht. You're an adult: fix it and come back later".
Being an asshole also doesn't inherently cut out bullshit.
That's what the Linus defenders are usually standing up for, at least. Maybe in his case it's an effective way to run his project, I don't know. He's the boss and it's up to his contributors whether or not they want to deal with that kind of thing.
I don't think that's the phenomenon that's being discussed here though. You say it's refreshing to be told when your ideas suck by someone who knows better, but in my experience that's not the case in most programming communities. Most of the time, the people who are going to tell you that you that your ideas suck are not actually that much more experienced and may not even have better ideas.
When I first got on Usenet in the early '90s, I was just starting to learn programming. I thought the people on comp.lang.c and elsewhere were just the smartest people in the world (some of them were, of course). I loved it when they skewered people asking dumb questions or proposing dumb ideas, and I felt like I learned a lot from reading their posts. In hindsight, they only seemed to be so smart because I knew so little. Looking back on it now, many of them just seem like bitter and pedantic people that knew a lot of technical minutiae but didn't necessarily know or care about creating software that actually did things, that other people could use. They were smart and knew a lot of useful things, but just as often they would make very personal and subjective observations about things, but mask those observations as bold, objective proclamations about This Is How Software Should Be Written. Unfortunately, in my larval hacker stage I couldn't tell the difference.
Anyway, what I was getting at was that it's good to learn things from people who know more than you do, but just because they're assholes about it doesn't mean they're right (it frequently means the opposite). Programming communities tend to be dominated by the assholes though, because they're the most motivated post comments and get into arguments with people about technical minutiae. It's the way it is, but it's not necessarily a good thing.
The elitism isn't shocking anymore, but it is sad and limiting. I want to hang out with / work with a programmer like this as much as I want to hang out with a religious zealot. Which is to say not at all.
On the other hand, dogmatism is frequently a way to relieve insecurity.
The difference between: "You cannot use a pointer without previous initialization becuase it may lead to corrupt memory, or some other error".
and
"Nobody with a fking idea of C would dereference a pointer as you have done"
is politeness. And the first one helps, the second one just offends. Both are right, but one is more useful than the other.
Especially in public discussions.
Being polite requires, as any other virtue, habit. And usually, acquiring it requires effort. But we, all of we, expect it from all of us.
It's tough to distinguish between someone dismissing an idea because he sees the inevitable problems that make it unworkable, and someone dismissing an idea that falls outside his comfort zone.
It's tough to distinguish between someone giving an abrupt answer because her time is too valuable to spend on a detailed one, and someone giving an abrupt answer because she doesn't have the understanding to formulate an actual rebuttal.
And of course it's impossible to tell any of the above from a nice guy having a shitty day.
There's a lot of gripe about our shitty community, and I often wonder whether the griping is just a byproduct of having so many conversations in permanently archived public fora, or whether there really is some force at work that makes impolite people choose programming or makes programmers impolite.
Also I find it disturbing that you connect bug fixes to a world view, the two couldn't be more separate.
The comment itself is completely in contrary to the relentlessly critical attitude that believes every detail is important.
I don't know that I prefer people going through the motions of hating on each other. It's not necessarily honest and genuine just because it's unpleasant.
And if you hit your spouse like boxers do in the ring then that would be abuse too. It's almost as if there are different rules for different situations.
(No, I'm not saying that kernel development is like boxing)
Now, of course, that sparks off a question about whether submitting your post or your startup to HN is de facto consenting to be verbally abused. But I think that's a pretty useful conversation to have.
I like to think of HN as one big subset of focus group users. Get another subset of people with a similar psychographic/demographic trait and you're likely to face just as much criticism, just of a different bent than you would receive here.
I can't load up the article again (squid error) but IIRC the guy was posted to HN by someone else,d then received a bunch of abuse on his site and via email etc. Perhaps better to keep the verbal abuse here rather than there?
When I first started using HN, only a little over a year ago really, it did seem different to now. A lot less criticism (yay, no mudslinging or fanboi fights!) and a lot more bootstrappy startup speak (though that can get just as annoying).
Oh well.
I agree with this. I've noticed it in myself. The more involved I've got in the tech community the more argumentative I've been with non-tech friends. Spending time debating with other programmers on HN and in comment threads and mailing lists has lead to me trying to debate even small points my friends make. It's something I'm trying to tone down but it's definitely been a big change in my personality over the last few years.
It depends. I generally try to be reasonably civil online, but I also think there are valid reasons to be less so. A good example is when people are giving advice to newcomers that has a good chance of putting them in imminent danger. E.g. someone goes to an online mushroom identification forum and posts a picture of some random mushroom they found and asks if it's edible, and someone else replies with something along the lines of, "Don't worry, anything you find in your back yard is edible," especially when the mushroom in question is a destroying angel or something. You see similar things happening all the time, with medical advice or otherwise.
Another less extreme example is when people know they're wrong, but they keep repeating whatever they're wrong about because they're being intellectually dishonest to promote whatever agenda they have. A good example of this is my comment the other day on the 'class of 2013: you've been scammed' story, where I tell the guy and his editors he's wrong but he still doesn't correct the article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728788
In these cases a lot of times I find that I correct someone once, but then they actually try to use my civility against me in one way or another, so sooner or later you kind of have to drop the hammer.
If someone is wrong about something because they're just unaware of some fact then by all means be civil. But sometimes there can be underlying issues that are fairly toxic and in order to preserve the community you need to find some sort of way to quash them, whether that's through a technological solution or through some form of social condemnation. In the real world when someone commits a crime like rape we generally don't just gently tell them it was wrong, because we accept that civility is a tool that allows reasonable people to have productive conversations, but at some point people forfeit their right to civility if they're being blatantly unreasonable. The same should apply online.
Amazing.
The written equivalent of spittle-flecked screaming is neither professional nor constructive. Unless, of course, the goal is to hound someone out of the community and make others less likely to participate, in which case that was an excellent comment.
Take action (remove commit rights), message Mauro in private, call him and let him know you are disappointed and why, ... but having an ASCII-based temper just makes Linux and/or programming look silly. Kernel dev is rough but there is plenty of time to let things cool down and let rational criticism sink in.
I remember reading once an author who refused to e-mail or respond to e-mails, because he was concerned that every piece of text committed to a private commentary between him and another person would never have been published in a book, and will potentially even become a privileged (private) conversation, that nobody else can benefit from, ever.
There is an obvious difference in tone between the 'polite disappointment private note of passive-aggressivity' and the 'verbal ass-chewing' that you issue when someone 'breaks one of the rules'.
What happens when this person gets chewed out on a forum on the internet?
People talk about it. Word spreads. Now I know that linux kernel devs are not meant to introduce breaking changes into userland, because of the power of his words.
Would I have heard if he had chosen other routes? Isn't it possible that he can keep a (potentially) helpful developer on the staff (we try to keep them, especially when they are unpaid, since they are harder to come by) without permanently or temporarily revoking his commit access? I don't know if he still works on kernel, but don't you think he would have been more alienated by forcible removal from the working group, for any period of time?
If my boss tells me to take a vacation, I would get worried.
Verbally abuse him, obviously.
I would venture to guess that most online assholes are socially dysfunctional people.
Misrepresenting your sources to make your point is FAR worse than 'shut the fuck up' in my opinion.
Honestly though, looking at the discussion, I have to admit that some of these userland apps did do wildly ridiculous stuff that sorta almost relied on certain kernel "flaws" -- so IMO they deserve to be broken (perhaps?)
Side thought - this happens in many communities as an indoctrination ritual (people laughing making fun of the newbie). So I'm wonder what the basis of it is (rooted in survival or human nature?) because there must be one.
If you're curious about questions like this, Pinker's "How the Mind Works" is a very reasonable and readable take on evolutionary psychology.
Thanks for the book suggestion I've been looking for something along those lines..
That could either be that the community is creating norms that make all programmers more polite, or, just that programmers as a group tend to get more polite as they get older.
Disagree. Fluffy unicorn social hour, when discussed by a programming community, resulted in flamewar behavior.
Let me pick the most recent three "real programming" type articles. Phantom.py the headless webkit engine, Arduino Yun, and Nimrod the static typed language release. Behavior in the articles, by programmer types while discussing programmer type things, was fairly civilized.
Well, OK. The Arduino Yun is yet another product that is not terribly well differentiated from a zillion other products in an extremely crowded market. And there was a smoldering birthday candle sized flame in the nimrod comments about unicode, but not that bad. Phantom.py had some minor war story about a competitor being a nightmare but Mostly on topic and interesting discussions.
This is very true. I don't know what it is about it, I'm pretty sure it's the lack of social skills that is prevalent with us nerd-types, but it could also be the anonimity of the internet.
But yeah, programming forums can get WAY too snarky for their own good.
http://www.muktware.com/5276/linus-torvalds-secure-boot-supp...
"Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead.
If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's your issue..."
What if that email was to a female kernel dev? What if a whizkid reads the kernel dev mailing list and goes asks their parents what deepthroating means?
So it is okay to swear at men but not at women? Why in this context?
Really, this is ridiculous. Why would something become acceptable/inacceptable simply because of the gender/religion/haircolour/height/taste in music of the recipient?
If one employee repeatedly causes offense or discomfort to another, especially on the basis of protected categories like race, religion, or sexual preference, and the management is aware of the offense but doesn't do anything about it, the company is opening itself to a lawsuit.
If management became aware of the remarks above, and they were within a workplace context (the above ones were out of the workplace), management would have to do something. They are making crude sexual references and could reasonably be regarded as offensive.
It does not matter if you think it is ridiculous, although it would be smart to reflect that the reason we have these laws is because, historically, there has been real and pervasive harassment.
There are some things that might (for instance, a reference that had a widely accepted meaning in general usage but also a specific use in the context of a particular group might be less appropriate to use to a member of that group where the context might be ambiguous enough to support both the group-specific and the more general use, while being perfectly fine otherwise), but I don't really see that being the case for the particular email in question.
Are you saying men can't suck dick?
Go ahead and repeat that quote to the nearest woman and see if they share your view.
"What if that email was to a female kernel dev?" What if it was man? A martian? A lickle putty tat? I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here saying here.
"What if a whizkid reads ... deepthroating means?" Whizkid? Doesn't know what deepthroating means? Were you home-schooled?
That everyone must be over socialized to be overly concerned about what everyone else thinks and not be concerned about the objectivity of what we're trying to achieve. In political questions this is overly dangerous.
A healthy level of tolerance of criticism is necessary for any sort of critical culture. Without it disasters like the nuclear disaster in Japan occur. Where everyone is trying to be so polite and get along that obvious problems go unsolved because criticism is not brought to bear on the right people at the right time.
Yes there are limits to what is acceptable and not overdoing it. But then there is also a need for tolerance of criticism to an extent and perhaps if there is enough confidence a rebuttal to criticism.
If, on the other hand, you want an intelligent conversation about tech and startups with the largest number of intelligent people, I suggest that we should all talk a bit more like Paul Graham and a bit less like a 14-year old playing Call of Duty (or, for that matter, Linus Torvalds)
I have no problem with the idea that in this community, Paul Graham is the best role model for communication. But let's not pretend that the place is flawed purely because of it's demographic.
"Anti-social" behavior according to whom and to what extent and for what purpose? For the purpose of feminizing men so that they are more passive and they fit better into your ideals of who people should be? So to fit men who want to be themselves into your little cult of civility?
> I still see people confusing the two.
There is no confusion. People want to be themselves and want a culture to cater to that. Instead you want a culture that caters to your needs. Which is fine, but that is no global definition of what that is and how to implement it. The idea that everyone and every community should conform to these feminizing norms is highly flawed. And is totally arbitrary.
> Both behaviours will leave adults concluding
Massive generalization. Adults, eh? Fuck you for calling any ideals that don't conform to your to be childish.
> mates establish a norm of anti-social behaviour, you will neatly exclude large portions of the population including most women, most children and most men over 30.
The point is to appeal to your group, not to appeal to all of society. That's what religions attempt to do, and fail all the time doing. There are no ideals that fit every community or even all of society. To attempt to create such ideals is essentially social engineering. It's the purview of totalitarians.
> intelligent conversation about tech and startups
Fuck you for calling people who don't conform to your norms unintelligent.
I am not saying you are obviously wrong. I complain about the 'arbitrary'.
In Western cultures, educated criticism is always enveloped in smoothness, and language is an important part of this envelope. This is not evolutionary, it is cultural and we do it because, in the long term, society has noticed that this is useful.
Academia is the classical example of this: one may hate his colleague in the same Department, and also his ideas, but one is not going to bully him linguistically in a paper. Because the time spent in explaining the insults is not worth it.
Unless one is a simple bully, obviously. But this is not the usual state of affairs.
Criticism means something in particular though, namely being critical of something.
Being critical of an idea does not mean insulting the person who proposed the idea, rather it means replying to the idea with intelligent commentary and feedback. There is rarely cause to be uncivil in providing criticism, and indeed doing such frequently closes doors to communication.
> A healthy level of tolerance of criticism is necessary for any sort of critical culture. Without it disasters like the nuclear disaster in Japan occur. Where everyone is trying to be so polite and get along that obvious problems go unsolved because criticism is not brought to bear on the right people at the right time.
Indeed this is true, but I think the overall feel in this thread is that the technical community frequently confuses criticism with outright personal attacks. In the very least, legitimate criticism is frequently mixed with verbal abuse, which adds nothing to the discourse.
> Yes there are limits to what is acceptable and not overdoing it. But then there is also a need for tolerance of criticism to an extent and perhaps if there is enough confidence a rebuttal to criticism.
A good engineer is one who accepts criticism, for that is how one improves. But if I am doing a code review, I would not tolerate someone questioning my history of career decisions when judging if my software architecture is correct.
I would not tolerate it because it is not on task, nor does it have a point or purpose.
There are times when bringing up the topic of someone's credentials or personal history is relevant, but even then there is no need to be disrespectful about it.
Now there are of course sometimes when more forceful language is called for, such as when personal or public safety is at stake, or when the future of a company is on the line. I would say that under those conditions, one should still do their best to communicate in a civil fashion, and then slowly escalate language used as is appropriate.
There's plenty of examples of programming communities that are the exact opposite, haskell being an oft cited example. The haskell community is very patient, calm, and avoids fighting/drama. Is it because haskell has some magic power that soothes the savage "programmer-type"? Or is it because the community standards are set by emulating the behaviour of the leaders? Compare how SPJ behaves to how Linus behaves. I think the only negative things I've ever heard from SPJ have been mild criticisms of his own work. Even in his role as an advocate for not just a language, but for entire fields (functional programming, static typing) he is consistently calm, respectful and pleasant.
"Here, be fair to everyone by limiting what you say so that women can participate."
TL;DR - If you don't like our community, go the fuck away or make your own "community" wherein your dogma can be enforced.
Alt TL;DR - If you love something let it go...
Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that person from somewhere, because where I come from (Chicago) strangers on the street ignore you, they don't wish you a good day and smile...
There's the whole "you can't know more than 150 people" study [1]. Which I think is very apt here, obviously we have to scale that idea (as anything less than like 5000 people means it doesn't exist when it comes to the web) but it might be a good idea to stop accepting new members or cut the community into chunks, if you wanna keep things from getting worse...
Finally, I've begun to really like OSC's version of the internet as presented in Ender's Game, at least when it comes to having real discussions.
Communities like this are like water: it changes constantly sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. The only thing to be happy about is whether or not it's thriving.
And, in my opinion, limiting the number of participants in this community would be a terrible mistake. Perhaps there's other ways to limit trolling, such as limiting the number of comments you can submit per day based on your karma, but it would unfair to exclude people to the great content here.
I agree but wouldn't it be nice if we could keep it changing for the better?
EDIT: Sorry if I wasn't clear, some really good ideas have been presented here, I only posted the first couple ideas that came to mind, expecting all the other really smart people here to come up with better ideas once I got the ball rolling - and they have!
Simply because you can't grow (for the better) by insulating yourself from all the "bad stuff".
Locking a forum down doesn't change anything. It seems like you're just wanting to censor dissent.
Perhaps users who have more flags than karma/upvotes actually disappear (along with their comments) for a time period and/or lose their ability to post for a while?
Huh? So what's the cut off date then? I noticed your account was only created 86 days ago.
Making a forum an invite-only clubhouse doesn't improve discussion.
I actually only started commenting then, I'd been a lurker for awhile longer, but that's not the point... I don't have much to add so maybe I should be removed from discussions until I can add more, I've only posted like 5 stories none of which I had anything to do with - I'd just found them.
It might, but at what cost?
The only things I remember about it is that a) there were effectively several 'internets', and you had to pay to access each one, and b) the Wiggin kids had to have accounts created for them by their parents, who could presumably vouch for them, and would be tied to a real identity.
But later on, (spoiler alert for a 30 year old book folks, Jesus dies at the end) they have totally self-funded anonymous accounts, which doesn't make sense in light of point b.
Blinded commitments. Could require verifiable yet anonymous endorsements from X existing users to 'level up' to an anonymous account; only the endorsers know who the account is for, yet all can verify that X users in good standing vouched for the anonymous account.
Here's the basic idea: Everyone has access to view basically everything, but for the right to discuss or post things you needed to be invited to that forum/group, so you start out kinda small in the general, "everyone can post here" community and then you were slowly invited in (or kicked out) depending on how much you contributed (and it's quality).
The troll block here is "hellbanning." http://toway1234.tumblr.com/post/16021243707/hacker-news-hel...
The problem is that since hellbanning is inherently passive-aggressive -- nobody in the community knows it's been applied, not even the person who's been banned -- it doesn't teach the community lessons on what behavior is beyond the pale. The banned person simply disappears. This makes life easier for the admins (since it lets them avoid both having to confront the person being banned and a time-consuming discussion of why that person was banned), but at the cost of not putting forward an example of How Not To Be for others to learn from and follow. So people make the same mistakes over and over again.
If people really do need to be thrown out of the community, it'd be healthier to have at least some of that happen via public executions rather than silent disappearances. At least when you see someone up on a gibbet, you get the message not to be like that person if you don't want to end up there yourself.
Full disclosure: I was partially hellbanned myself (submissions only, not comments) for a period, despite having 4,000+ karma at the time. I still don't understand what I did wrong, really. The experience knocked my opinion of HN down a few notches.
Really, one-off accounts seem to be the HN version of anonymous posting. Which suggests to me that it may be more beneficial, perhaps, to simply allow anonymous posting with some caveats (any user can choose to block all anonymous posts, anonymous posters couldn't be upvoted or downvoted, it automatically triggers some kind of alert to the mods to watch the post, and maybe it even costs you karma to use the feature.)
I also keep considering that some kind of API which allows users to choose to block other users might be an effective form of self-policing, but that would also kind of by definition stifle and fragment conversation.
The kind of people I seek out on line are people who understand the truth as something separate from them, which comes from a diverse and complicated objective reality. The kind of people I abhor are those whose personal power derive from punishment/reward of those around them in order to climb the social ladder.
There are more and more of the 2nd kind here on HN. There is more short sightedness, and more ageism. There is far less broad technical knowledge, and the level of Computer Science knowledge seems to have fallen dramatically. There are people who casually mix up "collide" with "collude" and will downvote you for pointing that out.
HN has gotten bigger. As usual, it's gotten stupider as a side effect.
Is it homogenous and if not, is it still a problem?
My very quick glance at the situation looks like someone's not too happy about getting savaged because he positions himself as a lightning rod in the past and was writing about a fluffy social topic relating to a fluffy social issue in a fluffy social arena. The whole steaming pile does not sound like HN-type material. OK, I don't particularly care.
What I do care is the air is kept clean for a real "hacker" "news" technical article like "Nimrod 0.9.2 released". I don't even use Nimrod and I found it an interesting article and discussion. A tad flamey around the unicode spat, but unicode is a magnet for that kind of thing and even the tiny little flame (like a birthday candle) was vaguely technical and interesting so its at least semi-excusable. Overall a fine quality article, perhaps because all the "yer mom" comments fresh from 4chan were magnetically attracted to fluffy unicorn social hour over there, keeping them away from the "real" articles.
There are numerous other "hacker news" articles I could have used as an example of genuine hacker news. But fluffy unicorn social hour decoy articles are fairly rare. So we're in no danger of being overrun.
The TLDR being that periodic (intentional?) seeding of HN with drama, kept carefully firewalled away from the real articles, keeps the air clean.
To each his own: My HN reading favors comments over links by at least an order of magnitude.
More people need to downvote direct personal insults.
The author is right that it's a problem.
I can upvote, however, meaning that I have both the ability to insult in comments and upvote insults that agree with whatever I want to insult at the time. That seems like a recipe for abuse if/when the userbase increases unexpectedly by a large magnitude, as older users wouldn't have the numbers for cutting down this behavior.
But other than closing down registrations and sending new applicants to "Hacker News 2", I don't know how to fix this.
(OTOH, that could have undesirable side effects, as it could, outside the domain of managing tone, result in a strong bias for older technologies and against new technologies, if it is the case that, on average, technical folks have a tendency to get attached to the technologies that were "hot" when they were establishing themselves and prone to seeing newer technologies as threats -- that's something I've seen enough to suspect it is a general, though far from universal, trend.)
(ref: http://www.popehat.com/2010/03/11/racial-babyocalypse-provok... )
There is nothing efficient about being a dick.
There are basically two ways that being a curt dick can be functional: [1] The other parties involved are extremely empathetic and look past the messenger to understand the message. [2] The curt dick has enough power to brow beat / intimidate / badger others into getting their way.
Neither of these are long term sustainable solutions, because empathy between parties is a two-way street. Simply put, you can't sustain empathy unless the other party grows.
Hackers pride themselves on the "fuck you" attitude that disrupts stuff, and I get that, and I like it. But the flip side of that is that an inflexibility to understand and communicate with others ultimately will dull your edge and you'll wind up short of what you want to achieve.
It's not what you say, it's how you say it - not because it's a nice feel good thing, but because how you say something is incredibly important in efficiently disseminating your message, and often time the success of your goals depends on it.
Writing off people who push back on you being a dick is writing off an entire population of people who don't see the world 100% your way... you know, like everyone besides you on the goddamn planet.
The real question is how do we fix it? I have often thought that what I would prefer would be a fully curated news feed rather than one managed by the upvote system. But this wouldn't seem to work well in practice. I would be relying on the persistent effort of a small number of curators, who might get sick or bored or go on holiday or they just might never exist in the first place - who wants to hand curate a new feed for some other people?
But what if we provided a very simple tool for producing a curated feed, so a curator could just right click in their browser to add a link to their feed. What then if we allowed the readers to aggregate these curators? The aggregation is yet another (semi)curated feed which can be followed for further aggregated.
This could (possibly) produce a single feed very similar to HN, but it seems likely that we could easily seek out a feed which was heavy on CS theory and light on VC politics (or the other way around).
The biggest challenge that I see is making it engaging to the curators. Right now we allow submissions and you get points for submitting something that gets upvoted or for making upvoted comments. I think we can make the experience rewarding but there are a lot of details, wherein live devils.
Maybe it sounds like I just recreated reddit, but this system would not have any votes, just aggregation of curated feeds.
Any thoughts?
I don't know that HN itself is the problem here, it's still pretty exemplary compared to the competition. Maybe a broader point could be made that it's depressing that the site with by far the best comments can still descend into those kinds of discussions.
For context, it's also worth noting that Dave is no stranger to controversy and has angered more than a few people over the years. I have no idea whether he was right or wrong in those situations, but I'm sure that that animosity played a role in some of the comments people made yesterday. Many of the really negative comments didn't seem like typical kneejerk Internet comments so much as people with grudges against him personally, and those grudges bled out into the discussion. Again, no judgement either way here, just providing context.
This isn't just the odd troll. There's a lot of cheerleading going on in the form of upvotes, even though the attacks don't contribute anything, and would normally be downvoted into light grey.
Okay, but then he then jumps from that to suggesting that HN implement a feature that doesn't let people on another site talk about whatever site they please?
That doesn't even make sense, or am I just missing something here?
In the big thread, there are 9 negative comments (the rest being sidetracks or push back). A couple of the smaller top levels have a second or third negative remark.
Of course these numbers are highly subjective. I wouldn't call it a torrent. Much of it certainly served no purpose.
Was there some other negative activity?
It was about this post by Dave Winer: http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/myOneTalkWithMarissaM...
It should be perfectly acceptable to decide you are done with a conversation and want out. We can't demand people stick around to be abused.
I'll preface what I think with this: I grew up with a computer since the early 90s. I used BBS's, and online communities since then. Internet culture always seemed to me to be very abusive, with very few exceptions. And as Dave says, there is a whole aspect of anonymity that makes people very comfortable when saying whatever they want, since they feel there will be no retribution.
For me, HN is one of the better places when compared to other forums I visit, such as music ones (not the technical side of music, by the way).
The one common problem I see is a user not giving another the benefit of the doubt. When I took an online course at university, the prof sent us a link regarding "Netiquette". It was actually very interesting. I can't find the exact one he sent the class, but it was something like this: http://ctlt.ubc.ca/distance-learning/learner-support/communi...
Anyway, one thing that stuck with me is asking genuine, courteous or friendly questions when you disagree with someone. There were many, many times when I would read someone's point of view which I thought were absolutely false. But I took the recommended route of asking a question to clear up some information. This is what I mean by giving the person the benefit of the doubt.
I think a lot of people worry that all of this is a competition and everyone's out to prove they are right. It is difficult to admit one is wrong, I know. But those who are sometimes right go out of their way to try and humiliate others with snarky or sarcastic comments. I used to be exactly like that when I was a kid participating in online communities in the 90s. Then I read something Oscar Wilde wrote: One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
It's pretty simple, but it works. You think you're right? Fine. But play nice. It may seem disingenuous, but ask questions which you think will lead the person to what you think is right. I've done it and many times the person knew something I didn't. Sometimes we were talking about different things. Sometimes I was right, but hey, at least the person learnt something new, and I learnt how to be a better person. And, of course, many times I was wrong, and I think to myself, "I'm glad I wasn't an asshole to him/her right off the bat".
I think we would benefit from interacting with others online the way we would if we were talking to them in person.
On a public twitter account, if you block someone they can still see your tweets, and they can still talk about you. You just can't see it.
Blocking a post from HN would mean people on HN wouldn't even see it or be able to talk about it. We might be assholes, but we should still be able to talk about stuff within the parameters laid out by HN.
Another solution might just be to disable commenting in your posts if the referer is HN.
Online discourse is not in the best shape. That said, despite wanting to feel bad for both authors, the stench of their misplaced entitlement prevents me.
Writing doesn't convey tone like speech does. I might be very happy yet you hear someone that is unhappy. This is pure projection.
That is, of course, if you're interested in responding to reality, as opposed to having some other motive.
We've seen all sorts of ShowHNs where the person who made it wasn't ready to post it yet, but someone got ahead of them. They rush into the comments to do due diligence, but sometimes the damage is already done. Now if the author wanted to post it again once it is finally complete, they'll likely end up with comments like "Didn't we see this already?" and potentially get less click-throughs considering. We've seen blog entries torn to shreds and the author show up hours late to a dead thread, hoping to do any necessary damage control or simply answer questions that could have changed the entire flow of conversation.
Not being fully in control of where my content ends up and not being able to be in every conversation about what I write is a big contributor to why I don't write at all. When someone posts my content here, it's assumed that it's to be taken seriously or that it is worthwhile. Despite that not being the case, people respond as though it is, and thus we find ourselves in this situation.
Even if there was some sort of tag like #nohn or something to highlight the fact that if discussion on the issue should be kept on the site because, as it wasn't intended to be a HN-worthy piece. That way, if it's posted anyways (as I don't believe in blocking the URL entirely), the author's intent is clear.
Also, what's with both his commenters and HN describing one another's commenters? There are shitty, stupid people everywhere, folks, and nobody is superior to anyone else. Except SomethingAwful goons, because, well... you know.
I think at least the devs at Google DO care and they take pride in their work (like every damn dev should). The problem that happens when your company (Google) services so many is that your voice isn't heard against the noise...(I think weev felt this with ATT).
I didn't get a chance to read the comments on the Mayer article (feel free someone to reply a HN link), but if you were getting personally attacked, that's immature of whoever trolled you. HOWEVER.....You can't generalize your experience with Semantics and assume that Mayer will be the same way. I think Mayer is doing a great job, and given her position at Yahoo will lead it the right way. (Still waiting for Yahoo to redesign that ugly homepage though, wasn't she credited for Google's simplistic search homepage?).
Side Note: I thought I read somewhere that Google's chief PR (the decider) went to work for the Obama Admin?
Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455
Just like I said earlier, Dave is personalizing his past experiences and shoving them on Mayer. The CEO of Semantics lead him on, but the BIG DIFF here is that Mayer is the CEO and like I think the brightest comment on there said, Mayer has to have a very thorough plan. She has alot to prove in this position, to shareholders, to her team, the board, and to everyone pushing the PR.
The upshot to all this is, I got way more exposure through HN than through /r/haskell, and a lot of people loved the post. I've gotten some cool emails out of this. So overall, I'd say trolls sure suck but the nice emails make it all worthwhile.
[1] http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736004
1. Thoughtful, contributing comments take a lot of effort to write, and people who write them can do other productive things. Pretty much every time I put effort into a thoughtful comment it gets ignored. It's particularly upsetting when it's "ask HN" or "show HN" type of thing - not a reply, not an up vote, do you even listen when you ask? So I stopped writing thoughtful comments ( * ), except for my own benefit - when I need to write something down to really think it through.
2. With the post title like you had I assumed it was celebrity gossip and did not even click the link. You can imagine the type of people that did click the link anyway. By choosing a subject you're choosing the audience.
( * )Ironically, this comment took me some effort to write. :)
And yes, sometimes I've been that asshole; don't take it personally; it's me, not you :)
That being said, just because you know a language is "bad" doesn't mean you won't use it (that comment is directed not just at the OP but also the trolls who assumed he was an idiot for knowingly using a "bad" language).
Over the few years, HN has sort of become the Digg and Reddit. There are far and few substantial conversations in visible view (yes count mine as unsubstantial as well).
From the logical perspective, the circle of HN needs to break off from its core and diverge into many different circles. There may already be few inner circles (hidden from the public view) I can't tell. But it seems logical that this big public circle is all inclusive, where everything goes.
Tearing down is always easier than building up and, as others have pointed out, as a community gets larger, the negativity tends to rise as well. It takes a lot of emotional energy to deal with a sea of people you respect who always have a significant portion ready to jump down your throat. This is one problem I have with social applications that grow sufficiently: There's always a mob somewhere large enough to lynch you. Sometimes that emotional energy might be better spent dealing with your in-laws or a few tough but valuable customers.
It doesn't help that negativity enforces itself, so it doesn't take long before a thread can be inundated with a hostile attitude. But how to address that?
I don't know how it might work, but what if there was an option for the author to include a picture of themselves (on HN)? That might humanize the discussion, by reminding people that they're talking to a real person...
"One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong."
I think that is the nub of the issue. People who are genuinely curious about an issue try to find out more. I routinely upvote comments here on any subject that ask for more information or more sources on factual statements made in articles submitted to HN or factual statements made in comments. We don't all have the same background in life experience and formal education, and I often learn new facts about the world from other Hacker News participants. I can't always assume that I understand another person's comment on the first read. Moreover, quite a few participants here write English as a second language. (How many Americans can write in ANY language besides English?) So sometimes the first thing to do when replying to an article submitted to HN is to ask follow-up questions. Another good thing to do is to point to other sources, if you know of any, for more information.
Civility is a core value of Paul Graham, the founder of Hacker News. He wants us to be able to disagree politely
http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
when we do disagree, and the Hacker News welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
distills the basic rules of the site into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
Don't be rude. Don't be mean. That's not easy, but that is the community guideline here. Or maybe not being mean or rude IS easy, if you practice it. It's worth finding out how much we could all habituate improving our social skills by how we behave here on Hacker News.
AFTER EDIT: It's worth pointing out that I wrote all of the above part of what I wrote before I really wrapped my mind around the fact that, after all, the submitted blog post comes from Dave Winer, whose blog posts I have been reading for more than a decade. I still stand by my statement that we may all as well be as civil as we possibly can and as factual as we possibly can here on Hacker News. This is a community we can all improve by our individual actions. That said, I think Dave Winer and plenty of other bloggers have plenty to learn from the best comment threads on Hacker News, the comment threads that most follow pg's aspirations for this site, precisely because there is a back-and-forth in the comments and a fact-checking that many bloggers shy away from. The difference between a blogger and a journalist is that a journalist is a reporter who writes for an editor. Sometimes bloggers write only for themselves, and when they do, they can learn from comments, if only they are willing to do so. When a blogger writes about another public figure, the blogger has to be able to take the heat, or maybe the blogger should find another kitchen.
Yeah, it's not perfect: it's actually really easy to get around, because all you have to do is copy/paste the link. But the overwhelming majority of the abusers won't even do that much work: they'll assume the link is dead, the nerd-rage will cool off, and they'll go elsewhere, leaving nothing on your site but a line in the server log.
But the real problem is also one of the unique features of HN; I couldn't flag or vote down any of the offending comments because I don't have enough karma. That's a shame, because it feels like I just have to sit on my hands and watch the bile flow. I think this makes the world appear rather worse than it is to anyone watching...
[0] http://thenextweb.com/eu/2011/04/13/dave-winer-twitter-is-mo...
I love the curated links, but that's about it. Trying to engage in conversation is a crap shoot. You might learn something, but you might encounter someone just dying to turn district attorney on you and just wanting to rip into you. I'll pass.
And God forbid you have a negative view on vi/vim.
Let the downvoting begin.
Think of Dave Winer as Robert Duvall. He's telling you a story about the promises and reality of acquisitions.
Those of you complaining about him? You're Sean Penn.
Thing is, someday you'll be telling this to a young 'un, just like Penn did at the end of the movie.
"The explanations required by the young are wearying." [2]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbUxePfsoWE
[2]: Look it up.
Do people realise that Winer reads and replies on HN? Would they ask a question to clarify if they knew he would?
Even when there is a general submission, it is not always obvious that OP or Original Author is participating. Reddit highlights the OP in a discussion which can be helpful.
That said, I don't have a fugging clue why people objected to the original article, or what the point of their objections were.
So in summary: Eveyone's wrong.
"In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down."
-- James Wolcott
People will read whatever they want into whatever there is.
It's funny to see Winer complaining about commenters being too quick to criticize from a limited background... when the whole issue starts from an article he wrote "in 15 minutes" criticizing Melissa Mayer based on a single short conversation.
However, yesterday I was really burnt out emotionally on some personal matters. And I've yet to fully recovered...
Is this something unique to HN, or something that many popular messageboards with anonymous posting features have in common? My guess would be the latter.
why does scripting.com want to load assets from localhost:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://127.0.0.1:5337/opmlEditor/comments/button?title=Hacker%20News%20is%20depressing&editorialDomain=comments.scripting.com">
</script>This isn't a problem with offline or private discussion because authors have no way of knowing what we said.
so long and keep all your rotten fish.
I think we, as a group, tend to be shitty judges of character, but our arrogance blinds us to the need for improvement. We're cynical about "people" in general, but we latch on too quickly to businesspeople who seem above-the-fray or decent, often based on superficial signals. (This is like the creepy guy who fabricates a relationship with a girl because she smiles at him.)
A consequence of this is that we can't perceive it when we the people above us play divide-and-conquer games against us. Language wars. This team against that team. IDE-users vs. command-line developers. Efficient but "not dedicated" 8-to-6 family guys vs. inefficient all-nighter types. Pro-Google vs. anti-Google. Facebook users vs. Facebook haters. Young vs. old. We've all been monstrously played and most of us don't even see it.
Your enemy isn't the guy who wrote the shitty code. He was quite possibly working under an obscene deadline in a job he couldn't afford to lose. No, the enemy is the boss who mandates you use the shitty code (using the nicest possible language, i.e. "we won't be able to deliver unless <horrible technical compromise that damages your career>") instead of letting you rewrite it; when he makes a common enemy out of the original architect, he's fucking playing you.
Most of our road-wear that we get in this career comes from wrong assumptions we make when divide-and-conquer games are played against us. We eventually wise up to the bad character of the players, but we retain those biases for a long time, and start saying things like "every shop I know of that used the JVM (N = 1) was unable to hire good people"... when the real reason that shop couldn't hire talent was that it paid poorly.
Just what I've seen. All this incivility and in-fighting comes out of our willingness to tear each other apart based on superficial differences, and that's something that's been inculcated in us from above. Why? Because we're fucking easy to control that way.
I view this entry as a bit of a tantrum, by someone who cares so little about the comments on Hacker News that he has repeatedly slandered the site and its regulars, and while encouraging others to post this very link in a comment earlier today simultaneously demands that this site not link to him. This strikes me as a little childish and bizarre for someone who, as I think we all know, understands a bit about the internet.
He is attempting to bully a group, using tactics more commonly found in grade school, and is threatening to cancel recess for everyone.
If you are a public figure, which Winer is for his contributions to the industry, "you" become bigger than the person. You become a message bus and a context. That comes with a lot of benefits, which includes that every opinion gets broadly spread regardless of merit, but it also means that context becomes a legitimate target for criticism, and a persistent wrapper around all messages, because your opinions are broadly spread regardless of specific merit. It is not reasonable to demand that each message be evaluated outside of that context.
And I'll reword what I wrote yesterday to fit this particular entry, which is that many of his posts have become deeply depressing. Many follow the pattern of aggrieved entitlement and disenfranchisement (and to repeat what I said yesterday, fit the bigoted stereotype about older developers. As one of the only people who even mentioned age -- and as a 40 year old developer -- I find it bizarre if Dave thought that was an insult about his age, when in reality it was a comment about him seemingly veering towards becoming the cliche).
It is fantastic that he is working on new, interesting stuff, but the message that percolates out continues to be rather morose.
If only that were true, I'd have spent even less time this week on meta-HN-drama.
And I reject or seriously, seriously, seriously lament that "discourse has moved to twitter". That sounds like the opener to George Orwell's 2084 or something.
2a) HN wants people to link to the original source article. So, in theory, blogs would not get posted.
2b) HN asks people not to editorialise when submitting links. Thus, if you want to include some text about an article you're submitting you're supposed to make a blog post, with a link to the article in the blog, and then post to HN the link to your blog post.
At least, that's how I understand it. It feels sub-optimal.
These fake points don't do much at all.
Anonymity or pseudonymity do, however, have benefits that should be considered before eliminating them. Whistleblowers and employees of companies being discussed are the two that come to mind immediately.
Your point about whistle-blowers and retaining anonymity for privacy/protection reasons is a very valid one, I hadn't considered that.