Hacker News is a social echo chamber
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
- I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions.
- I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through the new stories and if I see something interesting there I might upvote it.
- For comments, I upvote comments I find particularly helpful or insightful. I don't downvote comments very often unless they're particularly rude. However, I never downvote comments that are part of a discussion I'm having; I don't trust my impartiality in that case.
If my behavior is typical, then stories are being controlled by a 'vocal minority' who take the time to upvote or flag them. As in any group, the vocal minority tends to have the more fundamentalist / extremist points of view on a subject, which could lead to the outcomes TFA discusses.
- I don't usually upvote stories. I only do so if I have a very immediate "holy shit this is amazing!" reaction to it.
- I upvote comments frequently, particularly if it's a good, well-argued point done in good style (i.e., more factual than rhetoric). I downvote a lot more than I used to, but usually reserve it for posts I consider abusive. This means ad hominems and egregious displays of fundamentalism/extremism (e.g., "all laws are paid for by big corporate interests", which comes up every. single. time. AirBnb or Uber is mentioned).
That last part is subject to some personal bias naturally, but I do think it's important to reward posts that provide a holistic, nuanced view of issues rather than the fiery rhetoric of people banging on black and white drums. I've noticed a lot more of this sort of drumbeating on HN nowadays.
There are some topics that show up on HN frequently, but the discussion is incredibly poor every single time. I've given up on upvoting/downvoting any such discussions and simply don't read them anymore. This includes everything on sexism in tech.
I don't blame you, but I find it especially sad, because sexism in tech is one area that actually needs more meaningful nuanced discussion. Not to be too elitist, but if we can't have this conversation, who can?
lesswrong.com is typically able to discuss difficult topics much more rationally than the rest of the internet.
/s
Trying to get HN to productively discuss topics like this is like trying to get 4chan to "count to 10". The site just really isn't set up to facilitate it.
The notion that HN should only focus on the “technology” establishes a rather broken model, where no such polemic or axis exists.
Are there not potentially greater entrepreneurial opportunities for a collective that has a holistic view of the culture?
Such as being 5% female.
I've seen pure open discussions, and I don't want to have anything to do with them.
You know, I've noticed a lot of the 'superstar commenters' on HN have polar opposite views from each other on a lot of these touchy issues. So, it's sad to see that what ensues out of smart people disagreeing is a plain refusal to talk about these very things.
Why does it have to be this way? Why are some of the most respected and the smartest commenters on this site unwilling to have an intellectually honest debate?
Is it because of time? I've noticed that if I just sound the first thought in my mind, it's likely to come out as being rude ("wow, this sucks", "this is the 100th time I'm seeing this", "why did this person make this obvious mistake?"). It takes effort and time to structure these first thoughts as positive criticisms. Presumably, the smart folks here don't have a lot of time, so maybe it's just that they end up sounding terse and rude only because they don't have the time to reword things to sound more polite and supportive?
Unwilling? No, HN is more than willing to have a good debate. The issue is that with some particular topics, HN is unable.
HN is not a perfect platform for intelligent discussion. It is unable to handle certain types discussions and the only effective mechanism it has to keep those discussions from consuming the rest of the site is to crudely cull them.
Humbly, I suggest that if HN's inability to discuss some things surprises you, then your opinion of HN is too high. It is imperfect, very imperfect.
Agreed, it's actually just impossible to have a non-polarized discussion if people identify too strongly with one of the poles. This isn't unique to HN, we essentially live in a bipolar society. Even if you present a middle ground, someone identifying with either pole will assume you are identifying with the opposite pole, because they see that part of the world in black and white.
Nevertheless, these discussions are good for clarifying your understanding of the world, just try not to expect much in the way of respect, appreciation, agreement, or understanding.
This is a good time to bring up one of my favourite Paul Graham essays, "Keep Your Identity Small".
http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Religion, politics, professional sexism, all these are topics that infringe on people's identities, causing a strong gut reaction that leads to terrible discussions. Even programming languages can end up in a similar category, if you have too many people that identify as a "C++ programmer" or a "Pythonista", or a "Lisper", which leads to the oft-seen programming language flame war.
That's a good point; an effective compromise may be to allow heavily flagged discussions to continue after being pushed off the front page, instead of [dead]'ing them (which halts conversation abruptly.) This is actually what happens currently most of the time (as far as I have seen anyway) and I don't think it is particularly bad. The people who are already involved in a discussion can continue it, but more people are not drawn into it as the poisonous discussion doesn't stay visible on the front page.
Because after the tenth time it's discussed and turns into a verbal food fight, many people intuitively realize that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The people who don't take the voting system seriously are probably those who are the most likely to mindlessly upvote/downvote stories and comments.
I think up and down votes should be rationed. Or at least have some kind of cost (when your ratio is depleted you can upvote by using your own karma?). I remember slashdot had (has?) a similar system. It would force the users to think twice before mindlessly up or down voting anything. Maybe a downvote should be more expensive as an upvote, even.
Flagging stories would still be free for completely off topic contents (and fighting voting rings).
EDIT: or as an alternative: the more you vote the less your vote is meaningful.
- I only flag stories that are clearly posted here for promotional purposes only (example: Ask HN threads where the author does not ask anything but just posts a link to his site/startup)
- I upvote stories that I feel have a very good level of quality (i.e., deeply technical stuff) and have a low point count (support the underdogs)
- I upvote any comment that's mature, respectful, and which the author clearly spent a decent chunk of time on.
- I upvote stories fairly liberally. I use the saved_stories feature on my own profile as a lightweight bookmarking solution. So anything of interest that I think "I may want to find this again in future" I upvote. I tend to visit /new once or twice a day to spot interesting things that haven't hit the front-page, I think of this as community service.
- I upvote only the most insightful comments, I upvote comments less than I upvote stories. I downvote only the most rude or dumb comments, the ones filled with bile, hatred and flamebait views... downvotes are very rare but that's my criteria. I don't downvote dumb jokes, but notice other people tend to.
I never upvote/downvote other people's comments if I've taken part in the debate. I do notice that it's not possible to downvote the branch of the debate you've participated in, but I just avoid voting on any comment on a story I've posted a comment on.
One thing I have noticed, on a couple of occasions I've made a divisive statement and whilst it would overall get upvoted my total karma gets reduced. It seems a few people throw hissyfits when they disagree and go check other comments you've made and downvote a bunch of them.
- I flag stories only if they're poorly-written and completely unrelated to tech, or if they are opinion pieces that fail to back up their assertions (two or three short paragraphs)--in those cases I'll try to comment on why I flagged it.
- I upvote stories if they're technically interesting or socially relevant; I try to make a pass through the new section at least once every day.
- I upvote comments that are thoughtful or witty but on-topic, and downvote comments that are poorly written, severely off-topic, or mean in a non-clever way (dumb trolls).
The practice of downvoting because you don't agree with something is tricky--it makes sense (I can more easily pick out comments that probably run counter to the community and thus have better entropy) but also is kind of detrimental, because it conflates "This is a bad, poorly-worded off-topic comment" with "This is a comment I find disagreeable".
Why the tech requirement? It's HackerNews not TechNews. There are plenty of good posts I've found useful which fit the hacker label but not the tech one.
If they are well-written but don't involve technology, they don't activate the flag criteria. I may even upvote them if there are cool enough (many New Yorker essays, for example).
If they are poorly-written but do involve technology, they don't activate the flag criteria. I simply won't upvote them.
If they are both, they are taking up link space.
(I'm also personally opposed to the "Let's use hack to describe everything!". That said, I do appreciate good writing--for example, the piece on Frank Lucas that showed up a while ago.)
"Bird Bath: The Conservation of a William Morris Textile"
I didn't click flag because I have a certain fondness for dead media preservation, someones going to be writing something very much like this in 50 years for preserving 5.25 floppy media, or flash drives, or a museum preserving its vintage iphone 5, which gives you something to think about. And, after all, its jacquard woven which means a lot to CS/IT/tech people who know what that means (which is probably not many). But its really darn close to the line and I would not feel its excessively outta line for someone else to click flag, if they want to.
Whenever this matter surfaces, I recommend the HN Slapdown user script [1] which indicates stories that have been moved below the position they would have based on points only. In other words, it draws attention to stories that have been flagged or otherwise adversely affected.
In my opinion, the homepage either weights non-upvote inputs too heavily or receives too many non-upvote interactions from users.
I can't be certain whether flagging or other measures such as the "flamewar detector" are more or less responsible for the volatility of the home page ranking. My only anecdotal evidence is that when I have (very rarely) flagged stories, I've witnessed an immediate and severe rank adjustment, often immediately sending the submission into second-page purgatory. This has given me great respect for the severity of flagging.
My heuristics:
1. Most of all, I try to keep my interactions positive. If I don't agree, I act as if I don't care, by which I mean I do nothing. I see little value in downvoting something I disagree with. It won't change the person's mind—only a comment in reply has a chance of that.
2. I will downvote comments that I believe are objectively wrong and potentially misleading to other readers or are clearly intended to be offensive or mean-spirited. Still, I feel I am very sparse with downvotes. I downvote approximately one out of every 1,000 comments I read.
3. I've only flagged stories that are unrelated to technology, but even then only in extreme cases. I don't bother flagging stories about popular fiction, movie reviews, or other elements of geek culture because I don't think those stories are an epidemic at HN. Like you, I feel it's important to leave a comment when flagging a submission. I have flagged two stories if my memory serves me correctly.
4. I skim the new section on every visit to site; about once per day.
5. I upvote stories I find interesting or agreeable. I think this is the point of the upvote. Upvotes are where I can be entirely subjective. I upvote approximately one out of every 10 stories I read.
6. I upvote comments by the same rule as stories. I upvote approximately one out of every 100 comments I read.
7. I strongly disagree with downvoting or flagging simply because of disagreements. I don't think use of downvoting is as problematic at HN as elsewhere (e.g., Reddit), but I do feel there is still slightly excessive comment downvoting and moderately excessive story flagging (or other adjustments).
This article is direct user feedback and points out that moderation is just harmful for what HN stands for, why "making it disappear". You can't moderate a community-driven website. You can for porn or harassment speech, but not for critique, seriously. Even if the critique is unconstructive, that's how humans discuss, don't moderate that, otherwise you will falsify the outcome.
That's like the NSA, always trying to control things and sweeping things under the carpet, no like.
I used to until I lost the ability. I guess the impulse came from stackoverflow, where you are encourage to try and make the site better by editing and flagging poor items.
I used to go to the new page and flag 3-5 stories a day. I thought this was a benefit to the community and one way I could help make it better.
Finally one day I lost the ability to flag. I assumed a moderator didn't like one of the stories I'd flagged and took the privileged away.
No good dead goes unpunished:)
- I see newer stories thanks to some chrome extensions showing a 2 column layout. I rarely upvote though as I feel I am too inexperienced to decide what others should find interesting.
- I upvote comments that made me learn something. I downvote "redditism", flaming etc.
Just as another data point.
(I've flagged probably 10 things total.)
EDIT: jlgreco corrects me. The guy I was thinking of was flag-banned, not hell-banned.
I believe that if you flag an item that then becomes popular it counts against you. If you flag a story that has a strong voter-ring or sock-puppet gang then, guess what: You end up being on the losing end and the sock-puppets win.
Such is life.
If a submission is good I always upvote it.
I downvote quite often, but not for disagreement, only for comments that are not helpful to the discussion.
HN would be better if more people used their tools.
Yeah, I know... I spend so much time on this site (it's my primary news feed) I really need to make more of an effort to do that.
- Leftist orthodoxy (Keynesian good/Austrian bad, etc.) - Disappearing dissenters (HeckBanning, NegVotesToOblivion) - Apple the Immaculate (and Saint Jobs the Perfect) - All startups are equal (but YC's are more equaler than others)
Please HeckBan this and prove the points made about HN's accoustics and whatnot. Whatever you do, must not upArrow and offend the hive mind.
Really?
I've tended to notice the opposite: new ones are constantly appearing, they get lots of comments, inspire heated debates and most sentiments are sympathetic, sometimes to an almost unhealthy and postmodern degree.
Now, preface my following comments with the fact that I don't have data to back them up, so really you can take or leave what I'm about to say--if it resonates, then maybe I'm on to something--if it doesn't, then maybe I'm just projecting.
What I've noticed is a pattern that a dispassionate article about the plight of women in the tech industry will survive, but an article by a woman who is actively angry about being harassed will get a large number of angry, devaluing comments and will disappear very quickly.
On a positive note, this reflects a culture that values a level of scientific detachment, and also a recognition of the fact that Internet arguments can get very circular and ugly and can ultimately destroy an online community if left unchecked.
The problem is that this pattern also belies a cultural devaluation of the role of anger in combating trauma. Where trauma exists, anger will exist. Angry people are not always fair and balanced--in fact the state of the emotion actively undermines such a thing. Anger and scientific detachment are quite antithetical, because an angry person is very much inside of the thing they're supposed to be detached about--and it's hurting them.
So when a woman who is traumatized writes an article out of anger, there is inherent value in that, even if the anger behind the article makes it one-sided, because in the end that person is (bravely, in the face of the inevitable harassment that will come of it) bearing witness to what is (in my own experience) a major problem in the industry, a problem that is not only hurting people but limiting the talent pool significantly.
But that doesn't mean there is value to it being posted here. I don't think it is surprising or bad that angry rants disappear quickly, while a dispassionate analysis lives on.
Also, many of us have no problems with postmodernity and consider ourselves part of the political left. Which is fine, programming and god forbid "startup culture" should not be monolithic.
inspire lots of repeated, rehashed discussion.
Hey you probably don't know this, but some guys working in sausagefest industry segments, like IT, exhibit uncivilized behavior around women, and I theorize acting like apes doesn't exactly encourage ladies to help us fix the sausagefest problem, bet you never heard about that story before! However, story 234243 on that topic adds nothing so it gets flagged. Aside from adding nothing new, its often of the anecdote - generalization anti-pattern which also adds little to the conversation. "Once, postgresql didn't work, therefore it always universally sucks for everyone and all applications". Eh, flush it.
--
pg has a very known bias against "political discussions".
I would argue that all discussions are political, and anyone that can say with a straight face that they "don't like politics" doesn't realize how political that statement is.
I feel the NSA stories are the same. We get it; they're intercepting as much internet traffic as they can get and trying to break SSL (which they haven't succeeded at it without the help of 3rd parties providing signing keys). It's always the same comments (my personal favourite are the Americans who are mostly outraged at the fact they're being targetted, like the rest of the world's privacy is somehow lesser) and adds nothing to the conversation.
Despite a fear of dredging up a flamewar, what you're describing is a turf war where according to various executive orders the FBI is supposed to be spying on us, and the NSA is supposed to be spying on them. Its a (astroturf? planted?) distractor from the core issue of a whole lotta spying going on. And that's the long format explanation of why it adds nothing to the conversation.
Besides, most Americans I know aren't upset that it's happening to them to the exclusion of all others. That it is happening at all is the most common and most reasonable complaint. That it's not explicitly couched in concern for non-US-citizens does mean it implicitly discludes them.
I generally take the view that if everyone is complaining, then the middle ground is being struck. The classic example is the BBC - the BNP (British National Party, nasty fascists) often claim the BBC has a "left wing bias", which makes activists on the centre left laugh out loud, given how much right-wing bias we detect in programmes like the flagship "today" on R4 in the mornings.
So, unless both sides are complaining (me and you, the OP and the flaggers, PG, tokenadult and stiff,) something is wrong. :)
The existence of two parties arguing does not imply that:
1. All views are more-or-less represented 2. All views fit on a one-dimensional spectrum 3. A middle view is more desirable than either "extreme" view (or even desirable at all).
I also proudly call myself a political centrist, mostly out of the idea that I'm an Empiricist, and all politicians make some extraordinary claims that can't be substantiated and some more moderate ones that overlap and are more likely to be correct - (breathe) which I think may fall under the same fallacy. Food for thought (and re-thought,) thank you.
(especially interesting since, as a Lib Dem, I get quite cross about people saying politics fits onto a 1D axis, so I clearly don't even believe the premises of the fallacy in full!)
EDIT: from just a few minutes of reading, this concept (which I've held in my mind for a while) makes me think less well of compromise for compromise's sake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
I probably still think the BBC isn't biased though - especially given the difference between different programmes, even just on R4 the comedy is very left-biased.
One is an npr story. You can flag these stories all you want, but they still influence how the wider population views programmers and the field. Wouldn't it be interesting to discuss that here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6374508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360328
Do you think the comments section of other types of HN stories are held to the same standard? Or do you think the promptness with which these stories are flagged has something to do with their subject matter?
If you have a number of people acting in the way you describe, you end up with an echo chamber, which is what the article is noting.
I believe the credit we assign to peer reviewed scientific, mathematical, or engineering papers shouldn't be anywhere near the same weight we assign to peer reviewed social science papers. I dealt with quite a lot of these papers early in my career and they do a wonderful job of backing up grant proposals but a poor job of being correct.
My takeaway was that they tried to present some idea as universal when it really required the culture of the researcher in the geographical area the researcher was studying[1]. The second problem is that they didn't understand what they were studying. They didn't think that way.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are some amazing researchers whose results were really useful, but the lack of true rigor in many of these studies is just poor. Don't get me started about the damn math errors or "correlation does not imply causation" arguments.
1) Community risk factor studies have to be the worst. The number of them that only studied urban settings, but believed their results applied to rural areas is astounding.
The idea that 'hivemind' discussions are drowning out 'other' viewpoints has merit with respect to this forum. There are copious examples, from role-of-government discussions to technical preferences.
Indeed, there are cases where the community massively promotes dubious science that it finds agreeable.
We would be foolish to throw out this author's commentary because one of his examples is not bulletproof.
Most of the useful and interesting things that come out of HN are in threads that assume the answer to the big question and make some interesting point about the details.
I get the greater point, but I do not like starting off a perfectly fine argument with such a poor premise. It reeks of wanting to write an article on an important subject and using a poorly chosen event as the "catalyst" or "trigger point" for your need to write it. Also, I am not among those who take that sentence from the article as a "statement of truth".
Strange apologia. This isn't about whether it was a good article or not or the relative merits of peer reviewed social science. It's about whether it's good for the community when top articles are disappeared by a bunch of dittoheads simply because pg was critical.
Before pg post: top article.
After pg post: flagged to oblivion.
If that's going to be the case than it would be better for the community that pg had not commented in that post. Which is unfortunate because pg is very insightful and I think right in that case. Insight is wasted when it's buried on page 10.
The fault obviously is the poor use/abuse of the flagging power and has been extensively documented previously. I've seen zero evidence that it adds anything to this site. Make it cost 100 or 1000 karma to flag something and maybe it can work.
Also "My takeaway was that they tried to present some idea as universal", is a takeaway from social science research, not the article.
No, I'm pretty sure I meant they can get you grants but are, on the whole, hogwash. I do admit to using these studies to write grants to get money to do things for people. I was a bit of a crusader in my younger years before I realized the end never justifies the means.
Beth is nowhere near as good looking as Tricia.
Without other context, I'd assume that Tricia is much better looking according to the author of the comment.
Pope remains Catholic
12 points by BCM43 56 minutes ago | flag | discuss
Bear shits in wood
32 points by BCM43 21 minutes ago | flag | discussThis is why I think the "techies are sexist" articles are joining the "NSA is evil" articles on the flag pile. There's more often than not no new information, and predictable, boring (and in some cases, flame-filled) conversation follows.
By all means, kill this crap and let something more deserving and interesting take its place.
The only reason I'm not flagging this article is because it's shown itself to be popular and I'd probably lose the ability as a result. This article is straight up meta noise.
I hope people disagree with me in this thread and prove my point.
The fake air of noticeably forced civility on top of a disagreement is annoying to stomach at best, and can cause decent into passive aggression. By treating some regular ol' nonsense as erudite points at the same level as the people who actually know what they're talking about, an uninformed passerby will walk away with the wrong impression about the ideas presented. Disagreements aren't settled on the facts if someone is willing to talk longer and strain their original points further than the person they're talking with can tolerate. I've noticed that the most-informed in a Hacker News thread is not necessarily well-informed, unless I'm ready and willing to write walls of text (which I never am) there is often no point in attempting to join the conversation. The closest I'll even try anymore is making a small point at the fringe.
The site is this way because this way works; it's not like there aren't dozens of other sites with different policies out there on the internet. And yet for some reason we prefer to come here.
I question this because such discussions seem to be, in practice, the exact opposite of productive. They are not so much discussions as they are internet shouting matches. I doubt very few people walk away from those discussions with altered perspectives.
ADDENDUM: To those who counter that Hacker News has become such an important place in the internet consciousness that it needs to now address these things, consider that a primary reason it has become as important as it is now is that the rule you now complain about have done what they were intended to do.
The flamewar detection system isn't smacking down topics, it smacks down types of discussions. Certain topics seem to generate little but flamewar and get regularly smacked down, indicating to me that HN has little interest in (or perhaps more accurately, ability to) discuss[ing] those topics reasonably.
tl;dr: I agree, HN isn't for discussing everything. Far from not being okay with that, I think it is a good thing.
I do not think the topics getting the smackdown fit that category very well. They fit the category of meaningless "raise awareness" and "anecdote party" and "shouting match". But Vitality? Important?
How about Industry? They are VERY important to the linkbait multi-page online "journalism" banner ad soaked industry, but not the HN readers, mods, or owner. This probably makes linkbait industry people angry, come on guys you're supposed to be addicted to this stuff so click! but its not our problem. I don't know why they'd want us anyway, probably no community on the net with a higher concentration of adblockers installed in our browsers, so we won't make linkbaiters any money anyway.
I'd rather use the reddit terminology of "controversial discussions" where people are coming from very different places.
I think the problems with Hacker News has more to do with a failure to account for those situations over the echo chamber discussions where everyone is in (borderline-insufferable) agreement.
We were discussing flame wars on Slashdot before News.YC (ahem, Hacker News) even existed. People on the internet before then were discussing flame wars on usenet (as the parent post mentions).
And before that on ham radio bands like 80M and to a lesser extent 20M we had plenty of people arguing over basically nothing since... I donno 1920s or so?
That is not the sort of conversation that that Paul Graham considers a flamewar.
Downvoted? Probably more often than you would guess; many people downvote for disagreement just as they upvote for agreement.
As an example: Go (language) is a popular but quite controversial topic here. It is pretty easy to get downvoted in discussions on the merits of the language, but those discussions don't get flagged off the site and flamewars are rare (if present at all).
The HN flamewar detector isn't a human being. It's a software algorithm. It doesn't care about the subject of the flamewar or take that into account. It only looks for certain posting patterns.
What you're asking for is something that discriminates (no negativity intended) "controversial discussions" from "flamewars" - where "controversial discussion" is pretty much defined as "stuff I want to talk about".
Building a social echo chamber risks marginalising us from the rest of society, gradually becoming ignored and irrelevant as our self-reinforcing opinions drift ever further away from the mainstream
I don't consume movies, books, music, food, web sites, or much of anything else because they're "mainstream".
I do so because they have a high degree of quality that holds my interests. Mainstream is often the opposite of quality.
The more mainstream HN becomes, the less desirable it becomes. If I wanted mainstream I'd spend more time looking at Slashdot and Reddit.
Effectively challenging somebody's worldview doesn't begin with "everything you consider true is false, now listen to me" as is sometimes the preferred method of radicals. Being bombarded with information and viewpoints you consider wrongheaded doesn't expand your horizon, it galvanises you.
But when a person I have a lot in common with and agree with on many issues says something that I don't instinctively agree with, I listen and at the very least make sure I understand the full argument before I decide whether I think it's wrong.
Can you, in particular, handle being confident in one perspective and being able to acknowledge, understand, and evaluate another? Maybe. Can most people? I don't think so.
"Having a informative and effective discussion at a high level, and having opinions moved, predicates a high degree of common ground."
We can agree on definitions, but that's not necessarily an echo chamber. An echo chamber, or the negative kind of echo chamber, is when a (nonmathematical, nonformal) perspective or conclusion is reinforced by the entire community.
Example: "everybody has the same opportunities and therefore everybody is equally capable of achieving success". You get people on hacker news asserting this all the time. This is not a definition. This is dogma.
"Being bombarded with information and viewpoints you consider wrongheaded doesn't expand your horizon, it galvanises you."
Key phrase: "[ideas] you consider wrongheaded". Nobody has all the right ideas from the start. A priori, there is no reason to think that you will never encounter any ideas which appear wrongheaded to you at first.
I can often see people opening their comments with a hefty preamble, which goal is to justify the following controversial opinion, in hopes that it will not bring or at least lessen the wrath of the mob.
And of course people like their idols, too. When PG makes a comment - it's a godsend and instantly attracts the fervent following. In a similar manner, there's no lack of ardent supporters of Google that will rationalize any move by the company in a way that is good for the world.
It is evidence of nothing more than somebody wanting to make a poorly considered comment without the negative ramifications associated with typing before you think. HN loves people who are willing to be contrarian. The 'leaders' list is absolutely littered with people who spend most of their time disagreeing with the bulk of the site. They get upvoted, not downvoted, because they express their disagreement well.
Throwaway commenters typically get downvoted not because they are going against the grain but because they make very low quality comments.
The funny thing is that HN is the ultimate in technical austerity. The only thing it really has going for it is the influence of PG and the moderators... yet there are those who call out those things as being a problem.
Some issues are social hot buttons, with a roughly even split (if not in actual numbers, then in energy exerted in pushback against the opposing view), roughly equal validity to each perspective, and pretty much no chance of one side reversing their view en masse in short order. Repeated prolonged verbose heated arguments over these subjects will not lead to any meaningful consensus. Their presence tends to erupt as a tangent or non-sequitur to another discussion, destroying the overall thread in a wave of verbose hysteria. Nothing is served by their recurrence; we all know there's a dramatic split on views regarding the subject, we are each settled in our own views thereon, and frequent re-hashing the subject just sours the environment and encourages participants to seek more sensible discussions elsewhere. Ergo, there's no point in letting these recur. PG is right in weighting the algorithm so such destructive & pointless discussions tend to disappear.
Yes, we know such disagreements exist. A policy of "not here, guys" is a good thing. Yes, the issues being suppressed are of great sociopolitical importance; please recognize that decent people can disagree over them, please agree to disagree, and resolving that disagreement will not happen here - but continued rehashing thereof will create a toxic environment.
What I think HN's biggest problem is story repetition, which can lead to the echo chamber being enlarged. It's not a problem today, but when Snowden's news began to hit HN for days on end, it would have been nice to combine the discussion for all the news stories in order to avoid having other stories drowned out. I am certain that other important news stories were drowned out when the front page was effectively 100% Snowden.
This isn't to say that Snowden's story wasn't important (it was and still is), but similar stories from other sources should be able to keep it at the top instead of having multiple discussions on the same topic coming about.
There's, inevitably, a lot of low-level trolling, but you also get some amazingly original insights.
For instance /v/ is mostly very sexist, /pol/ is mostly very antisemitic. Even when there's no voting/karma of any sort if an idea gets a lot of traction at some point people who disagree will get flamed and passed a certain point will give up/stop discussing the topic/leave the forum for some other place.
When someone posts a very unpopular opinion it can't be downvoted, of course, but it will either be ignored or flamed until the thread gets completely train-wrecked/expired/killed by the mods.
On /b/? Where?
Basically, the reason it can do these things is that nobody takes themselves too seriously--the whole affair is rather tongue in cheek.
Different behavior results, sure, but look at the cost. Whats the SNR on HN, -3 dB, -6 dB maybe? Would HN readers tolerate HN turning into mostly garbage with a handful of precious gems?
Boy oh boy, I sure love me some Orwell references.
Referencing 1984 should be on par with referencing Hitler. It's just a lazy debate tactic. If you have a good point you can make it without resorting to these much-too-often used references.
Orwell himself went against it his essay "Politics and the English Language". Read it. It'll do you good.
(I know, I know, being an easy comparison isn't the real reason we complain about references to Hitler. I don't find the real reasons to be compelling either.)
I tend to have a lot of respect for pg, and found his apology for what happened in that thread to be admirable. Whether or not preventing discussion of the issue on HN is positive or negative...I have very complex feelings on the issue, and see valid arguments on both sides.
What I do not have mixed feelings about, however, is that these issues need to be put front and center, so that people in our industry a) know they exist b) know how common they are c) are inspired to make personal effort to fix it. I would hope that pg agrees.
If he does, why not make such stories, when they set off the flamewar detector, maintain their ranking, but disable comments? That way, the issue is still raised, and people are still alerted to it, but it prevents the (some believe) "unproductive" discussion.
In some cases it seems to, though by that time the discussion is long off the front page. I think this is a good thing, if something is on the front page then comments should be enabled, if only in case something in the article desperately needs to be corrected. If we get a post on here about a new study suggesting that vaccines may cause autism, that would almost certainly generate a flamewar but the absolute last thing we would want is for the post to remain on the front page and not permit anyone to post comments that may refute claims made by the study. In situations like those, it is better to kill the discussion and to take the post off the frontpage than to leave it there but disable commenting.
I wrote a moderation bot to use on a political subreddit that used a text classifier to determine whether comments should be deleted. A goal was to delete flame comments rapidly. It worked, but reddit's reply notifications limited its effectiveness.
Of note: the phrase "you are a" ranked higher for the flame category than any particular insult.
This may also have the side effect of allowing for some opinions to be shared, without being mired in flame-y back and forth. (And, importantly, still allows the story to stay more visible)
</sarcasm>
You mean, they want to see it here. And that's the problem. Just because a majority want to see it doesn't mean it should be seen here. And yes, a minority of users who've proven themselves over the years to understand the difference between on-topic and off-topic should have some power of this process.
HN is curated, and it's not just curated by the majority. And me, and many others are fine with that. It's what makes HN the way it is. Removing that effectively turns HN into Reddit.
Too many users are unable to make the distinction between agreeing with a story or feeling its interesting, and correctly evaluating its worth further examination and discussion. On the other hand the flaggers are pretty good at detecting stuff where the discussion will be useless.
Example: "Obama is the best president". Well that's going to get upvotes from people who like 'bama and want to tell everyone even though no one wants to hear it, who hate 'bama and want to tell everyone even though no one wants to hear it, people who think they should be more politically active so they don't personally care but in a misguided way think they're doing a public service by upvoting something thats widely agreed as a public good even though it isn't, and people who just like to watch the world burn... But lets face it, the comments are going to be garbage sloganeering at absolute best from both sides, so it get flagged as it should be.
Here's a live example from HN new which I don't think is going to make it under the above criteria:
"Ask HN: How are social media user habits changing?"
Is there anything actually useful to comment about this that hasn't been hashed to death already or is just an anecdote or bragging about how I deleted my facebook in 2009 so I'm more 'leet than the guys who deleted in 2010?
I theorize a meta poll of "is there anything interesting to talk about in social media that hasn't been talked about?" would probably come up 95% against. Maybe the poll comments would actually contain something interesting, maybe even from the 5% who think there might exist something interesting but may or may not be able to enumerate it, but I don't expect that to happen.
"Seeking clarity is more valuable than agreement."
That changed the way I think about writing, and sharing my opinions or discussing other people's ideas. If you go into a disagreement looking to better understand what led the other party to their beliefs, you typically have a more mature and interesting discussion. Plus, why someone believes something I completely disagree with is more interesting than the what, anyway. It is likely in the end that you both may agree to disagree, (a lost art in this age), but at least you can converse respectfully about complex ideas like adults.
I see it as there is a certain culture here, one which i happen to be in agreement with most of the time, while there is still room for dissent.
Sure, the problems of that post were symptomatic of the broader social algorithms of HN, but I don't think they mean HN's rules and the underlying enforcement patterns are inherently wrong. They just didn't work well in this particular case.
But it isn't, though - the post you replied to was specifically discussing that. The OP said:
a place focused on particular subjects [...] collects people with similar life experiences, interests, worldviews, etc.
which makes it sound very much like people from different backgrounds are going to face social rejection. If we're fine with that then so be it, but some of us would like to imagine we are more inclusive, and that as a community we could do more. The fact that tech keeps trying to portray itself as a pure meritocracy doesn't help.
Tech may not be a pure meritocracy, but it's far closer to one than most fields, and most of the discrimination I've seen has come from management, not programmers. Female and non-white engineers are regarded for their capabilities first and foremost.
I was just discussing this yesterday with my daughter. She's studying to be a teacher, and is deeply involved with social justice issues (I credit her with improving my sensitivity on gender, which was already pretty good). I was talking about how I go back and forth a bit on what I can or should do to encourage African-American teens to go into IT. One of the advantages that I perceive is that it's the source of a good, secure middle class living with very little racial discrimination relative to other fields. But the disadvantage is that there's very little African-American participation in the industry. I come down on the side of encouragement because we need pioneers, and because good middle-class security is becoming harder to come by in America.
But to get back to the original point - the cultural divide around here isn't really about gender or race, which is the point of the OP's essay.
The libertarian part? I'm not so sure there, but I'd guess that it comes from a sense of "I'm just trying to build my business, it'd be awesome if a bunch of silly regulations and crap would get out of my way"
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
EDIT: to add, I thought that Orwell actually wrote an essay called "I am on the left" although I can't now find it. He was definitely not right wing - he was just very critical of communism as a supposedly left wing system.
Within the Communist side, there were further factions (NKVD:Stalinist, POUM:other Marxist). Orwell joined POUM. As a result, he was condemned by Stalinists and had to flee back to England. He spent much of his career warning against Stalinism, from a position on what might be called the social democrat left.
[1] It's obviously not called that, and it may be a square not a street, but I remember the street sign. :)
In short, while I think communism is roughly the worst idea ever, that book gave me an understanding of the world he lived in and why he was quite rational to view radically left-wing ideas as the best option for that time and place. A functioning, reasonably fair capitalist society like we have in the US today would have been unimaginable or unbelievable based on his life experiences.
Wait, is that the common narrative? Surely the only people who believe that are the elderly, who just can't shake the "child genius" idea of programmers they were fed in the seventies and eighties?
Some people can be a little cranky, we're computer guys ffs, but I think the discourse here is pretty civil and open minded.
Just because the author wants it to be run a certain way doesn't mean that it should. If he doesn't like how it's done and thinks that issues that he believes are important should be discussed, he should make his own news aggregator site, instead of trying to hijack an already-established site for his own agenda.
If the majority start disagreeing with the curation of HN articles, then they will leave to other places, like reddit. And frankly, I'm not sure that pg even cares if this happens, he didn't start HN to increase his popularity or his influence.
"Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. "
The statement "X can do what they want with their Y BUT they shouldn't because Z" is ceding to X that which was already his, and in the same breath revoking that cession. Essentially: They don't have to change it, but they should change it.
Consider instead: "BUT this isn't what I'm looking for in a community, and it's not a community in which I will continue to participate - I encourage others to do the same."
That statement would have both acknowledged the owner's right and done so without attempting to indirectly dictate what the owner should do with his property.
If you have a better way to shovel stuff in bags, the most efficient and profitable way to implement "shovel stuff in bags 2.0" is to convince the guy in charge of 1.0 to upgrade, not go to the immense effort of creating a competitor, or start shoveling yourself. At least not as the very first step.
If you want to make a competitor, just do it, you don't need "cover" of some minor 1.0 vs 2.0 issue. Either way its not workin.