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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.

One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.

View on HN

The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big big players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.

Here's a fun article about facebook's postmodern propaganda:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html

Part 2: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/03/who_can_know_how_much...

Note: one may well disagree with some of the things he says. Try not to freak out.

There's great chapter in Edward Bernays' Propaganda where he takes apart a stereotypical set of newspaper stories and categorises them according to the type of agenda they serve; surpirise surprise almost none are real news (if that's actually a thing? Depends how reductionist you want to go). Applies just as much now as then, and as much to HN as any other media outlet

This was just the start:

http://vimeo.com/85948693

Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything.

I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products.

When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid.

Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable.

One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great.

I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff.

What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough.

()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.

Was your post just an elaborate example of this sort of organic advertising and astroturfing?

It sure looks like it to me. Notice how the flow of his conversation goes from on topic to something completely non-relevant that hits close to home on HN and is quite relevant/important to the members here.

The reply to that comment could be or is an example of how forum-sliding can be obtained with multiple accounts.

How do we know that those up votes are legitimate too?

I hate Apple.

I too used to use Gentoo, though it was far from my first Linux OS, and Linux was not my first Unix-like OS. I'll spare you the recounting of my entire computer-use history, except to say that I've used a wide variety of operating system over a period of decades, both as a user, sysadmin, and a developer.

I've hated Windows since it was invented, and hated Microsoft before even then, back in the DOS days, when it was a grabage OS that undeservedly dominated the 8-bit market. In some ways it's gotten better (particularly on the stability front), but in others its gotten worse (its dominance on the desktop market is complete).

Apple is like Microsoft with a smile on its face. Everybody's switching to it because it's cool, sleek, and trendy and even Linux is trying to emulate it. But its walled gardens, dumbed down, crippled and bastardized OS'es and "fuck you", "my way or the highway" attitude towards technical users, developers, and sysadmins make me want to puke.

Most users don't know any better, but I really don't get all the technical people who've switched to it from Linux and still sing its praises. They should know better. The most common attitude I hear from them is that they'd rather their OS "just work", and that they're too busy to spend a lot of time tweaking or making it work.

To that I say that they're really not as technical as they think. Someone who loves technology would pick the technically superior solution, the solution that gave them more choice and power, even if it required more of them as users, rather than picking the dumbed-down, technically crippled solution that may be easier to use by non-technical users (or users who don't care about technoogy, or are too busy to care). They would pick the three-button mouse over the one-button mouse.

Some examples of crippled and dumbed-down aspects of OS X off the top of my head (I should really keep a list, as I run in to something nearly every day):

  - massive and pervasive lack of choice
  - no focuse-follows mouse
  - no tiling window managers
  - X is not integrated with OS X's crappy windowing system,
    so you can't use X and still effectively interact with non-X gui apps
  - the Finder is a horrendous piece of shit
  - mouse-centric interface, forcing clicking through everything to
    configure the machine
  - no standard package manager (no, homebrew/macports, etc are not a
    good substitute until they can install everything and do it
    without conflict with the rest of the OS
  - no standard way to uninstall software
  - no more server-level hardware, forcing the use of Mac minis in
    racks because of:
  - license limits to running OSX only on Apple hardware, so you can't
    run it on standard server-level intel/amd hardware
  - tons of closed, proprietary, non-standard garbage like mDNSResponder, mds, etc
  - a feeble culture of open-source compared to Linux/BSD
  - default installs stuck with ancient versions of *nix utilities like bash
  - etc, etc, etc
  - and don't even get me started on the Apple Store or iDevices

I wish I never even knew any of the above, but I've been forced to find out because I'm forced to use OS X at work. I've long suspected that OS X is garbage, but now I know first-hand. It's like Windows all over again.

I guess I should be grateful that it's a *nix underneath, even if it is crippled and bastardized. But the world would be far better off if Microsoft and Apple never existed.

</rant>

As a counter to the notion that "they're really not as technical as they think," I'd argue that the professional user has to pick and choose his battles. Spending half a day futzing with window manager and X server configurations--whether due to new hardware, an incompatible patch, or something else--really, really hurts when it stands in the way of programming.

Mainstream Linux distros have not required those things for many years.

> I'm forced to use OS X at work.

I'm using Linux at work (or school -- PhD student here) and having only a non-root user account is a big pain for me. Package managers are unavailable, direct hardware access as well (I can't update my keyboard's programming, for instance), the software is old (debian stable) and you have to clash either with the administrators or have a shadow copy of each application you want to have up to date (emacs, Mono, and others).

Having root on my computer would solve a lot of those things (but the administrators are strongly against that). Still, I write this to stress that no OS is perfectly ready for power users (without root).

The "usual suspect" discussions about NSA are something like 10:1 against NSA. If there's an NSA sockpuppet army trying to influence HN, it's a good one, because there's no evidence of it.

Good influence won't simply be support for/against, but deflecting each viewpoint into a framework that upholds the status quo (making it impotent) and causing infighting between people who would otherwise find common ground.

The NSA doesn't influence standards by sockpuppeting "no crypto". They concern troll to add endless complexity, making implementations buggier and rarer.

In the HN NSA threads, the easiest example is encouraging argument between people who are in violent agreement that the NSA must be curtailed, but differ in approach. But instead of coding or grassroots activism, they're goaded into engaging each other on a message board!

Listen critically to "conservative" talk radio for a good general example - every segment starts off talking about problems that have grassroots concern (and that the "other side" would even sympathize with, just with lower priority). After the warm up to get listeners on board, the narrative switches to pigeonholing that anger away from systematic issues, and towards individual politicians and the "other side" that supports them.

So, you should be able to provide an example of an NSA thread on HN where a sockpuppet diverted the conversation to infighting between people otherwise sharing common ground.

I don't think standards groups need a lot of help concern-trolling complexity into standards. The exact same force is exerted on more benign standards; watch HTML for example.

Here's a rebuttal framework: select a NIST crypto standard and show an example of needless complexity and the discussion that led to it. I'll reply with an HTML working group thread that demonstrates the same thing. I'm pretty sure I'll win that contest, but we could try a few rounds just to see. How about we just do one?

I'm certainly not saying these behaviors are only due to conspiracy, as your response seems to be addressing. What I am saying is that the most effective and stealthy way of steering and disrupting conversation is to encourage these natural behaviors, and simultaneously calling out the organic infighting. Your previous assertion that discourse control would manifest as simple for/against is itself a straw man.

I'll own that my comment is a handywavy journey of rough assumptions, not an open and shut logical course. This is the case with any heuristic, and it's necessary navigate the unknowable (without waiting decades to get lucky for a leak to reveal specifics, at which point the method is ancient history anyway).

The way I see it, in 2014 the onus of proof is on someone who wishes to assert that discussions aren't being manipulated - if not by USG "itself", then by private companies looking out for their own interests. The only mechanism that would prevent corporate self-interest from evolving to this is individuals' morals, and given what we know about moral plasticity I don't see how that's any more than wishful thinking.

The irony is, I'm going further out on a limb, and at the same time making a falsifiable claim. Unlike you, I do not believe that the NSA subverts standards groups by injecting spurious complexity. I think there's a lot of spurious complexity in crypto standards (in fact, I think that for the most part, crypto standards are evil), but that it doesn't come from NSA.

There are archived mailing lists of many of these standards groups. We should be able to find an example of a potentially NSA-sourced complexity.

Remember when John Gilmore claimed that someone from the government had persuaded the IPSEC working group to misuse CBC IVs in order to weaken the standard? We found out who was behind that, and it clearly wasn't the NSA --- not only that, but they were part of a years-running clique of people degrading crypto standards out of what appears to be vanity and ignorance.

If you're a crypto standards body, I think vanity and ignorance is a much bigger threat than NSA.

(I think NSA did subvert at least one crypto standard, for what it's worth).

I would actually really love to see this. Could you find the HTML working group thread or does it have to be a competition?

I doubt he will respond to you. It's a pretty classic tactic to request citation from someone you know isn't prepared to offer it in order to defuse an argument. He doesn't have to offer citation, he only has to stop his opponent from appearing knowledgeable.

he doesn't need to be right, he only needs to make the other guy look wrong.

I've no doubt that people ask for citation in the manner suggested, but the gp had a resonable point. In the absense of evidence, it's better to assume what's going on is organic to online discussions.

If you've been on the internet for the last 10 years, this is easy to believe. If not, just visit the phoronix fourms. You'll be astounded by the batshit insane folks.

I mainly just wanted to see an analysis of needless complexity which is organically injected into committee-based standards processes because it could inform my own work which depends so heavily on them. Additionally, when so much of software engineering involves dealing with multiple stakeholders, understanding how people can "concern-troll" a useless or damaging requirement into the process might allow me to diffuse such a situation in the future.

Many on HN would like to show up tptacek. The lack of response speaks to the lack of evidence.

Sockpuppets confirmed on HN.

I often think your elequonce with the keyboard and Spock like logical argumentation sets people off by dropping 'cite bombs like debate star.

Nobody who knows me in real life would ever accuse me of being Spock-like.

Especially when having no citations of his own. It's mainly used as a tool to deflect the debate into a meta-debate about citation qualities.

I like the attempt at innuendo that says I'll have a hard time finding unproductive HTML working group discussions.

Except for your constant defence of them of course

I'd like to register my objection to the currently fashionable, yet toxic idea that when a point of view is only 95% stomped out that that is still a sign of "sock puppetry" and that the remaining dissent, rather than being celebrated, must be stomped out even harder... and then that this is treated as some sort of improvement of public discourse instead of an inevitable degradation of it.

This is, admittedly, not 100% a reply to any of the ancestors of this post, but, well, it's definitely an opportune time. Labeling all disagreement as "sock puppetry" is already a popular rhetorical dodge and this news is only going to make that worse. If you want real free discourse, you need real diversity of viewpoints and you need to foster that diversity, not insist on conformity.

If the only place that diversity is coming from truly is sock puppets, well, I would consider that a condemnation of the community in question. (And make sure you read that sentence very carefully before replying; it doesn't say "we should trust the sock puppets" (hardly!). It means that there should be diversity in the community, before we add in any viewpoints, right or wrong, expressed by sock puppets.)

I like this comment but also want to point out that I'm not even a dissenting voice about NSA surveillance.

Ok, I agree in general.

But the problem is that on the specifics, a few topics are indeed unanimous. You won't get diversity on those, and this is not a problem.

it's basically tptacek and mpyne against the world. for the most part i welcome contributors who aren't entirely biased.

unfortunately as even my own worst paranoia was not predictive enough, paranoia that has had me laughed at to my face and behind my back, given what's come out: it's very hard for me to react reasonably.

so people with a different bias to myself or others can greatly contribute to such discussions.

I think my comment may have sailed right over your head.

I think his comment also may have sailed right over your head. That or you're playing dumb. Either way, it's not working.

We're probably not worth it, we're a small community, and the part of that community that are actually and truly influential is smaller still, and wouldn't be doing their influencing by preaching to the HN choir. I'm sure we're monitored, at least automatically, but I doubt we're worth directing.

It's a very small echo chamber.

There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process.

A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently:

1. Subject change

2. False comparison

3. Claim of too many opponents

4. Silence

5. Claim to either be a member of, or opponents of discussion being members of club, with said membership somehow required to complete what is otherwise a non-rational conclusion.

6. Claim of overall subject and or implications of subject complexity being greater than scope of discussion; therefore, it’s all a waste of time. (You would not understand)

7. Transformation of rational point at hand to emotional one.

8. The bible.

9. Redefinition of common words.

10. Personal attack.

11. Obsfucation. (however you spell it)

12. Excess verbosity.

What I did was post this, put names on it, including my own, and then start citing it when the behavior is seen.

I expected people to moderate the behaviors and perhaps improve dialog. What actually happened was the behaviors intensified! They created new ones, and started using them in combination:

Subject change, excess verbosity, silence was very common. Blow up the dialog to prevent realizations or consensus, then go silent to let it all fade away. Then do it again, and again...

Now, something good did happen. Participants who get it, tended to add their own observations to the list, and a bond formed between them. This helped differentiate the dialog some, and high clarity material, rational material was easier to identify and that dialog did improve.

But the noise makers also improved, making better noise, more frequently, division went up, and the overall tone of the place was harder to enjoy.

This led me to another realization:

We very often want to frame things as debate when the truth is we are often doing advocacy.

Advocacy has three components: Reason, character, emotion. Advocacy is a super set of debate.

Effective advocates employ all three and here is the kicker:

They will trump an effective debater in a dialog.

Interesting isn't it?

> silence

Is it really fair to call this a dodge? Not responding hardly means one has difficulty dealing with a post's information. It usually means it is not worth dealing with the poster, as their post may be tiresome, repetitive, abusive, trollish, etc.

There's a third reason for silence.

I may remain silent if someone's reply makes me reconsider my earlier opinion. In that case, I'll upvote them so that they can get some visibility if they don't already have it.

Almost all of those have genuine ambiguity. The context and overall intent matters.

Say a fairly rational and reasonable contributor goes silent. They are likely just not willing to invest the time.

Say a troll drops a bomb, disturbs the convo, goes silent, and does this regularly?

The first scenario is just ordinary human dialog. The second one is a dodge.

And in many cases it means that for reasons having nothing to do with the forum, the silent person doesn't have time to log on this weekend or is too tired, distracted etc to continue the debate.

Nice list. I try to reserve my downvotes for these behaviors especially excessive verbosity, redefinition of common words and other non-substanitive content. I think I am going to add the now common request for citation (seriously, you are on the Internet, google it yourself, man.) I am all about reading different points of view but they they should contribute something new.

Use the phrase "add value" for this. Calling for people to add value requires them to make material, original contributions to a dialog, not just quote, cut, paste and link.

Link dropping is the worst. People won't actually express themselves. They will just collect information and drop it into a dialog like a trump, or battle card, rendering the whole thing a mess.

A call to add value helps push back on garbage like this.

As for "Google it", that cuts both ways. It can be valid for a person to cite the burden of proof as being yours. If you are pushing something not peer-reviewed and logically sound, supporting what you say needs to be the dominant norm. More work for you, but if you establish that norm, it also means the clowns, asses, dullards, zealots, etc... will have a much harder time establishing overall group credence.

Not as simple as it seems, is it?

Good points, but I think I still disagree with the power of citations. Just because a peer-reviewed article exists doesn't mean its true. Appeal to authority is, and always will be, a logical fallacy.

But my beef with asking for citations as a counter-argument is that it is shifting the burden of proof. If someone makes a statement that you are questioning, you may ask for clarification, but the ball is in your court to find evidence for disproof. The existence or non-existence of a published supporting article is neither proof nor disproof.

> Good points, but I think I still disagree with the power of citations. Just because a peer-reviewed article exists doesn't mean its true. Appeal to authority is, and always will be, a logical fallacy.

Incorrect. "Appeal to authority" is a form of argument which is a fallacy when misused.

Further, a citation can be an appeal to authority, but usually its not, its incorporating an existing argument by reference and/or incorporating supporting evidence for the existing argument by reference.

> But my beef with asking for citations as a counter-argument is that it is shifting the burden of proof. If someone makes a statement that you are questioning, you may ask for clarification, but the ball is in your court to find evidence for disproof.

No, if someone is making a statement that you are questioning, it is quite fair to ask them to support the claim. As the one making the claim, the burden of proof is on them -- the position you take above is the one shifting the burden of proof off of the person asserting a positive claim.

Its true that making the opposing positive claim places the burden on you, but some simply stating something doesn't suddenly make it the default hypothesis. If there is no prima facie case for the positive claim, then it can be discarded as unnecessary without counterevidence, you don't need to prove the negation.

> The existence or non-existence of a published supporting article is neither proof nor disproof.

The content of the published supporting article, however, is often at least evidence, and may be proof where the question is subject to definitive proof, e.g. there exist no positive integers x, y, and z such that x^n + y^n + z^n = 0, for n > 2 [0].

[0] https://www.math.wisc.edu/~boston/869.pdf

Yes, in debate that is true.

In advocacy it is NOT TRUE. Let that sink in for a while... :)

Most of the time we are doing advocacy. Let that sink in too.

Now, let's discuss what that really means:

It means people who want their way more than they want to be right or just or true, etc... can and will dominate a discussion with effective advocacy techniques whether or not they have rational merit.

Secondly, emotional arguments are only partially rational, yet they carry very significant weight. Being logically right, yet having that result feel bad, or cruel, or unjust is a very significant part of policy discussions.

For an example, this is why libertarians often do not gain traction in many policy discussions. (no slight on liberitarians, just an example) They are typically, and often brutally rational, dismissing emotional and character arguments entirely.

Somebody who can read a room, employ effective advocacy, and who can provide emotional, character and a fair degree of rational support will win the day almost every time.

And just for review, advocacy consists of logical arguments, emotional ones and character of everyone touched by the argument.

People resonate on these three in varying degrees. Your average "Uncle Liberty" FOX news viewer, for example, will rely strongly on emotional and character arguments, only lightly touching the rational. (why is a much longer post, and again, no slight on FOX viewers, I'm just highlighting an easy example we've all seen)

That fetish completely marginalizes a person who is otherwise solid and in their best interests.

An effective advocate can leverage that and convince somebody to support a much worse person for them, on character and emotion alone.

Your technical, smart, rational geek with modest to poor people skills will not consider emotion very strongly at all, and will be marginal on character.

To them, somebody who is a vital part of the process, but who may not be technical, or reason quite as well as they do, will be marginalized on that basis.

Say we've got a smart person, who is fighting for the people, who happens to have a fetish. The fetish has nothing to do with their policy vision, but they will lose on character arguments every time.

Other examples should be obvious now.

So then, we need to step back and understand the purpose of the dialog. We may be thinking, "let's get at the truth", where a bunch of people may be thinking, "let's make it better" (which is a different thing), and some others may be thinking, "let's make it the way it ought to be."

Honestly, few people are interested in the truth in political discussions. They are more interested in seeing it go their way, or favor them, or see "those other people", "taught a lesson" more than anything else.

Advocacy rules here. The strictly rational doesn't. Sorry.

What does that mean?

Lots of things. First, it means debate isn't the norm most of the time, even though we frame things as such.

It also means stories matter. Yes, stories. Personal experiences are extremely potent advocacy.

Lots more here, but let's just say framing things in terms of debate isn't inclusive enough to be broadly effective given the dynamics of how advocacy actually does work.

Competitive debate is oration and rhetoric. It isn't necessarily pure logical argument, one employs theatrics and logical fallacy where they can get away with it. It is about winning, not shedding more light on the truth.

Really, this is advocacy. Abandon debate rules and norms and you are left with the art of persuasion, which is what advocacy is.

What most people don't seem to grok is advocacy tends to be the dominant norm, not debate.

Given that is true, emotional arguments, character arguments are valid right along with rational, fact based, data driven arguments.

An effective advocate will win most rooms, even against better armed rational debate types.

That is why trolling works.

> "What actually happened was the behaviors intensified!"

I've seen it work both ways. Sometimes, being direct about labeling and pointing out bad behavior shames the worst actors, and educates people who had been doing it accidentally. Other times, it simply becomes another tool for the worst actors to use -- just another way to attack. (See also: the fallacy fallacy.)

In my experience, the biggest factors in whether things seem to go uphill or downhill after pointing out versions of rhetorical dodging/avoidance are:

(1) does the community have good examples of people doing it right? Shaming bad behavior only works in conjunction with modeling good behavior. (This is one reason I dislike HN's hiding comment scores -- there's a visual indicator for what makes a bad comment, but no visual indicator for what makes an excellent comment. "Top comment on a post" is a fairly weak signal as it misses excellent child/grandchild/deeper comments.)

(2) do the moderators have "soft power" to go with their "hard power" -- that is, are they respected enough that they can successfully ask people to change their behavior without needing to threaten a ban?

(3) when the moderators (or downvotes or flags) come in, are they fair? Do they tend to target bad actors from all sides, or do they let Green Team's jerks get away with behavior that Purple Team's jerks get banned for?

(4) is the community as a whole already burned out? It can be much harder to change behaviors when people stopped caring long ago.

-------

If I may add more labels to your list:

- "Rapid Deadline". Asking a question, making an argument, or posting a source/article and then making character attacks on opponents for having not answered even though not enough time has passed to reasonably expect answers. Or pretending like your point is agreed upon simply because it didn't get any responses in the first few minutes, and then arguing as if that point is now unassailable. This is particularly dangerous when one makes an argument that can take some time/thought/patience to respond to. (The only person I have blocked on FaceBook is an old friend who resorted to this tactic one too many times -- he'd post an article and then follow it up with insults about how I hadn't answered 3 minutes later, when the article took a good 10 minutes to read. Then he'd send private messages asking why I hadn't responded, and accusing me of cowardice.)

- "Not the real position". Using reasons you don't actually believe to advocate for something, such that even if all of those reasons are shot down, there's no possibility of changing your mind because your other, secret reasons haven't been answered.

- "Secret knowledge" (this might relate to your #5). Basically, you can't understand this unless you're of a particular race, gender, economic class, educational background, religion, etc. so I won't even attempt to explain it. (Often comes with statements like "check your privilege" or "alternate reality".)

- "I read your post backwards." (I had someone actually say this to me once!) Really, any sort of response that treats an opposing position as meaning something completely unrelated to what it was intended to mean. The classic line-by-line response sometimes has this property -- every sentence gets responded to, but somehow all of the really important points end up getting ignored.

Yes, that all rings true to me, particularly the fallacy fallacy part of it.

What the bad actors will do is just make noise with the dodges like they do everything else, "that's a dodge!" style, regardless of merit.

They don't care about merit, only volume and domination of the discussion.

And they don't care, because for them it's about affirmation, my club is the right club because I'm in it kind of thing. And if you aren't in my club, fuck you.

The place where I've been learning for years now has almost no moderation. Early on, I established some bonds and with some other group members, set some norms:

1. Support what you say

2. Words carry the weight you give them.

A "fuck you" often is returned with, "hugs and kisses, and how can I help you get it all out so you feel better?" kinds of responses. Those drive dominators, who don't have any material support for their advocacy, seriously nuts, while garnering popular support for the person returning fire in that fashion, BTW. Beautiful.

On the other hand, "I am disappointed in you" from a valued and respected contributor packs a big punch!

3. Offensive words are as offensive as you think they are.

This means profanity, etc... are OK.

Always being civil works in interesting ways. One way is that clearly bent positions, like say bigotry, are elevated to "just another valid opinion" and that will resonate to "everybody has a right to their opinion" kinds of things.

The truth is, we do have that right, but we don't have the right to be respected for those opinions.

So the other norm ended up being:

4. Act the ass, get called an ass. Don't like it? Don't be an ass.

Quite effective at marginalizing trolls, given the group really does understand the other norms.

Moderation is something I struggle with frankly. It is nearly always gamed or abused. Take an always be nice rule. That means being nice to the racist too. Really? Maybe being a racist should cost a person some, and they might potentially reconsider racism.

On the other hand, moderating criminal posts is necessary.

Your additions are good ones!

I have not encountered "backwards", lol! Not sure what I would have done with that one. Yes, "secret" is all about #5. Rapid deadline is another good one.

That list was an abbreviated one. Most popular kind of thing.

I feel the same way about votes as I do moderation. Those are nearly always gamed.

Both moderation and votes work well when politics and religion are not part of the discussion. Here at HN, I do see the equivalent in some economic discussions, where there is basically some religion in play, but it's minor by comparison to many other places.

What I prefer is some strong voices able to take it better than people give it, who can set norms and manage things toward some productive end.

Problem with that is bias. There is always bias. It takes considerable numbers of us working over a sustained amount of time to be mostly free of bias.

Rather than attempt to claim no bias, I believe it's better to just embrace it, and then attempt to find common ground without actually having to say people are wrong or bad.

> There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

I'd be careful about this one. People don't always have the same news sources, so what constitutes "common knowledge" for one person might be alien to another.

Personally, I expect myself to be able to provide a citation for anything reasonably controversial or not widely known and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with asking someone to show their work.

After all, there's the opposite side of this coin: someone who isn't giving evidence because they cannot. I mean, if I claim to have a unicorn in my garage, I can't reasonably expect everyone to accept it on my say-so. I know that's not at all the scenario you have in mind, but I think you'd hate to have someone engaged in such behavior justifying it with your logic when that's not what you meant at all.

A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish, and what is submitted to be published is heavily filtered, and the final articles are being paywalls, how can a plea for citations be a legitimate request?

If you are claiming you have a unicorn in your garage, I don't want citations - I want EVIDENCE. A picture would be a fine place to start. I can't imagine any citation being of value either pro or con. In a discussion I want to read evidence or reason - everything else is filler.

> A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish,

I think you just exposed the root of this.

You're thinking a citation has to be a scientific paper or something equivalent. I'm saying that when you argue something, you should be willing to cite ordinary evidence, of which a scientific paper is just one kind.

A photo would be a perfectly reasonable thing to cite as evidence.

Notably, I also found out a few other dynamics:

Personification trumps vilification and ridicule.

Let's take something really ugly, like abortion. People will post up the ugly pictures and they will post up their favorite slogans, and they will denigrate opponents with brutalities like, "baby killer"

This kind of noise completely destroys rational advocacy / debate on the topic, which is why religion and politics are often discouraged in technical and other discussion venues.

Now, personify it. I took a story from Brazil where a 9 year old girl was raped by her father, her mother wanted to get an abortion for her, and the church, state, father and others wanted to deny the girl that.

Instead of the usual advocacy path, I asked people what they personally would say to the little girl who doesn't want to carry a pregnancy.

This required they simulate the scenario, and express their thoughts as actions, or virtual actions in this case, rather than just pull out their favorite "pokemon battle card" type sayings...

Amazingly, the dialog split into two camps!

The majority of participants answered honestly, and were quite disturbed at the experience. The majority said they would not tell the little girl no, regardless of their personal beliefs / preferences. It was the human thing to do.

For those ideologues who were being absolutist about it, they would not answer, because they would reveal cracks in their black and white vision of things, so they vilified instead! And it was intense.

The rest of the group turned on them, and they got shouted down. Secondly, that experience changed the group dynamics. Abortion noise is no longer tolerated like it was before. It's potency as a distraction is now much less in that venue. The personification really impacted people.

Edit: One absolutist actually said the right answer was to cut the girl open after she has carried the baby far enough along to be viable. The group response to this was harsh, and they were banned.

I personally took a lot of heat for that disturbing approach and had to apologize for the rough dialog. And I did, citing my interest in finding out what trumps what. This was well received, but the whole thing was expensive emotionally.

Honestly, this is one of the few times I've ever seen the noise machine beat back into submission like that.

Lesson there somewhere.

(Yes, this is an area of interest of mine, and I've been running little experiments for some time as the problem identified in this thread is growing rapidly and we have few answers. I find the use of data intriguing, and I plan to do some reading to better understand what other options we may have.)

I doubt there is much written on this. It is a very new area (other that the traditional logic fallacies which still work as well as they always have) and if there is serious research being done it is probably proprietary - it's more valuable to use it secretly. Your work is some the best I've seen on online conversation manipulation. Keep up the good work.

Well, maybe I should publish. I'm not sure how, or what an appropriate context is.

After mulling your comment over, I realize the best path on this might be to provide open information. This is likely to operate under the same kinds of dynamics information security currently does.

So, let me just put it out there, maybe sort of a mini "Ask HN?"

Really, I'm unsure how to proceed. I understand quite a bit about this and after a quick look around, I may well be quite a ways into this stuff without having realized it...

I started about 8 years ago. Found a smaller venue where all but criminal speech is OK. Moderation is very light, and the number of participants is modest, say 20 very regular contributors and another 50 or so transient ones.

Consistency in the regulars makes for a great control, and there is a discussion archive for analysis and data over time. I used this archive along with various experiments to better understand how this all works.

Being able to go back through archives, look at intent, outcomes, dynamics and a fairly regular set of recurring, high pain topics, meant being able to run a few different scenarios with a reasonable control.

The other thing I did was take ideas from those adventures and apply them professionally as well as on much larger, higher prominence venues.

Overall, I was able to impact dialogs, sometimes to a considerable degree, and others have expressed interest as you have.

For some considerable time, I've been aware of the "sock puppet" type activity, as well as another interesting dynamic where people aligned with some political and economic forces actually take on a fairly professional type role without realizing it. They take the "battle cards" they are given and use them more frequently than they do contribute original content.

Affirmation and confirmation run high in the list of gratifying social media / forum type experiences.

People enjoy the sport of it, but they also use that sport to affirm themselves too. This makes things personal on a level we aren't talking about very much.

Here's a sample:

Take a mind. Barring some abuse, it's a potent mind, able to reason and understand fact vs opinion, etc...

Now, say that mind lies for whatever reason. What happens? The mind is now fragmented, or compartmentalized into the whole, vital, rational portion, and another portion that is associated with the lie. Reason is now somewhat broken and or diminished as the mind has to manage it's lie to avoid being caught on it, and one implication of that is extreme difficulty having dialogs that cross a boundary.

This is seen when seemingly rational people break down on a topic, based on a trigger word, etc... They quite literally can't resolve it normally due to the fact that who they are is all mixed up with this lie and the need to manage it.

Ordinarily, this kind of thing can resolve when it's made OK for them to own the lie, punch through, heal, let the compartment dissolve, and they are once again whole, not impacted by any of that mess.

So now take that dynamic and consider when somebody elevates faith to fact, or buys into some propaganda and associates that with positive affirmation for themselves. Say they are a bigot, or something, and rather than doing the work to resolve the bigotry and grow as a human, they seek affirmation and confirmation for the bigotry.

How much is that ongoing affirmation worth to them, compared to owning a character issue?

Turns out, that is worth a lot! They will write the letter, cast the vote, call the friend, buy the product, and so forth to support that source of normalization.

In this way, advocacy is more powerful than debate, due to the fragmented reason limiting the potency of debate and it's rational basis. Worse, advocacy coupled with propaganda and a lot of repetition can solidify these compartments or boundaries leaving people rigid and unable to process contradictory information!

We end up with a more polarized dialog and when we look across the scope of major issues, actually reaching common ground, or some consensus becomes personal! It's quite literally a threat to somebody on a basic level to join up with their peers and do something we can live with as opposed to, "the right thing" as they may happen to see it!

Meaning, this isn't about being wrong or right. There rarely are clear "right" options, but there are often good or livable or just better options. However, we can't make progress on nearly any front due to the fact that people have linked their self definition of their own worth and character to lies, propaganda, etc...

I've identified a lot of these, how they work, how to recognize them, and techniques (more are needed) to make dialog more productive.

And on that last point, more productive dialog should be the goal, not "who is right", simply due to these factors in play. Since nearly everything is polarized and rendered personal, progress is a material threat to a very large number of us.

Ok, enough of that. I could write pages...

What I don't know is how to approach sharing that would do some good and or have some credence. Given the relative lack of information, I can share examples, provide some general data, techniques, etc...

I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Some topics could be:

Understanding the difference between advocacy and debate.

What to do when others try to make their problems your problems, or make you personally part of the dialog with the intent to intimidate or make you more open to personal attacks and marginalization.

Establishing group norms.

Understanding offensive speech is as offensive as any of us personally thinks it is.

Weighing dialog. Should you worry when a clown calls you out as an ass? How about when a close friends does the same? What is the difference and what does that mean for online dialog?

etc...

Edit: A simple way to process the above is to realize politics, and advocacy type dialog of any kind is a contact sport. When we can speak from a position of relative security, we speak freely and we also can accept being wrong, or contribute to and accept consensus.

However, when we are insecure? We solidify around those things that bolster us, good and bad.

So the goal of these manipulations, and they are manipulations more than they are censorship, is to make people insecure by linking who they are to all the issues, which increases the pain of the "contact", motivating them to divide and gather in ways that resonate with and enable the goals of the manipulators. Because they are linked to it personally, they also find it very difficult to back out, "heal", or come to new or common realizations, rendering the discussion of alternatives, or maybe just "better" options a threat when those may actually be in their best interests.

So much here... It's nice that despite all the nonsense to be found on Internet posts, there can be some quality thought if you patiently wade through the junk first.

I know what you mean about how best to share your work. I am sitting on a bunch of AI research that others might be interested in and I am not sure how best to document and share, especially while not working in academia. A book, video, or web site maybe? I have no good ideas on that, only sympathy.

I think your experimental data is fantastic, but I have different hypotheses on the mechanism and motivation of the players.

We are creatures of reason which is great, but we still are susceptible to errors in judgement. These are small and mostly manifest as solidifying a conclusion prematurely.

But we are also social animals that have an inherent drive to find and defend our place in the pecking order. We display dominance to those beneath us and submission to those above.

The strategies of online conflict are varied and mirror those of offline conflict, but the core social desire is the same: to win the favor of our masters and weaken our lessers, unless we are forced to think for ourselves and become aware of the folly of it all.

Again, after mulling it over, I think both our models have significant merit, and they are incomplete.

Errors mostly have no personal reinforcement. They get corrected mostly over time. Agreed.

What I was getting at is a more deliberate error, or a forced one. The deliberate error is something like seeking affirmation for a character issue. Racist seeks reinforcement for racism rather than enlightenment to get past racism. The forced error could be something like an authoritarian childhood elevating dogma to fact, seriously impacting that person and their ability to grow and be objective.

Dominance / submission does drive a lot. And I do see a very clear connection between that and online dialog in that people who maybe are subs in most of their life get online and are free to be that dom they dream about being...

I tend to disagree about "the core social desire", but I do agree about it being "a social desire", among many other ones.

...but I have different hypotheses on the mechanism and motivation of the players.

Of course you do!

This kind of discussion needs to be out in the open to a far greater degree than it currently is.

Your last statements are good food for thought. Thanks.

Likewise on sympathies.

This thread has got me thinking on ways to put some basic information out there in the hopes of a greater dialog.

This thread is blowing my mind. Please continue to share.

I really like the idea that models are often formed prematurely and the reference to pokemon cards. One metaphor I use allot is that our values are like a deck of cards, some values are ranked higher then others. The ranking is determined in part by a recursive function (shuffling or playing a game of go fish) but also by functional requirements to justify the current mode of survival. A person tends to perceive their values in a way that justifies their actions (and vice versa). When modelling different Christian denominations you could consider each verse and interpretation as a card. The card game in play ensures that a church group ends up with a large chunks of each hand looking similar. The attraction of individuals to a particular church has allot to due with how well those cards advocate that person's life.

Doesn't that just work? What? You hit me with a baby killer +2? Here's a fuck the poor +5, how do you like them apples?

lol It really seems that way so often to me.

And yes! Bible verses. That is where the Pokemon thing in me came from. Was on a thread, and one of 'em dropped a verse, and soon, it was just like a game.

So I dropped Marley 4:20, you all fuck off and left. Not the best form, I know. But gratifying because that did blow up the little game and it was a total dodge in the form of massive subject change to pot.

Justification and affirmation drive huge amounts of the dialog.

Here's something from my own life you might find interesting, and this is the root of some of what I write here.

Coming out of school, and out of a hate church, I was left with some homophobia and some angst over biracial marriage of all things.

Met a good friend at work. She and I clicked, and eventually the running conversation bumped into both of those and she nailed me big.

Right there is a moment of character of sorts. For me, I could see it wrong, and I could see I really should improve, so I did. Took that stuff on the drive home and questioned all of it. Eventually resolved it for my own reason, which was just to be of better character, and it was done.

But, people can choose to defend, and if they do, they head down that path of justification and affirmation and part of their self-definition gets linked to specific issues policy vision kinds of things.

In my case, the debate mattered. I valued the other person, and they me, and so there was no real shame sorting it out. I was from a small town, and honestly, that kind of thing can just happen.

But, I could have taken another path then, and I could imagine myself today crippled in the debate because I would have a very deep, personal investment in making sure some specifics I need to feel good about who I am stay in place.

> Well, maybe I should publish. I'm not sure how, or what an appropriate context is.

If you don't mind revealing your identity, arxiv.org should be a good choice. It allows online publishing with open access for free without peer-review, and it is used by academic researchers a lot (including myself).

In case you prefer to stay anonymous, you may try to send them an email explaining the reasons for that.

> One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.

Being very meta do you have any links? HN being open it shouldn't be hard to do an analysis. I guess you aren't claiming it is being done but it could be done, but I don't see this as a problem.

Like, if this was happening, a blog with evidence would rank pretty well for karma points, but it hasn't been done.

AFAIU flamewars increase the discussion on a topic, so this makes a story much more likely to stay on frontpage.

The danger of flamewars is that they rapidly devolve to personal attacks. When threads devolve this far, it keeps intelligent people from joining the conversation and actually elevating it. 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters may create a best seller, but 10,000 raving lunatics with Internet connections destroy any chance of an intellectual conversation....:)

I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.

Here: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

"In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this."

One can't also tell the difference between subterfuge trolling and plain up trolling. It would be nice to use machine learning in a multidimensional conversation scoring system so that tired hollow techniques at conversation manipulation would fade in to the background noise.

> but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.

I'm amazed how obvious this is on Reddit now, and always laugh when I bring it up and get down voted to oblivion :)

I'm no expert, but it's clear NetFlix has a few thousand users in /r/movies for example.

Netflix also has however many thousands of normal users there.

Sure, but do you honestly love any product you pay for enough to continuously post about it? Has consumerism really come to that?

And instead of saying "Go for a drive on Highway 1 because it's beautiful", have you ever said "Take your Ford on Highway 1, because a Ford is the best way to see it" ?

(Every second post on /r/movies is "check <movie>, on Netflix NOW!")

You left off just plain downvoting. I've seen some fairly benign comments on certain topics go down to -3 or -4 in a hurry with no counterpoint given. Stuff the collective here will often ignore or debate, but down it goes.

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