It is unnatural and inhuman ... hence any social system that root out this is bad. Accept what we are and deal with it squarely. Escape is not a solution.
I am convinced of the future existence of MOOPs - massive online open psychology - where we aggregate the daily actions of millions (arguing with children, discussions with the boss, food choices etc) and look for patterns and better choices for each of us at the upcoming moment (Siri, what is the best way to tell
my wife her bum does look big in that, ... based on 500,000 similar conversations, the best 1% responses were when the phrase "xxx" was used)
This is feeling similar - that we need or want our virtual
environment to help us - in practise sessions as he seems to say, or in advice
It seems we want science, but at the level of our personal, everyday, choices. we want to trust our computing environments have our best interests at heart.
and that kind of means no commercial interests can be involved.
I think a world in this scenario is pretty much a dystopia.
If every person chooses for the better response and action given the a situation how can a individual be unique?
If all husbands reply to a bum in the exactly same way why do you really need a husband? Failing is a big part of being human, sometimes that can cause harm but failing and learning is one of ours core functions.
I rather be good than be you?
(Sorry if i made my post a bit 'agressive', its not my intent, english is not my main language and i still have to learn how to write properly)
I don't think that every husband would be replying the same to the 'bum problem'. I'd expect the response to be tailored based on some specific traits of both husband and wife and based on experience in similar types of marriages/relationships.
I do agree with you that I'd rather make my own mistakes, than try to be a perfect partner by using an app. The idea is definitely interesting, but scary at the same time. It sounds like something out of The Black Mirror show :)
P.S. your English is great, nothing to worry about!
> I'd expect the response to be tailored based on some specific traits of both husband and wife and based on experience in similar types of marriages/relationships.
I'm wary of trying to reverse-engineer human behaviour, especially as it applies to personal relationships.
Besides, who decides what's the “best” course of action here? Who decides what the goal is — length of relationship? Happiness? (How do you measure that? Pleasure endorphins? Well then the correct response is you should stop talking to your partner, and do some exercise and drugs!)
In practice, the person who decides is the person in Google's office at 17:00 on a Friday.
(This is why driverless cars are hellishly scary, by the way. Any car that can be controlled by computer should have to use only publicly-auditable software — i.e. everything must be open-source and all builds must be fully reproducible. At least then you can theoretically be certain you know who your car will decide to save in an emergency, and why. How long before `git blame` is invoked in court in a murder case?)
In your definition, being unique is being unlike others, so you are heavily shaped by others already, trying to squeeze in to a niche not yet claimed. I don't see how being forced to be unlike others is any better than being forced to be like others: you're being forced either way.
Also, I don't think that asking for advice removes agency. You still have to think if the advice is applicable to your unique situation, how can it be modified to fit better, and which of several conflicting pieces of advice has more merit. An advice from Siri on any life situation is nigh useless without a deeper understanding of the situation, a Siri can't have it unless she lived a big chunk of your life. So, armed with whatever advice, you still remain ultimately responsible.
I think that the uniqueness is not defined by being unlike others but by being on your on, when yourself process the sintuation and decide to follow it.
And for your second argument, it’s just to easy to follow the computers “orders”, a lot of people would just go for the order because it’s already justified, something along the lines of “I would do different, but the machine told me that everyone that on in that way get something wrong”.
I agree that this type of software would be good when one needs advices, but it would have to be complete trustworthy, giving wrong advices to a suicidal person by example can be devastating (and in this case not even thinking about the manipulation that would be possible by the corporation).
2. Manipulate people so that they act in a kind way (or avoid acting in an unkind way), without necessarily wanting to be kind.
Option 1 means you need a good way to remove unkind people from your own experience (“free listening”). This is typically not popular with commercial social network services, because this lets you ignore adverts too.
Option 2 reduces this need, but leads to the problem of who is “allowed” to do the manipulation, and who decides this?
When communicating in person, most people have years of learned behaviour (learned from millennia of social norms) nudging them towards acting kindly (or at least not actively unkind), because in person there are immediate, unavoidable social consequences. These consequences are absent when communicating remotely, such as via the internet. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this counts as option 1 or option 2.
I don't understand your criticism of option 1. As a Facebook user, I can remove anyone I want from my feed either by "unfriending" them or simply unsubscribing from their feed. Ads are not people so Facebook doesn't provide a facility for unsubscribing from them (and I assume they do some kind of curation on them since they generally seem of decent enough quality for internet ads). Of course, I use an ad blocker to ignore them anyway, but that's beside my lack of understanding of your criticism.
To your criticism of option two, I think this is the fundamental flaw in the goal of engineered social systems. There are groups which have radically different ideas about what is "kind". Extreme religious fanatics would say it's unkind to let someone "live in sin", so extreme measures are considered kind for the spiritual well-being of the individual and the community. Secular western thought is more interested in material well-being, so it would say kindness is the promotion of the material well-being of others, generally without passing judgment on how they choose to live (except insofar as it violates others' material well-being).
So the decision of who decides what's kind can lead to completely different interpretations of what kindness is and how the social system behaves.
Good and ethical behavior should be incentivized, both on short and long timescales. It is obviously not enough to punish the wrongdoers, because our laws don't prevent everyone from killing, discriminating, or exploiting their fellow people.
Currently so much rides on mere survival that the only effective objective function we have to consider our actions is that of money. Either the capitalist system needs to be diversified to encourage multi-objective optimization wrt quality of life across all lifeforms, or it needs to be dismantled and another form of cooperation that directly incentivizes helping your fellow human/animal survive should be installed.
Think about it like this: rather than writing some complicated optimization algorithm that sometimes climbs hills and sometimes descends them according to some arbitrary judgment scheme, we redesign the objective function so that all ethical behavior lies along stable manifolds. We can effectively hack human psychology by exploiting its predispositions to incentivize ultimately good behavior.
This "good behavior" doesn't even necessarily need to be complex or controversial: something as simple as the Golden Rule would likely be sufficient.
E: to add that I recently attended a contemporary art exhibition where one of the exhibits was the introduction of a new cryptocurrency called Kineticoin[1], which supposedly awards artistic contributions to society. How exactly to distribute this value is up for debate, but it is a sorely needed one, IMO.
Who gets to decide what is "Good" and "Ethical" behavior ?
What exactly would be the "incentive" "Good" and "Ethical" behavior. ?
You say that capitalism can be dismantled in favor of another form cooperation that directly incentivizes helping your fellow human survive. Is this not in direct contradiction the base animal instinct of self survival. The incentive would have to be huge in order to override this base instinct.
You suggest Golden Rule as sufficient way to define "good behavior". But Golden Rule itself has shortcomings and criticism
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Criticism). Do you have any sufficient argument against these criticism.
> Who gets to decide what is "Good" and "Ethical" behavior ?
Why should any one person get to decide? Right now we have given the power over that decision to the worst people.
I think a good first step is to recognise when someone has the power to incentivise behaviour and see whether they are using that power to incentivise negative behaviour. This is currently the case with most of the powerful institutions in our capitalist society. We do not live in a world of scarce resources. In most places there is more than enough food to go around, more than enough housing for everyone to be housed. We are forced into "survival mode" by the fact that wealthy people and institutions are hoarding resources and preventing access to them so that they can exploit us for profit.
If we simply checked and limited the power of such institutions, allowing people the freedom to act in a less competitive manner, we would probably have more co-operation and a more ethical society. We've seen plenty of examples of this before.
The animal instinct of co-operation and empathy is also due to for the self survival. We co-operate and empathise with each other ensure our own survival.
This is why people who sacrifice their lives for others are exceptions rather than norm. Seeing somebody lying on tracks in front of an oncoming train, the common instinct of onlookers is not to jump but stay where they are.
This reminds me of a cryptocurrency approach I've been suggesting for years: allow anyone to mint coins any time, and move the scarcity into the transaction network: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/
Actually, I find it interesting how HN incentivizes good behavior with their karma system. Yes, HN discussions are most of the time not about social values, but nevertheless I found that it changed me a bit, so that I think more about how to write my comments.
So what I like about the system, is that (for experienced users) down voting is allowed and that a down voted comment is getting less attention (less karma damage, less reader damage) and that is getting faded out (so while reading comments you can quickly skip the bad comments).
That way, you don't have to be afraid of writing a bad comment accidentally, because the system takes care of it, but when you write one you can see that that less people are reading it compared to a good one. I just wish down voting would require writing an answer. Nothing is more frustrating than a down voted comment when you do not know why people didn't like it.
Over the past years, I found that other readers like comments which tell them something new and insightful about the topic. Links for further reading and as references for opinions are also appreciated.
To be contrary, I find HN/Reddit point systems to be related to the degradation of discussion. It's a popularity contest. Good comments do not always get upvoted (in fact, they may be downvoted because people don't want to hear it). But salacious and ill-informed stuff gets upvoted a lot.
You very quickly get hive minded behavior: similar beliefs get upvoted, contrary ones get hidden, so soon enough you've got an echo chamber, powered by worthless Internet points.
It's a very basic hack on our psychology - we like points, but maybe it's not alltogether good. It works ok on HN because it's a decent community with moderation intended to keep the discussion good. But Twitter and most subreddits are horrible abuses of this and I'm not sure people would spend so much time arguing on the Internet if they simply weren't rewarded so directly for doing so.
Well, you are right about the hive mind and the popularity contest and I don't know how to solve those things easily. But what I like about the system is that it reduces negativity (to some extend). So many internet discussions are full of nonconstructive, negative criticism that I am happy that the Karma system tries to hide such comments. But obviously it has its own problems :-/
I agree with the parent, I had the same experience, the comments I believe are interesting opinions are only moderately upvoted, while silly jokes get upvoted much more. And especially I don't like when people downvote without leaving comment (contrary argument). If you agree it's obvious why, if you disagree then it's not.
I think the Slashdot system was an interesting one, it had also labels, so there was a difference between "+5 Insightful" and "+5 Funny". It also provided some feedback while downvoting. I think having moderation labels instead of plain points would help moderation.
Actually, users could then customize point cost for each of the labels, so they could see the page differently.
I frequently see people describe HN and Reddit as 'fickle' or 'hypocritical'. But the underlying pattern seems to be a nasty consequence of point-based ordering: whatever comes first does best.
There are some great breakdowns of Reddit comment karma by time after post. The direction is obvious - earlier comments score better - but the exponential falloff is still a sight to behold. Any view that isn't outrageous enough to downvote heavily can win just by arriving first, being seen most, and being upvoted by commenters trying to increase their own engagement. (HN removes 'downvote' when people reply to you. I wonder if it should discount upvotes on comments you reply to?)
It's a less-trolled system than the open queue of a messageboard, and more conversational than the obscure branching pattern of Twitter or Tumblr. But it's not much good for comprehensive, noninflammatory discussion.
That is somewhat negated by the fact that dissenting users from a post with a 'skewed' comment section can often go make their own post in response. This happens rather more frequently on Reddit than here since HN discourages duplicate posting on a topic.
I would grudgingly agree, but found it funny that the following example sat on the front page the same day as your comment, and the second post exceeded the original's points & comments!
I'm not so crazy about this criticism. Whenever I hear someone complain about echo chambers or contrary opinions being hidden it seems to me a case of "my personal opinion isn't being validated in this discussion." Does any forum on the internet ever claim that the most upvoted (or whatever metric) comments are the correct ones for all time?
A popular opinion doesn't make other opinions invalid and I think that's a mistake many people read into the situation because they're too emotionally invested. On top of that it completely ignores the countless variables that go into a top comment on a popular forum.
The best advice I can give is either 1. Don't take the unpopularity of your contributions so seriously or 2. take it so seriously that you're willing to understand how to game the system to MAKE your "objectively correct" opinion popular.
If you'd like, we can step through a lot of threads that have nothing to do with either of us and find factually wrong comments upvoted and factually correct ones downvoted. You seem to think that I'm making that criticism for personal reasons, when it's not personal. I'm aware of my own dumb statements that have gotten upvoted, so it's out of reflection if anything.
It does not bother me that unpopular stuff is downvoted (who really cares?), but it's a real dynamic. You said it yourself, if you want to craft a comment to be popular, there's a way to do that; it's not especially hard to figure out what to say if you spend time in various forums.
Maybe the issue with the upvoting system is it gives more credence to a baseless comment having value or being correct, when it's about popularity. From a social perspective it seems like a really great way to spread misinformation. Why would you not care about that?
What is the value of a popular baseless comment on the internet?
In my opinion there is a system of homeostasis that exists in internet comments. When a popular wrong opinion gets large enough it is a huge low hanging fruit. There is a race to be the first one to debunk it and cash in all the delicious "well, actually" karma. Go look at the top comment on any given hacker news thread. I wouldn't be surprised to find an overwhelming number of "well, actually" child comments immediately below them.
Furthermore, popular anonymous comments are nice but the real world still operates on reputation based media. A popular comment might inspire a reporter at a media source of record to write an article about it but you can bet their first order of business is to cut out the rhetoric and make the opinion seem as objective as possible. In many cases once you cut out the rhetoric of a baseless popular opinion there is no article, so on a larger social scale the popular comment basically dead in the water. A firstname-lastname reporter is thinking in terms of a career, not upvotes. That's why when you read the sources of a non-fiction book you see The New York Times and not The Slashdot Comment Section.
* Also I just want to clarify that the "someone" in my original reply to your comment was not a veiled accusation, I literally meant someone (anyone). It was not a passive aggressive attempt suggest that you are getting too emotionally involved with your comments. I merely meant that a lot of people (myself included) get too caught up in thinking that 1. they are objectively right and 2. lack of recognition of this fact must mean that the system is broken.
I'm not sure if "populist" is as pejorative as you think it is when describing HN.
Is it possible to have a forum on the internet with hundreds of active users that doesn't leverage a populist model (upvotes/favorites/likes)? Even places where the comments aren't ranked by the users they ARE ranked by activity (bumps/views) behind the scenes.
It seems like it would be very difficult to decouple "populism" from any large public forum worth reading so I'm skeptical of this criticism of HN. I would argue that it's disingenuous to accuse HN of mere populism without you defining your terms because even academics are skeptical of any one defintion. In many ways your use of "populist" is nothing more than a slur.
I am simply stating that "good" and "populist" are two different things.
IMO, HN incentivize having popular opinions. Saying "HN incentivizes good behavior" comes with an underlying assumption that "populist" is "good" which I was trying to point out via my comment.
> I'm not sure if "populist" is as pejorative as you think it is when describing HN.
I am not using "populist" in perjorative sense.
> Is it possible to have a forum on the internet with hundreds of active users that doesn't leverage a populist model (upvotes/favorites/likes)? Even places where the comments aren't ranked by the users they ARE ranked by activity (bumps/views) behind the scenes.
Nearly all internet forums I have used leverage the populist model. However, I think this is more due to the designers of these forums. The designers of these forums want to show the most "relevant content" and their definition of "relevant content" seems to be the content with which most people agree. I believe one could experiment with different definition of "relevant content" to create different forums.
Careful, 'downvote to disagree' may disagree with you! :)
I personally would like to see a public indication of the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and maybe comments to flags. Without this or some other system of checks & balances (even just a total number of submissions & comments on the user account page), completely anonymous moderation by HN users passing by will continue running the site. (Users on mobile devices who choose not to comment because it's a pain to include links to sources may deserve some consideration.)
The permanence of the site adds some unique properties as well: are there any other sites that lock edits after 1 hour or prevent deletion once there is a reply (or even any that attempt to accomplish anything even close to similar, whatever the means)?
This article and this comment thread are prime examples of why the tech industry needs social science and humanities. There are literally centuries of human though and decades of experimentation that addresses this problem, and the constant throughout history is that it is is both hard and complicated.
Yes the proposed solution in the article as well as some solutions proposed here in the comments ignore decades of theory and knowledge developed in social sciences, philosophy and other subjects by thousands of thinkers.
I guess when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Seriously. It's almost as if there was a concerted effort in the last century to stamp out any kinds of thought that opposed or threatened the dominant capitalist ideology of the global hegemonic powers...
For a solution to be a solution, it has to work, right? I would argue that there are a great number of proposals in humanities and social sciences, but the fact that we are still plagued by war & depression means that the proposals either didn't work or cannot be implemented for whatever reason(s).
Co-signed, especially the idea that studying the humanities is useful even though (in fact because) the conclusion they give is often that these problems are hard and complicated. The most common reason I find myself wishing people approaching these problems in tech formally studied humanities is not because the humanities have "the answer" but because if you think you have an answer, it's almost certainly been thought of before, and analyzed for decades.
Not reading admittedly boring and often inane philosophical books and instead trying to build your philosophy from first principles... tends to lead to whatever philosophy was created 50 years ago and has now permeated culture. Like how for a while, every geek I knew trying to re-invent moral philosophy ended up at utilitarianism, only to find out that the good counter-arguments had been made a long time ago; these days, people thinking about the internet, social pressure, and the nature of reality seem to be slowly re-inventing Foucault and Baudrillard without daring to touch the confusing French texts.
This is unfortunate, because Foucault and Baudrillard are both really entertaining once you get the hang of their writing style, especially compared to other philosophers.
"every geek I knew trying to re-invent moral philosophy ended up at utilitarianism, only to find out that the good counter-arguments had been made a long time ago"
The article doesn't dare touch on the idea that online communities may actually be detrimental to good social interaction. We evolved for face-to-face. In-person relationships are rich, rewarding and not as prone to miscommunication.
I don't think it can be taken as an assumption that "social systems" in the digital space can exist as a net social positive. The most fundamental problem in all groups is that 'well received' messages are far different than 'good' messages. And the feedback and filtering mechanisms in all current digital social systems strongly incentivize the former over the latter. And I don't think there's any particularly good way to solve this. Even in real life large purposeless gatherings of mostly bored people rarely leads to desirable things.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadThis is feeling similar - that we need or want our virtual environment to help us - in practise sessions as he seems to say, or in advice
It seems we want science, but at the level of our personal, everyday, choices. we want to trust our computing environments have our best interests at heart.
and that kind of means no commercial interests can be involved.
If every person chooses for the better response and action given the a situation how can a individual be unique?
If all husbands reply to a bum in the exactly same way why do you really need a husband? Failing is a big part of being human, sometimes that can cause harm but failing and learning is one of ours core functions.
I rather be good than be you?
(Sorry if i made my post a bit 'agressive', its not my intent, english is not my main language and i still have to learn how to write properly)
I do agree with you that I'd rather make my own mistakes, than try to be a perfect partner by using an app. The idea is definitely interesting, but scary at the same time. It sounds like something out of The Black Mirror show :)
P.S. your English is great, nothing to worry about!
I'm wary of trying to reverse-engineer human behaviour, especially as it applies to personal relationships.
Besides, who decides what's the “best” course of action here? Who decides what the goal is — length of relationship? Happiness? (How do you measure that? Pleasure endorphins? Well then the correct response is you should stop talking to your partner, and do some exercise and drugs!)
In practice, the person who decides is the person in Google's office at 17:00 on a Friday.
(This is why driverless cars are hellishly scary, by the way. Any car that can be controlled by computer should have to use only publicly-auditable software — i.e. everything must be open-source and all builds must be fully reproducible. At least then you can theoretically be certain you know who your car will decide to save in an emergency, and why. How long before `git blame` is invoked in court in a murder case?)
Also, I don't think that asking for advice removes agency. You still have to think if the advice is applicable to your unique situation, how can it be modified to fit better, and which of several conflicting pieces of advice has more merit. An advice from Siri on any life situation is nigh useless without a deeper understanding of the situation, a Siri can't have it unless she lived a big chunk of your life. So, armed with whatever advice, you still remain ultimately responsible.
And for your second argument, it’s just to easy to follow the computers “orders”, a lot of people would just go for the order because it’s already justified, something along the lines of “I would do different, but the machine told me that everyone that on in that way get something wrong”.
I agree that this type of software would be good when one needs advices, but it would have to be complete trustworthy, giving wrong advices to a suicidal person by example can be devastating (and in this case not even thinking about the manipulation that would be possible by the corporation).
1. Persuade people to choose to be kind.
2. Manipulate people so that they act in a kind way (or avoid acting in an unkind way), without necessarily wanting to be kind.
Option 1 means you need a good way to remove unkind people from your own experience (“free listening”). This is typically not popular with commercial social network services, because this lets you ignore adverts too.
Option 2 reduces this need, but leads to the problem of who is “allowed” to do the manipulation, and who decides this?
When communicating in person, most people have years of learned behaviour (learned from millennia of social norms) nudging them towards acting kindly (or at least not actively unkind), because in person there are immediate, unavoidable social consequences. These consequences are absent when communicating remotely, such as via the internet. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this counts as option 1 or option 2.
To your criticism of option two, I think this is the fundamental flaw in the goal of engineered social systems. There are groups which have radically different ideas about what is "kind". Extreme religious fanatics would say it's unkind to let someone "live in sin", so extreme measures are considered kind for the spiritual well-being of the individual and the community. Secular western thought is more interested in material well-being, so it would say kindness is the promotion of the material well-being of others, generally without passing judgment on how they choose to live (except insofar as it violates others' material well-being).
So the decision of who decides what's kind can lead to completely different interpretations of what kindness is and how the social system behaves.
Currently so much rides on mere survival that the only effective objective function we have to consider our actions is that of money. Either the capitalist system needs to be diversified to encourage multi-objective optimization wrt quality of life across all lifeforms, or it needs to be dismantled and another form of cooperation that directly incentivizes helping your fellow human/animal survive should be installed.
Think about it like this: rather than writing some complicated optimization algorithm that sometimes climbs hills and sometimes descends them according to some arbitrary judgment scheme, we redesign the objective function so that all ethical behavior lies along stable manifolds. We can effectively hack human psychology by exploiting its predispositions to incentivize ultimately good behavior.
This "good behavior" doesn't even necessarily need to be complex or controversial: something as simple as the Golden Rule would likely be sufficient.
E: to add that I recently attended a contemporary art exhibition where one of the exhibits was the introduction of a new cryptocurrency called Kineticoin[1], which supposedly awards artistic contributions to society. How exactly to distribute this value is up for debate, but it is a sorely needed one, IMO.
[1] https://kineticoin.weebly.com/
Who gets to decide what is "Good" and "Ethical" behavior ?
What exactly would be the "incentive" "Good" and "Ethical" behavior. ? You say that capitalism can be dismantled in favor of another form cooperation that directly incentivizes helping your fellow human survive. Is this not in direct contradiction the base animal instinct of self survival. The incentive would have to be huge in order to override this base instinct.
You suggest Golden Rule as sufficient way to define "good behavior". But Golden Rule itself has shortcomings and criticism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Criticism). Do you have any sufficient argument against these criticism.
Sometimes reformulated as "An it harm none, do as ye list."
A suicidal person can say "I don't want other people to save me from dying therefore I will not stop others from dying."
A rich person can say "I do not want charity from others therefore I will not give charity to others."
Why should any one person get to decide? Right now we have given the power over that decision to the worst people.
I think a good first step is to recognise when someone has the power to incentivise behaviour and see whether they are using that power to incentivise negative behaviour. This is currently the case with most of the powerful institutions in our capitalist society. We do not live in a world of scarce resources. In most places there is more than enough food to go around, more than enough housing for everyone to be housed. We are forced into "survival mode" by the fact that wealthy people and institutions are hoarding resources and preventing access to them so that they can exploit us for profit.
If we simply checked and limited the power of such institutions, allowing people the freedom to act in a less competitive manner, we would probably have more co-operation and a more ethical society. We've seen plenty of examples of this before.
What about the basic social animal instinct of co-operation and empathy?
This is why people who sacrifice their lives for others are exceptions rather than norm. Seeing somebody lying on tracks in front of an oncoming train, the common instinct of onlookers is not to jump but stay where they are.
So what I like about the system, is that (for experienced users) down voting is allowed and that a down voted comment is getting less attention (less karma damage, less reader damage) and that is getting faded out (so while reading comments you can quickly skip the bad comments).
That way, you don't have to be afraid of writing a bad comment accidentally, because the system takes care of it, but when you write one you can see that that less people are reading it compared to a good one. I just wish down voting would require writing an answer. Nothing is more frustrating than a down voted comment when you do not know why people didn't like it.
Over the past years, I found that other readers like comments which tell them something new and insightful about the topic. Links for further reading and as references for opinions are also appreciated.
You very quickly get hive minded behavior: similar beliefs get upvoted, contrary ones get hidden, so soon enough you've got an echo chamber, powered by worthless Internet points.
It's a very basic hack on our psychology - we like points, but maybe it's not alltogether good. It works ok on HN because it's a decent community with moderation intended to keep the discussion good. But Twitter and most subreddits are horrible abuses of this and I'm not sure people would spend so much time arguing on the Internet if they simply weren't rewarded so directly for doing so.
I think the Slashdot system was an interesting one, it had also labels, so there was a difference between "+5 Insightful" and "+5 Funny". It also provided some feedback while downvoting. I think having moderation labels instead of plain points would help moderation.
Actually, users could then customize point cost for each of the labels, so they could see the page differently.
There are some great breakdowns of Reddit comment karma by time after post. The direction is obvious - earlier comments score better - but the exponential falloff is still a sight to behold. Any view that isn't outrageous enough to downvote heavily can win just by arriving first, being seen most, and being upvoted by commenters trying to increase their own engagement. (HN removes 'downvote' when people reply to you. I wonder if it should discount upvotes on comments you reply to?)
It's a less-trolled system than the open queue of a messageboard, and more conversational than the obscure branching pattern of Twitter or Tumblr. But it's not much good for comprehensive, noninflammatory discussion.
I would grudgingly agree, but found it funny that the following example sat on the front page the same day as your comment, and the second post exceeded the original's points & comments!
It is possible to detect and block Chrome headless | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175646 (currently 146 points, 105 comments)
9 hours later: It is not possible to detect and block Chrome headless | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179181 (currently 341 points, 158 comments)
A popular opinion doesn't make other opinions invalid and I think that's a mistake many people read into the situation because they're too emotionally invested. On top of that it completely ignores the countless variables that go into a top comment on a popular forum.
The best advice I can give is either 1. Don't take the unpopularity of your contributions so seriously or 2. take it so seriously that you're willing to understand how to game the system to MAKE your "objectively correct" opinion popular.
It does not bother me that unpopular stuff is downvoted (who really cares?), but it's a real dynamic. You said it yourself, if you want to craft a comment to be popular, there's a way to do that; it's not especially hard to figure out what to say if you spend time in various forums.
Maybe the issue with the upvoting system is it gives more credence to a baseless comment having value or being correct, when it's about popularity. From a social perspective it seems like a really great way to spread misinformation. Why would you not care about that?
In my opinion there is a system of homeostasis that exists in internet comments. When a popular wrong opinion gets large enough it is a huge low hanging fruit. There is a race to be the first one to debunk it and cash in all the delicious "well, actually" karma. Go look at the top comment on any given hacker news thread. I wouldn't be surprised to find an overwhelming number of "well, actually" child comments immediately below them.
Furthermore, popular anonymous comments are nice but the real world still operates on reputation based media. A popular comment might inspire a reporter at a media source of record to write an article about it but you can bet their first order of business is to cut out the rhetoric and make the opinion seem as objective as possible. In many cases once you cut out the rhetoric of a baseless popular opinion there is no article, so on a larger social scale the popular comment basically dead in the water. A firstname-lastname reporter is thinking in terms of a career, not upvotes. That's why when you read the sources of a non-fiction book you see The New York Times and not The Slashdot Comment Section.
* Also I just want to clarify that the "someone" in my original reply to your comment was not a veiled accusation, I literally meant someone (anyone). It was not a passive aggressive attempt suggest that you are getting too emotionally involved with your comments. I merely meant that a lot of people (myself included) get too caught up in thinking that 1. they are objectively right and 2. lack of recognition of this fact must mean that the system is broken.
Is it possible to have a forum on the internet with hundreds of active users that doesn't leverage a populist model (upvotes/favorites/likes)? Even places where the comments aren't ranked by the users they ARE ranked by activity (bumps/views) behind the scenes.
It seems like it would be very difficult to decouple "populism" from any large public forum worth reading so I'm skeptical of this criticism of HN. I would argue that it's disingenuous to accuse HN of mere populism without you defining your terms because even academics are skeptical of any one defintion. In many ways your use of "populist" is nothing more than a slur.
I am simply stating that "good" and "populist" are two different things. IMO, HN incentivize having popular opinions. Saying "HN incentivizes good behavior" comes with an underlying assumption that "populist" is "good" which I was trying to point out via my comment.
> I'm not sure if "populist" is as pejorative as you think it is when describing HN.
I am not using "populist" in perjorative sense.
> Is it possible to have a forum on the internet with hundreds of active users that doesn't leverage a populist model (upvotes/favorites/likes)? Even places where the comments aren't ranked by the users they ARE ranked by activity (bumps/views) behind the scenes.
Nearly all internet forums I have used leverage the populist model. However, I think this is more due to the designers of these forums. The designers of these forums want to show the most "relevant content" and their definition of "relevant content" seems to be the content with which most people agree. I believe one could experiment with different definition of "relevant content" to create different forums.
I personally would like to see a public indication of the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and maybe comments to flags. Without this or some other system of checks & balances (even just a total number of submissions & comments on the user account page), completely anonymous moderation by HN users passing by will continue running the site. (Users on mobile devices who choose not to comment because it's a pain to include links to sources may deserve some consideration.)
The permanence of the site adds some unique properties as well: are there any other sites that lock edits after 1 hour or prevent deletion once there is a reply (or even any that attempt to accomplish anything even close to similar, whatever the means)?
I guess when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Not reading admittedly boring and often inane philosophical books and instead trying to build your philosophy from first principles... tends to lead to whatever philosophy was created 50 years ago and has now permeated culture. Like how for a while, every geek I knew trying to re-invent moral philosophy ended up at utilitarianism, only to find out that the good counter-arguments had been made a long time ago; these days, people thinking about the internet, social pressure, and the nature of reality seem to be slowly re-inventing Foucault and Baudrillard without daring to touch the confusing French texts.
And kudos for overall quality post.