Meta HN: About the quality of discussion or rather the lack therof
Dear HN,
over recent months I have felt that the quality of the discussions has fallen below previous levels in terms of subject-related talk. Specifically, I find it annoying that more and more top comments or top replies to top comments are puns and/or variations thereof.
A good laugh is healthy, I agree. But, to me, HN feels more and more like reddit. Phrases like "I'll probably get downvoted for..." are nonsensical, as it does not help a meaningful discussion at all.
So, I ask of you - do you have the same feeling?
Kind regards,
43 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadBecause of that, it's best to post links to specific posts to give examples of what you're talking about. You might find that other people read those posts quite differently, which can be interesting in its own right. Alternatively, if they're posts that break the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), we should moderate them. You, and anyone else, are also welcome to email such links to hn@ycombinator.com.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points.
As pg once put it, "note those words most and probably". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922380
"words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that a specific or meaningful statement has been made"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Essentially, if you were being honest, you would just say on topic is whatever we decided it is, since the intentional ambiguity basically comes down to that.
Would somehow "Topic X is never allowed" be somehow better? That would be silly, but even then there would be arguments about whether a story was topic X. Well, anyway, that guideline seems sensible to me. Not hard to understand why every word is there, for those not blinded by frustration (or whatever you were blinded by when you wrote that). I'm a huge fan of Weasel Words, Don Watson's excellent book, and I can't see a similarity. If you're so sure this place is controlled by evil forces, you should live somewhere else, no?
Since the down-voting is the tool we have been given, I have tried to be more active in using it to mark comments that take discussion to wrong direction.
Some UI innovations might help here as well. Sometimes when inside thread, you see it's heading to useless direction. Would be nice to be able to collapse the thread without scrolling back up.
I thought downvotes were to be used on posts which don’t move the discussion or contribute to it. For example, non-sequitors or inaccuracies. Judging which direction is “wrong” sounds like opinion abuse to me.
One of my favorite parts of HN is intelligent and diverse discussion, two things I believe must exist hand in hand.
Maybe this is what you meant, but I would not choose to downvote you either way.
Downvotes can be used for any reason at all, as can upvotes. AFAIK only flagging has guidelines.
For example, many Ask HN posts are questions asking for opinions. So you help the poster out and write your opinion. Then some dofus comes around who is to lazy to write an opinion of his or her own but wants to express disagreement by down voting your post. These dofuses' downvotes are annoying and results in people not bothering to reply to Ask HN posts anymore.
Letting people downvote for any reason frees up space that would otherwise be taken by petty or banal comments. If a downvoter had something to say worth reading, I would rather they commented, but if they can't put in the effort, then the board is better off with just their vote. Better still with their complete silence, but people get emotionally involved and feel they have to contribute something.
Also, I've found that most obviously pointless downvotes either get corrected or stay at -1. I haven't seen many comments voted down further than that which didn't have some obvious issues. People shouldn't be discouraged - these are meaningless internet brownie points we're talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171”
Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
I generally agree with that policy. The only real downside of that is that minority views can be downvoted to hell merely for being a minority view. A side effect of that is that minority members can get a lot of downvotes simply for participating, no matter how well they express themselves, and this can feel very unwelcoming and like there is a hostile atmosphere here.
I post as openly female. It isn't uncommon for me to get a lot of downvotes and it is really hard for me infer meaningful signal from that. I often cannot readily determine if I committed some social faux pas that violates the guidelines or if I am getting some pile on of disagreement simply because I am a demographic outlier who, therefore, has a different world view and expresses myself differently.
I posit this is a de facto barrier to diversity on the site. It will cause a lot of women and other minorities to simply not bother.
In fact, someone essentially said as much to me recently. They just don't bother most of the time in part because of downvote patterns here.
I'm often downvoted when my perspective deviates from that of the HN bubble, but I really don't mind. I'd rather have the discussion than worry about worthless internet points; if it changes even one person's mind, or helps them think or see a topic in a way they might not otherwise have, it's worth the effort put forth.
TL;DR Don't worry about the downvotes. Can't change HN policies or other people's actions and feelings, only your own.
I am very leery of concluding that downvotes can be wholesale ignored simply because I am a demographic outlier and many people will knee jerk disagree with me. That fundamentally breaks an important social feedback loop.
I didn't make it to the leaderboard by assuming I was getting pushback merely because I am female and men here are clearly sexist pigs and I can ignore their rebuke. I put quite a lot of time and effort into sorting out what I could ignore and what I needed to take seriously as an indicator that I needed to do something differently.
Granted, what I did different wasn't necessarily what other people thought I should. But that social feedback loop matters. It never works well to suggest that minorities can and should simply wholesale ignore such feedback. That goes bad places.
It has been extremely helpful to me that really ugly comments aimed at me are often flagged to death. Unfortunately, this sometimes only happens if I point it out. Then my comment pointing it out is often also flagged and/or downvoted.
It has also been extremely helpful that some people give corrective upvotes. I, also, do that to comments that I don't think really deserve to be in the negatives. Getting back to even after being downvoted feels much, much more to me like "Okay, others don't see it that way and your viewpoint is an outlier for this forum" and much less like "Shut up, bitch. No one wants you here anyway."
My point, which I didn't convey entirely well, is that you can't use downvotes as a signal because there is no agreed upon criteria for when they should be used. Don't agree with the comment? Downvote is fine. Don't think the comment is on topic? Downvote. Have an emotional response to the comment? Downvote. I'm not sure how you can pull signal out of that noise.
I say ignore downvotes because they should not be used as the anti-validation of an idea, thought, or concept. The groupthink can be (and often is) wrong.
> It has been extremely helpful to me that really ugly comments aimed at me are often flagged to death.
Flagging does have guidelines for their use, and ugly comments should (IMHO) be flagged to death. There is a line between disagreement and incivility, but that's what HN mods are for (thread detachment, ban warning, bans) and their attention can be requested with those flags.
With all of that said, I think the HN moderators are fairly astute as to whether someone is participating in good faith, and taking corrective action if they're not. Sorry if we've gone off track. People are hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Assume positive intent until observation proves otherwise.
Very, very carefully and with a low statistical confidence level, relying quite heavily on other factors to inform your conclusions.
As stated above, I think it is problematic to ignore them entirely. I don't see how I could state that more clearly.
I'm aware that I generally think a great deal more about social stuff than most people I meet. I'm aware I do sometimes overthink it and sometimes the answer is "Someone fat fingered it and there really is no social signalling to be derived from it."
As I see it, the only possible content of votes is popularity - which, when it comes to quality, is a very bad metric. In a relatively small, educated group like HN, it's a little bit less diabolically awful than it might be if it was in, say, 1930's Germany, but it's still the same metric.
Different opinions are what I expect from HN, but I wish the discussion revolves quite closely around the title.
I also hate to see puns and jokes on HN, but I'm glad to report that when I do see them, they are usually downvoted at the bottom of the page.
I'm sure it's happened that a joke made the top comment, but I can't remember ever seeing it in the thousands of comment sections I've read here.
Also, some of the humor here makes obscure references and brings to light excellent tidbits of science, history and wisdom I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.
( Edit: heres my latest -2 comment which i really don't understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16401221 )
There are some sacred cow on HN too that you cannot go against: meltdown/spectre is overblown, Google tech isn't the greatest, or numerous economic or political opinions.
It also seems like there has been a relaxing of posting subject matter requirements. Naked politics now hit the front page daily when mods used to give at least lip service to deleting it. I think this has done a lot of bring in tribalism - online political discussing seems to bring it out in people and it spreads like a cancer to the rest of the site.
I think if you shoved the political discussion to a side channel, the discussion all around would improve.
"Not new. Only read the first and last page if the paper.."
And you have no idea why that might be downvoted? I don't think you can have tried to understand. Maybe the downvoters got no further than me (i.e. the bit I quoted) which already has arrogance, ignorance, carelessness—or so it seems—and had already had enough.
"I didn't read the whole paper but..."
"I didn't read your whole comment but I got to that bit and I downvoted you!"
You can always try Reddit, Facebook, Fark, or your favorite topic-specific forum for a different flavor of commentary.
It's a psychological trick.
Lately, I began to feel HN is full of people who sell their time. They just can't believe that anyone might be willing to work for free. Here is the evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400111 Albeit, it's not enough to draw this kind of conclusion.
See this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16391332
Here I simply asked for people's opinion of the experience on different platforms.
From now I'll just read and rarely post. My work area is ad tech and people here seem not like ads much and will downvote/ignore ad tech questions.
re ads: I hate them, but I would only contemplate downvoting someone claiming that the internet would die without them – the whole entitlement to push them to my eyeballs thing – unless the comment cited evidence.
But keep commenting, some will read it and knowledge that challenges prejudice (prejudgments) always spreads quite slowly at first. Then later nearly everybody convince themselves they've ever believed anything else.
Note that the above is true for most contributors, but most downvotes on the site are directed at a small minority of people who commonly comment without reading the article, or didn't understand it, or blunder through general ignorance or profound bias; so most downvotes are still legit.
I've put more thought into the strange ratings of movies on IMDb. There are many reasons for this, but one is - it seems the, er, less discerning movie-goers tend to do more voting. Many people never vote. Just that alone means the crap movies get more and often higher votes. Similarly with music topping the charts. But on IMDb the voting's not everything. There are user comments where you can have your say. People know the movie ratings are often silly.
p.s. Do people anywhere like ads much? People in advertising aside perhaps.
I don't think you're wrong, but I do agree that it's easy to only remember the good bits. Anecdotally at least apparently old threads can be just as bad, and that's even after search for specific topics!
There are recurrent discussions in the same vein echoing back in (HN's) time. I suppose they crop up whenever HN goes through a growth spurt. Just guessing.
I am not against quips and puns. HN is a gathering of people with a certain area of interest and there is great fun is sharing puns that the community identifies with. There are rarely such outlets outside this arena sans an in-person meetup of aspiring startup geeks.
Having said that, such comments are usually in the mid rung and the tops ones (within an hour of posting) tends to be indepth thoughtful ones by relevant people. I have seen doctors, life guards, teachers, lawyers, and so many others from various walks of life give profound insights in the comment sections of relevant articles. So I would not discount the quality.
But discussions like this are worth for keeping the focus where it needs to be.