Sounds to me like the reasons he stopped reading HN were:
1) He couldn't stop himself from posting. He had to comment on things even when he had nothing to add. He even admits to commenting solely to gain karma.
2) He couldn't stop himself from reading the things he found pointless. All the flame wars, the arguments, etc.
Just learn to skip all that. Learn to only post when you have something to add. Only read an article when you actually care about the article. Only read the comments when you care both about the article and what others have to say about it.
Learn some self-control.
That, or tell me what the new best tech-news site is. I get a lot more information about new techniques, languages, etc etc here at HN than anywhere else at the moment.
It's a matter of SNR though, isn't it? Sure you can skip things and sure you can edit yourself, but it's also easier (healthier?) to just stay somewhere that, to your own personal comfort, delivers signal and promotes meaningful response.
The less I have to bear the burden and sink the energy cost of filtration the more I can put into comprehension, enjoyment, and growth.
I think this indicates a higher average quality than other online comments better than most other indicators. In most places the comment would get posted anyway, but here you feel your writing as part of an average standard which is much higher.
I know for one that I also pay more attention to use of words and grammar on here that I probably would other places because that is what the standard is, that is what we all like to read and comments not at that standard usually end up down the bottom heavily down voted.
You don't see a lot of well written and constructive comments down voted even if they are arguing a alternate and contentious viewpoint.
I quite often write out a whole comment pointing out the error of someone's thinking, or just lashing out in general, then realize that I'm not actually adding anything, the person won't listen anyhow, and I'm just wasting my time, others' time, and being negative.
So I click 'back' on my browser and it goes away.
Since I learned to do that, my time on sites like HN has been much more rewarding.
I couldn't agree more. I still manage to slip in some meaningless and regrettable comments, but fortunately far less then the drivel you never get to see.
I've actually thought that the biggest flaw in HN's interface is that the user's karma is displayed on the home page. I've no doubt it seemed like a good way to encourage and reinforce contribution, but I fear it's enabling to a subtle sort of addiction.
Precisely what that addiction is to is perhaps what's hardest to answer. Is it attention? Validation? Some more abstract notion of amassment and score? I've noticed myself looking up into the corner upon return to the site, and have even consciously avoided that gaze pattern at times.
It may even come down to such fundamental questions as the existence of altruism. Just as one can ask "are you doing this for someone else, or just because doing things for others makes you feel good?" one can ask at "are you contributing thoughtfully because you want to participate in the community, or because you want to see your karma go up?" If you want to see your karma increase, is it because you want to participate, or the converse? Can the two be functionally separated?
I write very few comments. When I do write a comment, I always do the top-right corner check when I come back. To me, its validation that my opinion was well taken by the community (a community that I respect).
If you're not getting down voted a reasonable proportion of the time, you're too timid a thinker (or your comments avoid all controversy and stick to technical matters).
Except that on HN, if you are not getting more upvotes than the number of comments you are posting, you can't vote on the comments. That is what the "avg: " on your profile page is for, if it's not 2 or higher your votes don't count.
Is there somewhere to read up on all the rules of HN? I figured out a few things on my own (like that you have to have 200 rep to downvote), but once in a while I come across something I don't understand (like, it seems that you can't downvote immediate children of your comments?).
The features do feel like easter eggs, but I would imagine that pg isn't mentioning them on purpose to preserve the incentive structure on HN and prevent people gaming the system.
I have found out most of this stuff gradually, by reading comments. The best advice I can give you, to maybe speed it up a bit, is to click on "ask" on the orange bar and browse the local posts that discuss HN.
This kind of thing also tends to change. I think I got my downvoting privileges at 50 or so. Like words after a long night of drinking, voting has flowed a lot mre frequently of late. Pg usually modifies the caps to compensate, but they aren't usually announced. I noticed, for example, that /leaders is no longer in the top bar. I think that was a while ago, but just an example of how the site changes.
I disagree. If you're not getting downvoted, that could just as easily mean you're not unconvincing.
Downvotes are ideally for low-value content. If your viewpoint is contrary to popular opinion, the onus is on you to explain your reasoning persuasively enough to not come off as a simple contrarian.
Downvotes are not a reward for thinking independently. They are a penalty for sloppy thinking or overly presumptious output. They are also the only way I can think of for fighting populist, short-circuit comments that troll for upvotes - by encouraging actual argumentation.
Right. I attempted to argue that this was because the comment they disagreed with failed to make them stop and think about why disagreement exists, and re-evaluate their position. That is, downvotes are generally a sign of failure.
Certainly, some people stop, think, disagree, and downvote. I believe that this is the case when the original comment is sloppy, and generally warrants a reply. In some cases, especially various kinds of politics, the replies are omitted presumably because of fatigue. Such people have already replied to the argument enough times in their life to not want to do it again. That could be interpreted as a failure of domain research on the part of the original commenter, but I don't like to blame people for not being "well-read".
The behavior of a group and the behavior of individuals in that group aren't necessarily the same.
It's quite possible for the majority of people to vote based on agreement, and yet have the overall score of the comment be determined by those who vote by quality. Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out. The remaining comment score is made up of those who voted because it was a well-reasoned argument.
Reddit has the "Controversial" tab for this, though HN unfortunately doesn't make a distinction between a comment with 50 upvotes and 40 downvotes vs. one with 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
> Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out.
It's possible for this to happen, but I don't think there are that many hot-button issues where the two sides are exactly balanced. More commonly there will be at least a slight skew in one direction or another, which gets magnified in absolute score the more people there are who vote based on agreement. For example, if there's a 60/40 opinion skew among people who vote based on agreement on a particular topic, and 20 people vote that way, you already have an 8-point rating gap between the popular and unpopular comments (+12/-8 versus +8/-12). On really high-traffic topics, where 100 people might up/downvote based on agreement, you only need a tiny skew from 50/50 for the votes to pile up in one direction or another.
I think in practice that often swamps the quality-based voting, especially on high-traffic articles: you sometimes see extremely short and not particularly insightful comments that express a popular sentiment up at +40 or more.
Voting based on agreement/disagreement, rather than based on quality and relevance is thuggery. It's also human nature; we're passionate, lazy animals. The question is whether or not the problem is widespread enough to threaten the overall value of HN.
Granting that it's human nature to want to send a 1-click agree/disagree signal, and that signal can then be noise which hides another valuable/punishable signal we want to collect, I'd like to see HN or another site like it try a two-axis voting system:
up-promote vs. down-demote: affecting order-of-presentation and karma
left-agree vs. right-disagress: a mini-poll per comment, with no censorious effect on presentation or numerical-reputational effect on karma
My comment history serves as a counterexample to this claim.
I make plenty of comments on controversial topics, often in opposition to mainstream opinion. I get lots of critical responses, but I only rarely see downvotes, and have only one comment that I know of that's below 1 (deservedly so; it was snarky and non-contributory). I'm neither timid nor controversy-avoiding; I just present my controversial ideas in a way that's engaging and enlightening.
I do too, but I would MUCH prefer it if that number were replaced with a count of new replies made to posts you've made, and linked to the 'threads' view of that same count.
The majority of time when I post it isn't to make a point, but to get clarification or ask a question, and sometimes I forget to look for the answers, or the answer comes after my 'threads' page has gone through a few pages, making it harder to find, etc.
PG tried hiding the karma for every comment a year or so back, but that made it harder to to skim pages looking for insightful comments.
Something that could reduce the game-like unpredictable reward aspect of karma scanning might be to delay updating it, perhaps only once a day. But then you might fall back to checking 'threads'.
Perhaps only hide karma score from your own comments made more recently than a day?
I know he meant overall karma. That's why I suggested only updating it once a day, but you could still check how recent comments are doing with the "comments" link on the top bar, so you'd need to hide those scores too, hence my comment.
I was just thinking about this the other day too. Some Swiss students posted a survey to Reddit asking things like, is karma beneficial or not? After thinking about it, it's not clear whether social news sites truly benefit from quantifying reputation with karma and other measures.
It creates an incentive to game the mechanic, makes it easier to game the mechanic with vote rings and bots and whatnot, causes people to comment and submit for the wrong reasons (build their karma rather than listen, learn, and contribute), and displaces the more natural, organic reputation from Web 0.99beta (Usenet, BBS, mailing lists, etc) where you actually had learn netiquette and figure out for yourself who knew what they were talking about and who didn't
Perhaps it's useful to some social networks, but I think HN is much more capable of getting along just fine without it.
Karma is useful at the system level, but not for end users. You can use it to weed out the bad apples but it will only ever be a very superficial indicator of quality.
I agree with this. A large part of the addictiveness comes from knowing that every time you reload the page you might gain the tiny quantum of satisfaction that comes from seeing that number increment.
Hey pg, next time you're making changes to make HN a little less addictive, how about a "hidekarma" option, which would stop my karma appearing in the top right hand corner of every page?
> I get a lot more information about new techniques, languages, etc etc here at HN than anywhere else at the moment.
I find much more useful content on reddit these days. HN tends to be full of opinion pieces with very little technical content. These sometimes start interesting discussions but I don't feel that I actually learn anything useful either from the original article or the comments.
Being unable to stop reading or commenting on hn can never possibly be the reason you've successfully stopped reading or commenting on hn can it?
He wanted to spend his time reading and discussing articles on hn. His problem was that he was finding it increasingly unrewarding. So he quit.
Your last point regarding the best tech-news site is irrelevant. He is replacing hn with "arguing with people in person or via e-mail, reading disagreeable books, and the like."
A way to implement this is to use the new page. There's little indication of what you "should" read, so you have to make up your own mind, from the title or brief skim. There's no or few comments, so less opportunity for meaningless conflict that is irrelevant to the submission. It is, however, more work.
bonus: you have a massively increased influence on what gets to the front page - so, to an extent, you create the HN you want.
"Just learn to skip all that. Learn to only post when you have something to add. Only read an article when you actually care about the article. Only read the comments when you care both about the article and what others have to say about it."
Perfect advice. That pretty much applies to the entire Internet, not just HN.
One of the problems with the Karma thing is it's ridiculously simple to gain karma. Unless you're deliberately being stupid.
All you have to do is say something you believe will fit in with the groupthink of the community.
The first step to salvation is the realization that karma="how much time you waste commenting" rather than how much your comments are valued.
I'd like to see a community where there is a limited supply of karma. Or your karma is shown as a percentage of total karma. I think that would produce much better dynamics.
This is 'drewcrawford. Reading ~10 pages of the last 60 days of his comments, I'm not seeing the unproductive arguments he's referring to. It's too bad; he's an interesting guy: lives in OKC, went to WWDC, has opinions about crypto. Maybe a bit too willing to invest himself in discussions that HN doesn't do well (politics, social justice).
To be fair, politics/social justice discussions seem to turn poisonous everywhere on the web and they probably produce a steady stream of people saying "I'm not posting there again".
I thought you had the wrong guy for a moment, given how tame and deliberate these threads seem. Maybe he had other accounts with which he regularly tread into the lava?
About 5 levels down you'll see a 20-point comment that's unnecessarily nasty. I think that's exactly what the author is referring to, and I agree - I don't like it.
Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion, I find it unlikely your upvotes represent anything more than a set of people who found their preconceptions tickled by your post. Do you have any sort of actual other study to back you point up, or are you just stating your own biases?
I am not sympathetic to the notion that this is an unreasonable nasty comment, given some of the arguments I've found myself embroiled in on HN recently.
I'm not arguing with Drew, though. He's an interesting guy, and he doesn't like commenting here anymore, and that's a shame --- though, again, talking about colonialism on HN is not a good way to moderate your blood pressure.
The issue I take with that comment is that its peppered with phrases that do nothing to add to the discussion, but rather to make the parent poster feel dumb. For example:
"From the article you seem to be replying to"
"Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion,"
The person he's attacking made a simple statement (perhaps factually incorrect), and the guy jumped all over him. Its not a particularly egregious case, and certainly not uncommon, but I surmise that it exemplifies the authors complaint.
I consider it extremely important–perhaps vital, even–to spend time engaging others intelligently who have diverging views from one’s own. I think that this is, on the whole, one of the most valuable uses of one’s time that exists.
Very interesting insight. If you're not doing things that are transformative -- that change your habits and the way you have of looking at the world, you're wasting your time. And I don't mean that in a philosophical or political sense. It applies to everything -- coding, marketing, time management. If you spend 3 hours on HN today and leave with basically the same opinions, habits, and immediately useful pieces of knowledge that you started with? Not good for you.
HN has always discouraged deeply nested discussions, seeing them as just so much noise. I've always thought that was whacked. Yes, many times you are in a flame war and nothing is accomplished, but the entire point of interacting with other people is to learn. So you'd think that a long conversation about, I dunno, pointer arithmetic, would have a transformative effect on both the participants and the community. I think the issue here is whether you view users as intelligent folks who are trying to understand each other, or cranks and trolls who solely exist to get some emotional thrill from flaming (yes, Gresham's Law comes into play here, but everything is a trade-off)
As it is, what's happened is this kind of lightweight, superficial herd mentality, with folks striking out fairly deep responses and then nothing ever gets settled. Lots of generalizations and high-level talk, nothing past an initial exchange or three. I've even questioned some longtime members about various topics and was told "I'm not posting to discuss, I'm posting to cut you off" more or less.
Once I realized that HN was idle geek chitchat and not the watercooler for entrepreneurs I wanted it to be, it changed my opinion of the place. I still like it, no place like it, but it also has this terrible time-wasting underbelly that we rarely talk about enough.
> the entire point of interacting with other people is to learn.
I find the short/shallow discussions on HN very good for this. They give you just a couple of shots to either pose an insightful question or provide an insightful response, which encourages high signal content and enforces a "get to the point" mentality. From discussions elsewhere, I've found the majority of learning comes within those first few serious posts; by the time a single person has posted 5-6 times it's often either repetitive or off-topic. In my experience, it's extremely rare for people to still be providing new insight after 5+ rounds of back and forth.
That said, in those rare circumstances, I would like to continue discussions further than HN allows (that's one reason I list my e-mail address in my profile.) I've found that what kills deep discussion on HN is not the lack of deep nesting, but the fast news cycle and lack of a "refresh" mechanic to bring threads with new posts back to the top. If someone responds to a discussion I started 2 days ago, I may never see their response.
I will always look at the threads page to see responses to things I have written even if it is days after. The problem I guess though is even if the response is written, once it drops off the front page no-one else will see it. The fast news cycle is artificial in a way in that a lot of the stuff posted which manage to get up voted is stuff we could do to not have in comparison with some of the bigger, more contentious ideas and stories which deserve further discussion.
I don't know if this problem is really solvable without the reddit style sub-reddits, with as big a community as we have here different things will interest different people and each one of these things is taking front page space away from other things quicker.
I have the habits of reading opposing viewpoints but only in once in a while that somebody cause a belief system update. However, I learn much more from views that I don't know that others people have. This cause more belief system update and change beliefs that I hold.
I also find over-the-top viewpoints are more likely to yield belief system update than the regular old bland viewpoints like liberals versus conservatives. I learn much more from statists versus anarchists or copyright abolitionists versus IP defenders who are actually worth their salt.
If you're not doing things that are transformative -- that change your habits and the way you have of looking at the world, you're wasting your time.
As written, this is a dangerously solipsistic statement. Transforming your mind, body, knowledge, opinions and philosophy is indeed helpful, but it is much less than half the problem: Unless you are content to live and die as a hermit, you must also seek to transform the world, even if it's just the world in your immediate vicinity.
Learning is valuable, but teaching is just as valuable, if not more so.
Teaching is hard, though. You have to do it in tiny pieces, applied one drop at a time over weeks, months, and years. One of the hardest things to learn is not to lecture. You think -- especially if you have spent years in school -- that you can just tie someone down and tell them the truth over and over until they get it, but it doesn't work that way in real life. Rather, it is both ineffective and rude to grab a piece of someone's attention and then attempt to deliver a big lecture. In face-to-face interaction, people deploy social signals to discourage this; on the web we must take more obvious measures, such as designing venues like HN where lecturing feels awkward and is therefore discouraged.
But if you want to read incredibly long-form back-and-forth discussions that go on for pages the rest of the Internet is right there, one click away.
"... what's happened is this kind of lightweight, superficial herd mentality, with folks striking out fairly deep responses and then nothing ever gets settled ..."
'Nothing ever gets settled' seems a staple of internet discussions, at least in places I've lurked.
I rarely, if ever, see it discussed how a particular argument could be settled. Instead, they all branch out into n-ary tree style growths - one core question becomes a couple of supporting points, becomes a mass of key points each with a different importance weighting for each participant, some pick-n-mix arguing for the easier nodes which may or may not include some artillery citations being lobbed around, followed by a hunkering down into fixed positions as the argubattle dies out, tenuous support structures collapsing under the confusion.
What sort of shape do you imagine a transformative discussion on pointer arithmetic might take? What transformation might it result in, and in whom? Is the point for one person to learn what another knows, or for both to explore the topic to generate completely new information, or both? How would you declare, in advance, end conditions (would you?)?
A serial discussion doesn't seem a great vehicle for arguing or discussing - the more deeply nested it is, the more specific and time consuming each point is, the harder it is to see the wood for the trees.
Instead of arguing whether forestry companies should pay more tax due to environmental damage, you end up arguing whether it's right that in Minnesota, under regulation Foo.Bar paragraph baz, any company which owns more than 140 hectares of land more than 80% of which is forest, and employing more than 10 people, and which falls under the definition of a Forestry company as specified by Jones vs. Calson 1884, must submit their year end accounts under Revised Minn. Accounting Regulations instead of New Minn. Accounting Regulations. Then each of those points opens for arguing. It's very fractal - every point of contention is potentially a whole full-sized argument.
In short, as a discussion on the internet lengthens, the available conclusions approach 'it depends [on the specific situation]', although Godwin's Law intervenes to prevent this state being reached. Human Nature abhors naked indecision.
I don't read very many articles on Hacker News and I think I get a lot more out of it by being my own add on filter.
I avoid articles from techcrunch, nytimes, and basically any majorish news source (they usually can't keep my attention for some reason, even if it is interesting). What I do like are the new startup posts (sometimes they are interesting just to see what people are doing), the underlying tech posts or how someone solved an interesting problem (be it programming or something else) and anything else that sticks out I'll click on. After I click on them I skim them and see if it keeps my interest and then I read whatever is left, some days I don't read any articles and some days I read quite a few.
Also comments help the filter and if I'm grabbed by a title I might check the comments to see whether or not I am going to read an article.
"Every community deteriorates over time" - I hate these kind of statements made by every community as it grows and the "older" generations feel that they come from an elitist or a superior, time of purity.
Did you know Wikipedia doesn't function as a democracy? I believe the stats are something like top 20 % influence 80% of articles. If HN were to be proper democracy, I think it's decline would be hastened a.k.a -"Every community deteriorates over time"
Aging in online communities happens way faster than real life-but it 's psychology is basically the same -"What does this Twenty-something CEO know to tell us 15 year industry veterans something of value?"
Unlike your XKCD example, a community's early members are not talking about the general population. They're talking about a special interest community's dilution.
Few communities are begun by the average, they're begun by the inspired, impassioned, or invested. The founders are focused. Motivated, they cross a barrier of inaction, pouring in resources and effort, establishing a meeting place for clear like minds.
Latecomers are on the whole less missioned. The barrier to joining is less than the barrier to beginning. Growth and time inexorably pull participatory discussion away from the founding focus toward the bell curve's center.
I don't see why people make such a big deal about karma...it doesn't affect anything...and noone can see it without checking your profile. And that's coming from someone who was #3 karma wise on this site.
The problem is that karma does affect things. Just by existing it affects the way we think. It may be subtle, but we give more respect to posters with higher karma. It's a sign of acceptance from a desirable community. It's also correlated with the age of your account, and we all know that older accounts are respected more than newer accounts.
And we do check the karma of other users even though we have to click through to a profile. All the time. At least I do. It helps to frame a user's comments for instance.
Ultimately I think karma is a big deal. And it comes off as a little disingenuous when someone with a ton of it belittles its importance.
Yes, karma affects things. It's an instant feedback. So you can adjust to it. It's supposed to have a positive effect, and I believe it has, but the negative is:
I've already learned that going "with the crowd" can get you more than trying to argument against the popular belief. Going against guarantees to give you some minus values even if you follow all the rules and contribute to the discussion (that is you're not going off-topic). I guess we can generalize things and say that the life is the same, you just can't argue that the condoms are good among the Catholics. So I have personally already also learned that how I'd be able to get more karma: say positive things about Python in post about Python, about Erlang in post about Erlang, about Lisp in posts about Lisp, etc. As Scott Adams would say "we're just meat robots."
As long as people react so, the people are not only train not to troll, but also not to discuss against, just to "join our righteous crusades and fight the infidels."
To a point, some of the most well know and respected members of this community and more generally the startup's community are often so respected because they do take alternate viewpoints and argue for them really well.
Sure you can preach to the choir on issues but if you do truly believe in an opposite viewpoint and make a well construed argument on it, good enough for the other side to at least see where you are coming from, that will earn a lot of respect.
For the same reason people ostracized by their social group might be sad or even suicidal. Most people cannot overcome the hard-wiring that cares about our relative social standing.
Karma is most significant yardstick in this community, so that is HN's way of saying that it matters. This is why PG says you have to be careful about what you measure [1], because then you tend to start optimizing for that.
Well I can empathize with the author. I too feel almost everything of importance that I've ever accomplished intellectually or mathematically, however modest, emerged as the result of intense collaboration with colleagues, complete with rigorous arguments. We would often change sides solely to get a burst of new energy when stuck in the same old thoughts. It's how research is done.
I also begin a lot of comments that I don't publish (please give the karma to swah below for saying it first :), as writing is a skill you have to work at. I don't consider myself a lurker, as my low karma might indicate given I've been here 1306 days, but mostly I scan and occasionally read in depth and try to jump in when I can add value or correct obvious mistakes. In terms of interests it's surprising how diverse this community is. Even with lots of programmers one wouldn't expect to find so many familiar with category theory.
I've seen HN change, often not for the better, and I'm reminded of Shirky's essay on a group being it's own worst enemy, but I've watched this puppy grow for a long time so I'm staying. Besides, I haven't owned a TV in 20 years now and I miss the Saturday morning cartoons. HN fills that gap.
Maybe he wanted to burn the bridge publicly in order to make it more likely that he will keep to his decision. "Can't go back now that I've said I'm leaving." kind of thing? But if he does decide to go back it leaves a nice opening for the follow-on post of "Why I decided to go back to reading HN".
A reasonable point of view, but I would suggest simply setting rough limits like "I am going to spend about 20 minutes today reading tech news."
Way off topic, but: I think the article was too long. This is a trick I learned a long time ago: usually when I write an email or a blog post I let it sit for a while, then try to shorten it. Other people's time is as precious as our own so the effort in shrinking material down for quick digestion is worthwhile.
It was only natural that the community's interests would broaden and lose focus. There was certainly a more strict focus prior to 5-6 months ago and definitely 4 years ago, however, HN was never strictly startup only news. In the initial stages it was heavily weighted towards startup news, but the focus was still more diffuse than say /r/startups.
This is where the superiority of a site designed to offer something for everyone without foisting a mould on everyone becomes obvious. Reddit allows the targeted streaming of topic consistent information. Hacker News attempts to be an aggregate approximation of multiple streams that interest hacker mindsets. Alternatively, Facebook is good if you're looking for organized boredom in a curated garden that will spill your information like a dribble cup.
The thing I love about HN are the comments from domain-experts - e.g. tptacek on security, grellas posts on law or a direct response from a founder/creator. These kind of comments always seem to be very insightful. I don't value general discussions that much and I don't think HN is a very good medium for discussions.
I think it might be better to ignore the roles of an expert and evaluate the comments by themselves. If the comments are insightful, they can stand on their own. Evaluating the comments by themselves help to develop critical thinking and avoid being spoonfed by others.
Arguments from authority are a fallacy and I am not saying that I trust blindly someone just because they are an expert. I am just stating that domain experts on HN generally have some really insightful comments :)
I've left other communities for many of the same reasons. I think that people get attached to the discourse and mental challenge that they ignore the underlying issues. I don't think any site will ever be good enough and I don't think that sites really change that much. I think the change perceived is more the person coming around to the way things actually are and not the 'new toy' image they had.
From what I can tell, most people that post there do so in a manner that represents intelligence and proper manners. Plus they all agree with each other too. There are some new people that join up because they have a question but from what I have seen, there is a finite community. This also leads to a tremendous stagnation on the forums. When everyone agrees, and everyone is polite, discussions resolve themselves very quickly and there is nothing left to talk about. Granted they are only concerned with one particular philosophy and it's impacts, I think it shows what can happen.
Why do you think the problem people will be the ones who click the link? And think about it enough to figure out what situations it applies to and learn how to recognize those situations. And learn to see situations they are personally involved in, in an objective enough way so that they can recognize when they personally are doing it. And remember all this.
The link offers very little help in doing these tasks. It's almost pure content, with little about how to integrate it into your life and actually use it. I think it therefore is failing to give much advice about a part where the many of relevant people get stuck or fail.
There also seems to be some significant proportion of people who think taking issues like this seriously is not fun -- it's "overly serious" -- and they want their internet discussions to be light-hearted and enjoyable. They are alienated to learning things. So they won't care what you're saying; they think it's only for people with a different personality type who like that kind of thing. I don't even know what to do about these people because giving an explanation of why they are making a mistake would offend them -- if they aren't going to take discussion too seriously, they certainly don't want it to turn into a self-help seminar that asks them personally to improve.
So, point is, while it's a decent article, if it's supposed to be for fixing a discussion atmosphere involving thousands of people, I don't think it will solve that problem.
There is a similar post to the original article here that was posted to LW a few days ago, Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality , http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distrac... . I have been strongly cutting back my browsing in general, including both LW and HN.
Very insightful. I have become a casual reader just for articles, not really for the illogical arguments or personal attacks. It really does feel like everybody's talking and no one is saying anything.
You're missing out. The comments are a great way to filter the articles. I usually load them up before reading the story and if the most highly rated comment is a point by point evisceration of the thesis of the article then I know I can skip it.
Umm...Its a website....you should probably just get over whatever is making you grumpy and get some fresh air. Sure its a community, but if it really is that hard to let go of then you really need some time out to sort out your real world issues.
A few ideas (of course you won't be reading this, so perhaps it'll be useful to those of us remaining on the service):
1. Logout of HN and have a friend of yours change your password and not tell you what it is. This keeps you from getting into the commenting/commenting-for-karma cycle. And you won't want to create a new account because karma addicts can't stand the idea of starting back at zero.
2. Find a community that better suits your argumentative needs. I would probably suggest looking a quora.com -- but, if you're addicted to arguments for the sake of arguments, then that's probably not a good idea either.
3. Take up photography. Seriously. It will center you and give you a vice to replace the void created by quitting this site (whether the ban is short-term imposed or long-term imposed).
The biggest change for me is the broadening of focus away from just startups. I like it because I'm interested in broad stuff, but it leaves a hole. So we created http://techstartu.ps for the startup piece and now I regularly visit both sites. Reddit subreddits are also good for other specific knowledge domains, e.g. netsec.
"I consider it extremely important–perhaps vital, even–to spend time engaging others intelligently who have diverging views from one’s own. I think that this is, on the whole, one of the most valuable uses of one’s time that exists. "
This should be the reason he has comments closed. Walk your talk.
I was thinking the same thing myself. I'm unsure why a person who considers having arguments a vital part of his life and is "very, very careful" with his time would spend a month writing an article nobody can comment on. He's surely not coming back the HN to read the comments.
Tell me again why I should care about this article?
EDIT: FWIW I did enjoy reading parts of the article. I thought the writer has some thought-provoking things to say. I like his ideas about what make a bad argument, and I like his ideas about the importance of interacting with people who don't think like you. I just have a problem taking people who say one thing and do another seriously.
There are communities I have left for various reasons. I am not wrapped around the axle enough about it to write a blog post naming the forum in the title and bitch about everything that is wrong with the forum in question. I couldn't get through half this post. I just don't care that much. I stopped reading after he explained how central HN had been to him and how giving it up was like lopping off a limb (or some such) but he just had to do it (or some such). HN serves some of my needs, so I visit when time permits and the interest is there. No big.
Sometimes you just have to accept things for what they are and let them be. HN is the Parisian salon or bohemian coffee house of its age. And they also suffered from the pretentious, inane or despotic and inciteful, as well as the insightful and delightful.
One thing I would like to see get addressed is how a popular sentiment can get upvoted so much. I feel that this undermines the importance of making an insightful or relevant comment. People can easily just speak the popular sentiment of the time and gain karma/have it highlighted.
However, this is an issue we can all try to address. Next time we see a comment that says "hackers rule", we can avoid being trigger happy about upvoting it but rather evaluate it in terms of its merits. As a corollary, I make it a focus of mine to upvote good comments that I disagree with, a particularly hard thing to do.
It's easy, see the 'points' as a value instead of an increment on vote. That way you evaluate a comment based on what you think it's worth. If it still has less points than what you think it is worth, vote it up, otherwise vote it down.
This is one thing I absolutely can't stand in reddit and now I see that it is also very common here in HN.
People seem to up-vote users with "high score/past reputation/YC funded member" on virtually any comment they leave, even if their comment contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion or just re-enforces whatever the hive mind believes in.
Forget about trying to disagree with a popular HN poster without getting down-voted to oblivion.
This is really sad.
I think overall karma points should not be made public. Each comment should be judged by its own merit not by the "karma points" they have in the leader-board.
I haven't really wrapped my head around the grounds for down-voting on HN. It seemed very rare - and proper - at first, but I am beginning to get that the, albeit few, who do it vote based on content and not form. In other words, they disagree with what a person is saying - sometimes vehemently - but the downvoted comment is still politely and somewhat cogently phrased.
It's not as widespread as on reddit where there is widespread reputation-sniping going on, and many HN users tend to pick up on unfair downvotes and vote the comment up to counter it. It'll still deter some people, I guess.
Based on how much some of my comments bounce up and down, I don't think that the downvotes are done by only a few. But I think this is a good thing, and if anything we need more people eager to downvote poor quality submissions. I think the reason that HN has remained as usable as it has because it is actively policed for content quality.
I don't see a way to check, but I'd guess that my upvote to downvote ratio is about 3:1. I try to vote up anything that would want to see more of on the site, whether I agree or disagree with the content. I try to mercilessly vote down snappy one liners, purposeless profanity, and dumb jokes. If anything, I'd say I vote primarily on form --- I'll support just about any content if it's well written and well intentioned.
Oh yes, blind upvotes based on the poster are the worst. It devalues the actual discussion. Power users in Digg are the main cause of its downfall. I hate to see HN is going that way.
About addressing this - does anyone know why you can't change a vote on HN? I've had several times where I meant to downvote specifically and upvoted instead by mistake; the buttons are very close together especially on a mobile device, but even on my desktop my finger has slipped.
124 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread1) He couldn't stop himself from posting. He had to comment on things even when he had nothing to add. He even admits to commenting solely to gain karma.
2) He couldn't stop himself from reading the things he found pointless. All the flame wars, the arguments, etc.
Just learn to skip all that. Learn to only post when you have something to add. Only read an article when you actually care about the article. Only read the comments when you care both about the article and what others have to say about it.
Learn some self-control.
That, or tell me what the new best tech-news site is. I get a lot more information about new techniques, languages, etc etc here at HN than anywhere else at the moment.
The less I have to bear the burden and sink the energy cost of filtration the more I can put into comprehension, enjoyment, and growth.
Then I discard it and feel very proud for saving everyone's time.
I know for one that I also pay more attention to use of words and grammar on here that I probably would other places because that is what the standard is, that is what we all like to read and comments not at that standard usually end up down the bottom heavily down voted.
You don't see a lot of well written and constructive comments down voted even if they are arguing a alternate and contentious viewpoint.
So I click 'back' on my browser and it goes away.
Since I learned to do that, my time on sites like HN has been much more rewarding.
Precisely what that addiction is to is perhaps what's hardest to answer. Is it attention? Validation? Some more abstract notion of amassment and score? I've noticed myself looking up into the corner upon return to the site, and have even consciously avoided that gaze pattern at times.
It may even come down to such fundamental questions as the existence of altruism. Just as one can ask "are you doing this for someone else, or just because doing things for others makes you feel good?" one can ask at "are you contributing thoughtfully because you want to participate in the community, or because you want to see your karma go up?" If you want to see your karma increase, is it because you want to participate, or the converse? Can the two be functionally separated?
I'm going to try to avoid that this time :)
Is there somewhere to read up on all the rules of HN? I figured out a few things on my own (like that you have to have 200 rep to downvote), but once in a while I come across something I don't understand (like, it seems that you can't downvote immediate children of your comments?).
This kind of thing also tends to change. I think I got my downvoting privileges at 50 or so. Like words after a long night of drinking, voting has flowed a lot mre frequently of late. Pg usually modifies the caps to compensate, but they aren't usually announced. I noticed, for example, that /leaders is no longer in the top bar. I think that was a while ago, but just an example of how the site changes.
Here is pg's announcement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173801
In the same discussion, in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174132, pg moved the leader link to the Lists page and had the Ask HN on top bar.
Downvotes are ideally for low-value content. If your viewpoint is contrary to popular opinion, the onus is on you to explain your reasoning persuasively enough to not come off as a simple contrarian.
Downvotes are not a reward for thinking independently. They are a penalty for sloppy thinking or overly presumptious output. They are also the only way I can think of for fighting populist, short-circuit comments that troll for upvotes - by encouraging actual argumentation.
Certainly, some people stop, think, disagree, and downvote. I believe that this is the case when the original comment is sloppy, and generally warrants a reply. In some cases, especially various kinds of politics, the replies are omitted presumably because of fatigue. Such people have already replied to the argument enough times in their life to not want to do it again. That could be interpreted as a failure of domain research on the part of the original commenter, but I don't like to blame people for not being "well-read".
It's quite possible for the majority of people to vote based on agreement, and yet have the overall score of the comment be determined by those who vote by quality. Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out. The remaining comment score is made up of those who voted because it was a well-reasoned argument.
Reddit has the "Controversial" tab for this, though HN unfortunately doesn't make a distinction between a comment with 50 upvotes and 40 downvotes vs. one with 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
It's possible for this to happen, but I don't think there are that many hot-button issues where the two sides are exactly balanced. More commonly there will be at least a slight skew in one direction or another, which gets magnified in absolute score the more people there are who vote based on agreement. For example, if there's a 60/40 opinion skew among people who vote based on agreement on a particular topic, and 20 people vote that way, you already have an 8-point rating gap between the popular and unpopular comments (+12/-8 versus +8/-12). On really high-traffic topics, where 100 people might up/downvote based on agreement, you only need a tiny skew from 50/50 for the votes to pile up in one direction or another.
I think in practice that often swamps the quality-based voting, especially on high-traffic articles: you sometimes see extremely short and not particularly insightful comments that express a popular sentiment up at +40 or more.
up-promote vs. down-demote: affecting order-of-presentation and karma
left-agree vs. right-disagress: a mini-poll per comment, with no censorious effect on presentation or numerical-reputational effect on karma
I make plenty of comments on controversial topics, often in opposition to mainstream opinion. I get lots of critical responses, but I only rarely see downvotes, and have only one comment that I know of that's below 1 (deservedly so; it was snarky and non-contributory). I'm neither timid nor controversy-avoiding; I just present my controversial ideas in a way that's engaging and enlightening.
The majority of time when I post it isn't to make a point, but to get clarification or ask a question, and sometimes I forget to look for the answers, or the answer comes after my 'threads' page has gone through a few pages, making it harder to find, etc.
Something that could reduce the game-like unpredictable reward aspect of karma scanning might be to delay updating it, perhaps only once a day. But then you might fall back to checking 'threads'.
Perhaps only hide karma score from your own comments made more recently than a day?
An experiment would be to remove it, and only display it on your username page (as your average karma is now.)
It creates an incentive to game the mechanic, makes it easier to game the mechanic with vote rings and bots and whatnot, causes people to comment and submit for the wrong reasons (build their karma rather than listen, learn, and contribute), and displaces the more natural, organic reputation from Web 0.99beta (Usenet, BBS, mailing lists, etc) where you actually had learn netiquette and figure out for yourself who knew what they were talking about and who didn't
Perhaps it's useful to some social networks, but I think HN is much more capable of getting along just fine without it.
Hey pg, next time you're making changes to make HN a little less addictive, how about a "hidekarma" option, which would stop my karma appearing in the top right hand corner of every page?
I find much more useful content on reddit these days. HN tends to be full of opinion pieces with very little technical content. These sometimes start interesting discussions but I don't feel that I actually learn anything useful either from the original article or the comments.
He wanted to spend his time reading and discussing articles on hn. His problem was that he was finding it increasingly unrewarding. So he quit.
Your last point regarding the best tech-news site is irrelevant. He is replacing hn with "arguing with people in person or via e-mail, reading disagreeable books, and the like."
bonus: you have a massively increased influence on what gets to the front page - so, to an extent, you create the HN you want.
Perfect advice. That pretty much applies to the entire Internet, not just HN.
All you have to do is say something you believe will fit in with the groupthink of the community.
The first step to salvation is the realization that karma="how much time you waste commenting" rather than how much your comments are valued.
I'd like to see a community where there is a limited supply of karma. Or your karma is shown as a percentage of total karma. I think that would produce much better dynamics.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584474
About 5 levels down you'll see a 20-point comment that's unnecessarily nasty. I think that's exactly what the author is referring to, and I agree - I don't like it.
Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion, I find it unlikely your upvotes represent anything more than a set of people who found their preconceptions tickled by your post. Do you have any sort of actual other study to back you point up, or are you just stating your own biases?
I am not sympathetic to the notion that this is an unreasonable nasty comment, given some of the arguments I've found myself embroiled in on HN recently.
I'm not arguing with Drew, though. He's an interesting guy, and he doesn't like commenting here anymore, and that's a shame --- though, again, talking about colonialism on HN is not a good way to moderate your blood pressure.
"From the article you seem to be replying to"
"Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion,"
The person he's attacking made a simple statement (perhaps factually incorrect), and the guy jumped all over him. Its not a particularly egregious case, and certainly not uncommon, but I surmise that it exemplifies the authors complaint.
Very interesting insight. If you're not doing things that are transformative -- that change your habits and the way you have of looking at the world, you're wasting your time. And I don't mean that in a philosophical or political sense. It applies to everything -- coding, marketing, time management. If you spend 3 hours on HN today and leave with basically the same opinions, habits, and immediately useful pieces of knowledge that you started with? Not good for you.
HN has always discouraged deeply nested discussions, seeing them as just so much noise. I've always thought that was whacked. Yes, many times you are in a flame war and nothing is accomplished, but the entire point of interacting with other people is to learn. So you'd think that a long conversation about, I dunno, pointer arithmetic, would have a transformative effect on both the participants and the community. I think the issue here is whether you view users as intelligent folks who are trying to understand each other, or cranks and trolls who solely exist to get some emotional thrill from flaming (yes, Gresham's Law comes into play here, but everything is a trade-off)
As it is, what's happened is this kind of lightweight, superficial herd mentality, with folks striking out fairly deep responses and then nothing ever gets settled. Lots of generalizations and high-level talk, nothing past an initial exchange or three. I've even questioned some longtime members about various topics and was told "I'm not posting to discuss, I'm posting to cut you off" more or less.
Once I realized that HN was idle geek chitchat and not the watercooler for entrepreneurs I wanted it to be, it changed my opinion of the place. I still like it, no place like it, but it also has this terrible time-wasting underbelly that we rarely talk about enough.
I find the short/shallow discussions on HN very good for this. They give you just a couple of shots to either pose an insightful question or provide an insightful response, which encourages high signal content and enforces a "get to the point" mentality. From discussions elsewhere, I've found the majority of learning comes within those first few serious posts; by the time a single person has posted 5-6 times it's often either repetitive or off-topic. In my experience, it's extremely rare for people to still be providing new insight after 5+ rounds of back and forth.
That said, in those rare circumstances, I would like to continue discussions further than HN allows (that's one reason I list my e-mail address in my profile.) I've found that what kills deep discussion on HN is not the lack of deep nesting, but the fast news cycle and lack of a "refresh" mechanic to bring threads with new posts back to the top. If someone responds to a discussion I started 2 days ago, I may never see their response.
I don't know if this problem is really solvable without the reddit style sub-reddits, with as big a community as we have here different things will interest different people and each one of these things is taking front page space away from other things quicker.
I also find over-the-top viewpoints are more likely to yield belief system update than the regular old bland viewpoints like liberals versus conservatives. I learn much more from statists versus anarchists or copyright abolitionists versus IP defenders who are actually worth their salt.
As written, this is a dangerously solipsistic statement. Transforming your mind, body, knowledge, opinions and philosophy is indeed helpful, but it is much less than half the problem: Unless you are content to live and die as a hermit, you must also seek to transform the world, even if it's just the world in your immediate vicinity.
Learning is valuable, but teaching is just as valuable, if not more so.
Teaching is hard, though. You have to do it in tiny pieces, applied one drop at a time over weeks, months, and years. One of the hardest things to learn is not to lecture. You think -- especially if you have spent years in school -- that you can just tie someone down and tell them the truth over and over until they get it, but it doesn't work that way in real life. Rather, it is both ineffective and rude to grab a piece of someone's attention and then attempt to deliver a big lecture. In face-to-face interaction, people deploy social signals to discourage this; on the web we must take more obvious measures, such as designing venues like HN where lecturing feels awkward and is therefore discouraged.
But if you want to read incredibly long-form back-and-forth discussions that go on for pages the rest of the Internet is right there, one click away.
Dangerously self-referential statement. As written, of course.
I'm actually an antisolipsist, so it was written using the second-person pronoun and is correct as such. (and not solipsistic by any means)
And no, I have no idea if I am pulling your leg or not since I'm still working out all the implications of antisolipsism.
are you sure?
Clay Shirky has a copy of a speech explaining the mechanics of this phenomena, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ~ http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
I rarely, if ever, see it discussed how a particular argument could be settled. Instead, they all branch out into n-ary tree style growths - one core question becomes a couple of supporting points, becomes a mass of key points each with a different importance weighting for each participant, some pick-n-mix arguing for the easier nodes which may or may not include some artillery citations being lobbed around, followed by a hunkering down into fixed positions as the argubattle dies out, tenuous support structures collapsing under the confusion.
What sort of shape do you imagine a transformative discussion on pointer arithmetic might take? What transformation might it result in, and in whom? Is the point for one person to learn what another knows, or for both to explore the topic to generate completely new information, or both? How would you declare, in advance, end conditions (would you?)?
A serial discussion doesn't seem a great vehicle for arguing or discussing - the more deeply nested it is, the more specific and time consuming each point is, the harder it is to see the wood for the trees.
Instead of arguing whether forestry companies should pay more tax due to environmental damage, you end up arguing whether it's right that in Minnesota, under regulation Foo.Bar paragraph baz, any company which owns more than 140 hectares of land more than 80% of which is forest, and employing more than 10 people, and which falls under the definition of a Forestry company as specified by Jones vs. Calson 1884, must submit their year end accounts under Revised Minn. Accounting Regulations instead of New Minn. Accounting Regulations. Then each of those points opens for arguing. It's very fractal - every point of contention is potentially a whole full-sized argument.
In short, as a discussion on the internet lengthens, the available conclusions approach 'it depends [on the specific situation]', although Godwin's Law intervenes to prevent this state being reached. Human Nature abhors naked indecision.
I avoid articles from techcrunch, nytimes, and basically any majorish news source (they usually can't keep my attention for some reason, even if it is interesting). What I do like are the new startup posts (sometimes they are interesting just to see what people are doing), the underlying tech posts or how someone solved an interesting problem (be it programming or something else) and anything else that sticks out I'll click on. After I click on them I skim them and see if it keeps my interest and then I read whatever is left, some days I don't read any articles and some days I read quite a few.
Also comments help the filter and if I'm grabbed by a title I might check the comments to see whether or not I am going to read an article.
Just related: http://xkcd.com/603/
Did you know Wikipedia doesn't function as a democracy? I believe the stats are something like top 20 % influence 80% of articles. If HN were to be proper democracy, I think it's decline would be hastened a.k.a -"Every community deteriorates over time"
Aging in online communities happens way faster than real life-but it 's psychology is basically the same -"What does this Twenty-something CEO know to tell us 15 year industry veterans something of value?"
Few communities are begun by the average, they're begun by the inspired, impassioned, or invested. The founders are focused. Motivated, they cross a barrier of inaction, pouring in resources and effort, establishing a meeting place for clear like minds.
Latecomers are on the whole less missioned. The barrier to joining is less than the barrier to beginning. Growth and time inexorably pull participatory discussion away from the founding focus toward the bell curve's center.
And we do check the karma of other users even though we have to click through to a profile. All the time. At least I do. It helps to frame a user's comments for instance.
Ultimately I think karma is a big deal. And it comes off as a little disingenuous when someone with a ton of it belittles its importance.
I've already learned that going "with the crowd" can get you more than trying to argument against the popular belief. Going against guarantees to give you some minus values even if you follow all the rules and contribute to the discussion (that is you're not going off-topic). I guess we can generalize things and say that the life is the same, you just can't argue that the condoms are good among the Catholics. So I have personally already also learned that how I'd be able to get more karma: say positive things about Python in post about Python, about Erlang in post about Erlang, about Lisp in posts about Lisp, etc. As Scott Adams would say "we're just meat robots."
As long as people react so, the people are not only train not to troll, but also not to discuss against, just to "join our righteous crusades and fight the infidels."
Sure you can preach to the choir on issues but if you do truly believe in an opposite viewpoint and make a well construed argument on it, good enough for the other side to at least see where you are coming from, that will earn a lot of respect.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
I also begin a lot of comments that I don't publish (please give the karma to swah below for saying it first :), as writing is a skill you have to work at. I don't consider myself a lurker, as my low karma might indicate given I've been here 1306 days, but mostly I scan and occasionally read in depth and try to jump in when I can add value or correct obvious mistakes. In terms of interests it's surprising how diverse this community is. Even with lots of programmers one wouldn't expect to find so many familiar with category theory.
I've seen HN change, often not for the better, and I'm reminded of Shirky's essay on a group being it's own worst enemy, but I've watched this puppy grow for a long time so I'm staying. Besides, I haven't owned a TV in 20 years now and I miss the Saturday morning cartoons. HN fills that gap.
Him: "Baby, I love you but you're so self-destructive" HN: "No, don't go - I promise we'll change and be better for you"
I don't buy it. Why make a stink about it? Why not just leave quietly?
Way off topic, but: I think the article was too long. This is a trick I learned a long time ago: usually when I write an email or a blog post I let it sit for a while, then try to shorten it. Other people's time is as precious as our own so the effort in shrinking material down for quick digestion is worthwhile.
http://www.reddit.com/r/startups
This is where the superiority of a site designed to offer something for everyone without foisting a mould on everyone becomes obvious. Reddit allows the targeted streaming of topic consistent information. Hacker News attempts to be an aggregate approximation of multiple streams that interest hacker mindsets. Alternatively, Facebook is good if you're looking for organized boredom in a curated garden that will spill your information like a dribble cup.
One site that I like to look at from time to time is http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?s=7f68f69e2b74a...
From what I can tell, most people that post there do so in a manner that represents intelligence and proper manners. Plus they all agree with each other too. There are some new people that join up because they have a question but from what I have seen, there is a finite community. This also leads to a tremendous stagnation on the forums. When everyone agrees, and everyone is polite, discussions resolve themselves very quickly and there is nothing left to talk about. Granted they are only concerned with one particular philosophy and it's impacts, I think it shows what can happen.
Seriously, that's what I wrote it for.
The link offers very little help in doing these tasks. It's almost pure content, with little about how to integrate it into your life and actually use it. I think it therefore is failing to give much advice about a part where the many of relevant people get stuck or fail.
There also seems to be some significant proportion of people who think taking issues like this seriously is not fun -- it's "overly serious" -- and they want their internet discussions to be light-hearted and enjoyable. They are alienated to learning things. So they won't care what you're saying; they think it's only for people with a different personality type who like that kind of thing. I don't even know what to do about these people because giving an explanation of why they are making a mistake would offend them -- if they aren't going to take discussion too seriously, they certainly don't want it to turn into a self-help seminar that asks them personally to improve.
So, point is, while it's a decent article, if it's supposed to be for fixing a discussion atmosphere involving thousands of people, I don't think it will solve that problem.
1. Logout of HN and have a friend of yours change your password and not tell you what it is. This keeps you from getting into the commenting/commenting-for-karma cycle. And you won't want to create a new account because karma addicts can't stand the idea of starting back at zero.
2. Find a community that better suits your argumentative needs. I would probably suggest looking a quora.com -- but, if you're addicted to arguments for the sake of arguments, then that's probably not a good idea either.
3. Take up photography. Seriously. It will center you and give you a vice to replace the void created by quitting this site (whether the ban is short-term imposed or long-term imposed).
This should be the reason he has comments closed. Walk your talk.
Tell me again why I should care about this article?
EDIT: FWIW I did enjoy reading parts of the article. I thought the writer has some thought-provoking things to say. I like his ideas about what make a bad argument, and I like his ideas about the importance of interacting with people who don't think like you. I just have a problem taking people who say one thing and do another seriously.
Sometimes you just have to accept things for what they are and let them be. HN is the Parisian salon or bohemian coffee house of its age. And they also suffered from the pretentious, inane or despotic and inciteful, as well as the insightful and delightful.
However, this is an issue we can all try to address. Next time we see a comment that says "hackers rule", we can avoid being trigger happy about upvoting it but rather evaluate it in terms of its merits. As a corollary, I make it a focus of mine to upvote good comments that I disagree with, a particularly hard thing to do.
This is one thing I absolutely can't stand in reddit and now I see that it is also very common here in HN.
People seem to up-vote users with "high score/past reputation/YC funded member" on virtually any comment they leave, even if their comment contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion or just re-enforces whatever the hive mind believes in.
Forget about trying to disagree with a popular HN poster without getting down-voted to oblivion.
This is really sad.
I think overall karma points should not be made public. Each comment should be judged by its own merit not by the "karma points" they have in the leader-board.
It's not as widespread as on reddit where there is widespread reputation-sniping going on, and many HN users tend to pick up on unfair downvotes and vote the comment up to counter it. It'll still deter some people, I guess.
I don't see a way to check, but I'd guess that my upvote to downvote ratio is about 3:1. I try to vote up anything that would want to see more of on the site, whether I agree or disagree with the content. I try to mercilessly vote down snappy one liners, purposeless profanity, and dumb jokes. If anything, I'd say I vote primarily on form --- I'll support just about any content if it's well written and well intentioned.
That's been a problem with HN for as long as it exists.