Hah, as a long-time lurker when I saw that title I thought it was interesting and made a mental note to come back when there were comments. It didn't even cross my mind to comment on it - I wonder what causes the different perspective of those who do.
Even as a kind of active commenter very rarely do I have anything worth saying about the post itself, usually I comment in response to other people's comments.
Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers.
First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me.
Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, via mechanisms whereby others who {agree, can find utility, can profit} are incentivized to act as amplifiers. The cost function to repeat a message drops precipitously every time it’s repeated (influences status quo). I’m not sure it’s particularly surprising that internet social forums behave by the same rules — and are even optimized to replicate them mechanistically (upvotes).
I mean... not be dismissive, I guess it does strike me as particularly neat that the internet provides a medium for these people to productively share insight and identify new niches where they can potentially add value to the rest of the world. Where would we on HN be without, say, patio11? :)
I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.
Anecdata, but I'm a typical lurker. If I don't have something to contribute to a discussion, I stay silent. I think that goes for a lot of people.
There's also the commitment angle - if you engage in a discussion, you're typically committed to follow up on the responses you get. That can be more of a time/attention commitment than people are interested in, and with the growing toxicity of online discourse a lot of people don't want to put themselves out there to begin with.
There's also your attention surface. I typically read threads/posts from a variety of communities, but might prefer to reply only on some, and lurk on the others. I'm sure this is true for a lot of people, from anecdotes I've heard.
Yep. If it's about programming, game design, board games, video games, writing, I'll feel confident I have something to say and/or want to contribute. But I also read discussion about music composition, hiking, art, diy, history, philosophy, etc, and I would almost never post in those subjects (at least not at this point in time), as those aren't my focus, just other subjects I'm curious about.
"Commitment" to a discussion is optional. It's perfectly reasonable to give your point of view, and come back a few days later to see if there were any interesting replies.
Depends on the forum. HN emphasises that, by not notifying users that they had replies. Reddit on the other hand colours your mailbox in red so you're aware of replies without actively seeking them.
I don't know which foster the best quality discussions, but I feel the HN way is a bit impersonal.
I have no idea. Perhaps they want to avoid discussions form derailing? Reddit routinely has long sub-threads, but they're hidden behind a link by default.
A trick I finally hit on for Reddit a couple of years ago was that when I start feeling a discussion does not feel fun or interesting anymore, I look away while I click on the inbox icon.
When I don't see the replies, they're easy to ignore.
At some point (I have no idea when), Reddit also added a "disable inbox replies" button to comments, so that you can prevent notifications on a comment by comment basis.
I've been lurking on Hacker News for (at least) two years before deciding to participate: I would visit the homepage daily, read some interesting news and comments, and finally leave the site.
It's pointless to comment if one cannot add new information, perspectives, arguments, or humors to the thread, as a result, one really needs to make an effort to engage in the discussion. In practice, it means you'll need a proper keyboard, and a fast Internet connection to search for references. At least, at there, or at Reddit, or even at 4chan, this principle applies. I mean, you can make pointless comments, but you'll lower the SNR of the entire community, or your comment will be ignored or filtered on 4chan, or downvoted (or not getting votes) on HN/Reddit/Slashdot.
There are other places where the barrier-of-entry is lower, like the comments section below the stories on "ordinary" news websites (not HN), etc, but make an comment is even more pointless.
I guess the best counterexample I can think of is Twitter. It's no more than 140 chars and highly personal, so making a knee-jerk comment is common, and you can use a mobile phone instead of a proper computer to do so.
Time is a big factor: usually I can only spend some 30 minutes per day for HN/reddit, barely enough to only have a look at a few of the interesting posts, let alone contributing. I feel like you need to be willing to commit a meaningful part of your time to internet communities to contribute frequently.
I think it's mostly a psychological barrier in most respects. There's also no necessity to comment - lurking, despite the quite awful name we've given the behaviour, is a perfectly normal thing to do. Plenty of people read books who don't write them, etc.
I'd also presume (and it is a presumption!) that people who are commenting on one platform will likely also to be commenting on another. As in, I would presume they would establish a conversation as the preferred method of internet discourse they digest, as opposed to a one way consumption of data.
This also gives me an opportunity to use one of my favourite Cronenberg quotes: "The monologue is his preferred method of discourse" - Videodrome
"""
The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations:
* The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."
* The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.
* No one read the post, for whatever reason.
* No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.
* No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.
— Bryan C. Warnock
"""
In this way, I think the voting system became popular, not only because it's usable a mechanism to select interesting information, but also gives an important feedback to encourage the poster, same for the "Like" button. However, they has their own problems.
That's not true -- I comment on HN but lurk everywhere else. The reason for this is, first, time commitment (I can really only be part of one online community at a time, although I do read other forums on occasion), and, second, I find discussions here more civil, comments more relevant, and emotions less charged than on other platforms.
In truth the polarizing of the Internet is causing a lot of us to be lurkers who may have things to say but do not want to engage in emotional content with strangers, because everything is interpreted so emotionally these days.
The barriers only seem low to those people who've already passed them.
But I remember teenage me, over 20 years ago, being very reserved about writing online because I considered my grammar too bad and I didn't want to embarrass myself.
And back then there wasn't even anything social media, where blunders like that could lead straight back to "real" me, the whole idea still made me anxious.
Can't even begin to imagine how teenagers these days must feel with social media being literally everywhere and recording pretty much everything they write for the foreseeable future.
At least nowadays they have access to some pretty good grammar correction tools ;)
I know of some friends who are lurking on HN, but feel like the have nothing valuable to contribute to most discussions. So they just read the comments without feeling comfortable enough to interact with them.
Maybe out of fear of saying something wrong and getting debated on it - though it's quite civilized here. They might have seen too much of other websites where things turn less civil :)
I find it's mostly that posting a comment is very different from entering into discussion. There is a surprising amount of friction attached to entering into a discussion on the web, compared to just lobbing a comment onto a page (like I'm doing right now). Throw in point scoring to comments, and you've created a system that just doesn't appeal to the majority of people.
You get publicly scored on your contributions to the discussion. Most people are turned off by the idea of discussions being adversarial, point scoring, confrontational.
And in that respect, I consider the barriers to comment contribution to be very high indeed.
Bit of a different perspective : I mostly read HN on my phone, and I find it hard and time consuming to write non-trivial, thoughtful comments on a phone. It takes several times longer than it would with a proper keyboard. So I don't bother posting and mostly just lurk.
It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit.
That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies").
Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and templating new users is pretty hostile). And until very recently the noticeboard had two different sections, a holding pen and the main board. (They've got rid of the holding pen).
Username creation is less hostile right now that it was a few years ago, but that can change at any moment if someone choses to trawl the new username lists.
1. Must represent a single person, not a company, organization, website, band, partnership, or other group of people
2. Must not be deceptive or impersonate someone else
3. Must not be unreasonably long
4. Must not be inflammatory or imply that you intend to troll
If you create an account that doesn't meet this policy, an administrator will prevent you from editing until you choose a new username, and you can continue afterward.
You're absolutely right in that Wikipedia needs to improve its user experience to ensure that new editors know what the rules are before they accidentally violate them.
On their own these might all be simple and reasonable, where the problems start is when entrenched people try to "weaponize" these rules for the purpose of waging drama wars to keep any newcomers from becoming relevant in the community, at that point it becomes an issue of personal interpretation which usually isn't all that objective.
So simple it's presented on a page with dozens of subsections. It should present a simple version like your 5 points and link to the longer version for the few outlier cases or rejections.
It's repeated for every single policy page - they are enormously long and complex for every single topic. There is nothing remotely like a friendly beginners guide to helping - be that fixing some poor language, or correcting a mistake. You have to plough through the meta Wikipedia policy encyclopedia and figure out what's relevant or not the hard way.
On my experience many moons ago, Wikipedia was one of the most hostile sites I've ever encountered for new users. I dread to think how a subject expert who isn't also an IT expert finds it.
Reading through that page, it feels like a case of the core rules being really simple, but a lot of ink being spent being very particular about defining the edge.
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Seems fine to have the sussinct description at the top followed by details on the same page. If there really are lots of people that have issues picking a username (these policies seem petty typical so I’d expect most users to be fine) then a link from the create account page would be a good idea.
I don't seem to have been clear enough: it's not just the policy, but the ways in which the policy is applied.
For a few years the new username lists were trawled by vandal patrols and there was a lot of biting of newbies -- so much that "don't bite the newbies" had to be added to the policy pages.
For example: the section on "confusing usernames". This was added to avoid people suggesting they were a bot account if they weren't a bot account, or were an admin if they weren't an admin, or to prevent impersonation.
So, if you register as "kjwenflkjclnaksdnalmsd" that's confusing, but it's not against the policy. Except a lot of people reporting usernames hadn't bothered to read the policy, and so they were just reporting names like that as confusing. For sometime people using their real names in a non-latin script were being blocked because their name was "confusing". This again led to changes in policy.
What WP really needs to do (and what they've actually done) is have a bot that checks usernames and places them on a list with descriptions of the problems, and warnings about why it might not be a problem. (There are differences between "WhitePower88" and "MartyJenkins88") -- and then have people checking the list.
> an administrator will prevent you from editing until you choose a new username, and you can continue afterward.
No, an admin may instantly block you permanently, or may temporarily block you until you change your name, or may temporarily block you while they discuss it with you, or may not block you but apply one of two templates, or add your name to a username for discussion board where you'll have to try to justify your name.
EDIT: Reads some stuff about his company. He knows that information is factually incorrect. It's not harmful to his company, but it is misleading to people reading Wikipedia. He signs up for an account.
If he signs up a "xargleblarg" he's fine, he can edit the article.
If he choses to be open and honest and he signs up as "Bob from BobCo" he faces instant blocks across multiple policies (COI, Spam, spam username), even if those policies are being incorrectly applied.
> Reads some stuff about his company. He knows that information is factually incorrect. It's not harmful to his company, but it is misleading to people reading Wikipedia. He signs up for an account.
The only interactions I had with Wikipedia are reading articles. Even I know it is frowned upon to edit your own articles.
Biting newbies is one of the main problems for Wikipedia, and the hostile way the username policy is applied is one example of biting newbies.
And it's really inconsistant: depending who's looking at the name the new user may get instantly blocked permanently; may have to go through RFC/usernames, may have to discuss with admins on usernames for admin attention or on ANI, may have to discuss with admins on their userpage, may have to discuss with non-admins on their userpage.
> It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit.
Anyone can edit it, but only those with enough obsessession can meaningfully make a change (beyond fixing typos and such) that will persist. That was my impression anyway, after spending a bit of time trying to contribute and it seems to be very much inline with the message in the OP.
You know why the political process is so opaque? Fundamentally, it's because the people who are there making stuff happen had the time and inclination to be there. They stuffed envelopes, went to events and ate lots of rubber chicken, and did stupid nonsense to be a councilman or chief of staff or whatever.
The same thing happens in these scenarios, but with different types of "toil" to gain acceptance.
>The cost function to repeat a message drops precipitously every time it’s repeated (influences status quo).
I'm not trying to be a contrarian on this point but some social forums (e.g.: reddit, where this was linked from) end-up being sgemented into their own forms of echo-chambers, where any dissenting outliers - however valid - are voted into oblivion, simply because it doesn't agree with "muh viewpoint".
IMHO, that reinforces status quo, rather than influences it. I realise that this mightn't be the case with all or even the majority of social forums but it's the loudest that gets the most attention and since we're discussing something directly linked from redditstan, I figured it worth mentioning (since the aspect of influencing the status quo angle crumbles in this specific regard).
To give an example: Create an account on reddit and comment a valid point in the donald, even if it's down-voted into oblivion, go and then comment on something in politics or worldpolitics or the like. Wait for someone to go look at your post history and see that you commented in the donald and watch the tide turn against you, simply because of your participation - even if that comment is directly contradictory the original post in the donald. Just by association, that influence of the status quo is immediately eroded way because it's deemed "invalid" because, again, "muh viewpoint".
Any possibility of influence is lost, at that point. Repeat it day and night, it won't eventually influence the status quo until enough people repeat it and I think that's, probably, more along the lines of what you meant: It's not the number of times it's repeated, it's the volume of that repition's saturation into the larger group that's intrinsically more important. A single person repeating a message over 30 years has far less weight than people (en masse) repeating the same message. Granted, it - sometimes -takes a single person to incite the spread of that message, simply repeating it ad infinum won't reach the end-goal of influencing the status quo.
You could just make separate accounts for separate sub-reddits. A single first post can be influential, see mimblewimble, bitcoin, linux, special theory of relativity...
> A single first post can be influential, see mimblewimble, bitcoin, linux, special theory of relativity...
Again, I'm not trying to be contrarian because you bring up valid points - save for Theories of Relativity because they were review before being published by someone.
A good example, which was quashed from its inception, was the Copernican Theory of Heliocentrism: Though, very much valid, it was oppressively pushed from gaining ground by "muh religious viewpoint[s]". Even when substantiated by Galileo, this wasn't influential enough to change the status quo - with Galileo living the remainder of his in house arrest.
To lazily quote Nietzsche, in this regard: "All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
Given your point about the donald, you'll despair at https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/117289/86725. Check out the history and the comments-moved-to-chat. Answerer suggests creating lots of social media accounts as a way to drive bad search results about you off the first page of Google, and lists a bunch of possible sites to sign up to, including Gab. The mention of Gab gets censored by a moderator, but not before various Academia Stack Exchange members have chimed in to opine that:
1. Mentioning Gab as a possible site to sign up for is "pretty blatantly out of line" and a violation of the Stack Exchange Code of Conduct, and
2. If they discovered that a job candidate had a Gab account, they would throw out the application based upon that fact alone.
So it's not just internet communities; we've got academics openly bragging that even engaging with a community they politically disapprove of, regardless of your individual views, will lead to them barring you from employment in academia.
I'd encourage anyone convinced by this comment to do some research into the antisemitic and white supremacist comments which representatives of Gab have openly, publicly made.
While I agree with you, the complaint of the particular critic you're replying to isn't even about the contents of the site. It's that some of Gab's staff have, individually, said bigoted things.
Even assuming that's true (and I don't know or care if it is), it's unclear to me why it should reflect on the community. If tomorrow somebody were to leak a tape of Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky ranting about their hatred of some race, it wouldn't somehow reflect poorly on the character of anyone with a Hacker News or Stack Overflow account.
Not employees, representatives. These are things which employees of Gab have said in their official capacity representing the company (for instance, on Gab official social media accounts).
Okay. Still doesn't change anything. Stack Overflow has officially made plenty of official announcements on political issues that I oppose, despite being an active user.
So what? That doesn't justify reactions like rejecting an applicant based on having an account alone.
First and foremost political opinions have no place in most professional settings and no influence on someones work. If I recall correctly it's even illegal to judge someone based on their political affiliations in many countries.
Further, someone could have an account there to comment against the radical opinions or because he has friends with those opinions, which brought him to the network. And surely some more reasons why someone might have an account without sharing the extremist views of the outliers there.
Repeating messages to an audience that agrees with them are practically non actions. Influence occurs when the difference between saying something and not results in different actions. As such most social media content is effectively meaningless.
New ideas in this context are not limited to what disagrees with the overall consensus. Simiple refinements make real changes over time.
The difference between outlier actors and outlier Wikipedia editors are that outlier actors are better than everyone else at acting, but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. It used to be that the way in which you were an outlier had to be somewhat related to being good at the task you were competing for the honor of completing, but on social networks the only qualification is that you spend all day doing it.
I don't think there is as much of a difference as you're saying.
I agree most actors we see on TV and movies are outliers (even within the total population of actors). I don't agree they are consequently better than most other people at acting. I think they're marginally better, somewhat practiced, but really "into it" as a career.
Likewise, I think you're underestimating how "good" someone is at a thing if they do it all day. It is difficult to not become good at an activity - for some subset of what that activity entails - if you do it all day long. I think most actors are good at some subset of acting and most Wikipedia editors are good at some subset of editing.
If you dribble a basketball all day long for five years you'll become remarkable at the narrow skill of dribbling unless you deliberately try not to. You probably won't get significantly better at the broader activity of basketball, but dribbling will become like walking for you. In the same way, I don't think there is a large difference in the way actors and Wikipedia editors become good at their activities. They just spend a lot of time in a particular niche.
regarding actors, I actually disagree. Sometimes I will watch a movie made with second rate actors and they tend to be so much worse than first rate actors at acting, that often those movies are unwatchable.
Precisely. Those actors are still outliers, just as almost all reddit commenters are outliers. Outliers aren't defined by being good at their activity, they're defined by doing it sufficiently more than the rest of the population. That's why I said there isn't much of a difference between Wikipedia editors and actors as concerns their relative skill over the total population.
>regarding actors, I actually disagree. Sometimes I will watch a movie made with second rate actors and they tend to be so much worse than first rate actors at acting, that often those movies are unwatchable.
Part of this is also just the options that first-rate actors open up for you as a writer or director that less capable ones cannot. If you think of the performer's talent as kind of a box that you can fit your narrative and emotional depth in, you just wouldn't try to ship something unless you have a box big enough to hold it.
If you have someone like Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellan on hand you can give them long, baroque speeches and they will nail it. With a less capable actor you would be forced to keep it simpler because most of that stuff might sound corny as hell in less capable hands.
1. Luck does indeed play at big role in getting a break, the right roles, the right director, etc. A lot of people who could have become big stars don't. People know this and leap from there to the whole thing being pretty random.
2. It's often not obvious what makes a great actor that much greater than someone who is not quite so great. Film probably accentuates the differences. But even with mid- to top-level professional theater, the whole cast is probably pretty solid, but the stars really shine in hard to put your finger on it ways. In more "normal" professional roles, it's usually a lot easier to peg why someone is just better than someone else.
I found myself instantly agreeing with your sentiment and then failing to explain it to myself.
I think the problem is that being good at something is not related to that "good" as an outcome and appreciated by others as such.
Let me try to explain with a bit of an overstatement: Most TV is crap, but year after year they keep making it. People making it cannot be good at it? Well actually they are. They found the sweet-spot by maximizing the profit in terms of eyeball captured they will make from the least amount of effort. That is success.
Now-a-day successful politicians are far better at making people vote for them than actually realizing the platform they are elected on. They are literally good at the game of democracy, but don't know what to do with the spoils. The difference between those two seems to be "fake-news".
Lets assume that the prolific reviewer on Amazon is completely legit. He is obviously good in the sense of efficient at reading and writing reviews. That we do not see the "good" in an outcome of having so many reviews written by the same person does not make his activity less good as an activity.
Typically, it is considered a bad thing when success comes by exploiting the system instead of achieving the goals of the system. Politicians who are experts at nothing but gathering votes are a failure of the system when they do occur, because the government has a purpose. Another example would be corporate executives that don't know anything about running a business, but are experts are accumulating status. The "degenerate best reviewer" would be a bot that posts the letter "a" at absolute maximum speed.
>but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive.
Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.
This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.
It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.
80% of US workers are in the service sector, 12.6% in manufacturing, 1.5% in agriculture. 60% spend the entire workday sitting.
The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.
I got bored one day and decided to spend an evening going through a full discourse with somebody who was using the gamified rhetoric, essentially making a counter point and dropping a link with a "study" that had a title and synopsis which sounded like it backed up his claim.
I sat down and read every...single...link.
What I discovered was that not only had he clearly not read anything he'd posted but that what is allowed to pass for a publishable study is borderline laughable.
After going through it and then realizing that several "prominent voices" on my assorted feeds use the exact same approach, it became apparent that these folks only goal was to keep a conversation thread going in order to amplify the headline reach of a post. Slightly more sophisticated spamming essentially. The only solution was to realize what was happening and refuse to engage.
Now the only conversations I'll have about topics online are a) off of Facebook and b) logical conversations that can be had without link bombing.
The more conversations I've been involved in, the more I've realized that if it seems like what's being said doesn't add up...there's usually a reason.
You have to be obsessive but you also have to produce content that is useful to the community at some level, otherwise other superhumanly obsessive people will reject your edits and IP ban you.
On reddit you can submit posts all day but you only see the light if others upvote you.
In short I think you have to be both obsessive and skilled, which is something like the real world.
> First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common
Sure, but we should consider which outliers most internet discussions end up encouraging. They're going to encourage people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions. It's going to encourage people who spend less time writing their comments, because if you're spending 15-45 minutes making sure your comment is of high enough quality you're simply not going to be able to make many comments. If you spend a few seconds/a few minutes writing one, you can make a lot. It's going to encourage comments when people are outside of their own areas of expertise or when they don't have much to say (because you're not going to be seeing all the people who refrained from commenting).
You mentioned voting, but the same issue applies. Someone who has fewer time obligations is going to end up upvoting/downvoting a lot more comments than someone with an very active offline life. Someone who votes before reading an entire comment is going to be able to make a lot more votes than someone who does. Someone who upvotes/downvotes everything because of how they feel is going to be giving out more votes than someone who wants to reserve those for truly bad/truly good comments. Someone who checks whether or not a comment is true is going to have less time to vote than someone who doesn't. Someone who has time to refresh a page every 10 minutes throughout the day is going to be voting earlier, affecting what comments/posts even get seen by less active user (people with other things to do miss a post because really active users downvoted it off the front page within 30 minutes).
A lot of people seem to be unaware that this is an issue, and think the internet is representative of society at large. But commenting and voting as much as you want encourages certain kinds of content from certain kinds of people (a small subsection of people[1]), and discourages content from others.
> people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions
seems like a bit of a category error. There are any number of stable online groups that should be considered under the rubric of "community/social" activities. People participating in them know and expect things of each other, just as they do in a face-to-face group.
While I find the research interesting, I have to say that this is not what I read on the internet. Wikipedia has no use for the kind of work I do, and most books I am recommended by other people, so I don't need to sit and read a review. As for Reddit, I do use it but again, only in very niche forums where the discussion is never one-sided or made to look informative.
The same goes for my news sources and other content. Sure, I enjoy the occasional mainstream YouTube video, but if I'm looking up something technical -- I prefer to read articles and blog posts from actual people with firsthand experience.
The thing is that among "actual people with firsthand experience" the ones who blog are probably outliers as well, so the original principle still holds.
Am here for over 2 years now, rarely upvote something, haven't submitted anything and this is just my 2nd comment... Pretty sure this rule holds for close to all kind of forums.
Honestly, if you want to see what news editors see in the form of letters to the editor, go to your closest small(ish) (100k or less) town local newspaper or tv station's website and look through the comments on stories. They're frighteningly disjointed, insane, and disconnected from reality.
These are real, actual people who submit comments. And those people are anonymous and free to post whatever lies they care to come up with on forums such as this one.
I don't know if you're willing to make a 3rd comment, but I'm trying to understand the lurker mindset from the perspective of someone who posts quite actively.
Is is just that you don't care enough to reply, feel like your opinions are unpopular, don't feel like you have anything to say, or something else?
Of course not, there's nothing wrong with not posting. My question was just out of curiosity for why people never feel "compelled" (not a great word here) to post while actively browsing quite a bit.
I'm kind of a lurker as well. I read HN comments to gain a broader perspective on issues. Sharing my own thoughts on the matter doesn't really help with that.
Of course, sometimes when reading comments I get the feeling that you people are all entirely, inexcusably wrong, and I feel an urge to set the record straight. Normally on HN, it doesn't take long for someone to step up and explain exactly what I was thinking with an eloquence I couldn't have matched. And the world is right again. :-)
I check the site maybe once every couple of days, and I don't comment or reply because it usually seems like the post is "old" by then and the discussion has died down.
Your comment now is marked "5 minutes ago" and seems game for a reply, but later today when it's "5 hours ago" or longer, I'd feel like it has expired and any reply would be lost and never seen.
I follow a discussion I'm in for at least a day. HN commenting is asynchronous - it's not a chat conversation. Work hours, time zones and other "hazards" of modern Internet life all intervene...
Hello fellow hackers,
This is my first comment since I started reading HN around 4y ago. This comment thread mostly summarizes why I'm a lurker: most of the time when I read an article someone already made a point that I would like to make. Most of the time it would be superfluous ( objectively speaking this comment can be treated as such...). To make it slightly worthwhile let me share why I keep on consuming HN and lurking here: What I really like about HN in comparison to reddit is that HN is way less negative/aggressive. Many years ago I once tried there to discuss something - wanted to share my joy about some feature in some library on proggit. Instead of arguments I've received bunch of profanities and name calling. That effectively 'cured' me from participating in comments there. I really really enjoy that such negativity is missing here. That trait plus curated links makes my time spent here much better spent in comparison to alternatives. Thank you guys!
Similarly, I would like to know your mindset like what incentives or motivations do you see? Do you also feel that if you don't post a comment, the discussion won't go in that direction?
As a lurker for me most of the times I feel like I am on window shopping of ideas. Not looking anything in particular.
A fair percentage of my comments are downvoted, so it's not about opinion validation. I'm opinionated on a number of topics, and voice those opinions.
Sometimes I have a question to pose, or I disagree with the premise of the submission (sometimes I'm one of the few people to do so).
I'm a singular, non-influential person. I don't believe I'm exactly changing hearts and minds writing HN comments. I do like the discourse I get, though.
I realise the irony of claiming I only lurk by writing this, but I'm fighting my habits to help illuminate those interested.
For me personally, I just don't care and don't get any reward in the idea of conversing with some random person on the internet.
The chances are, I'll never see you again on here or irl, remember your online name (I remember faces, not names), or you will have any real impact in my day to day life. This is how I feel about every commenter online. I don't talk to random people on the street, so why would I talk to random people on the internet? To me, there is little difference.
I value face to face communication much higher than text chat. I really enjoy reading peoples faces and expressions when chatting, to the point where I find talking to others online is the equivalent of having a conversation where everyone has a paper bag on their head when.
If I think someone is wrong on the internet, I just don't care. I read their comment, think to myself "They are wrong/an idiot" and get on with my day. I see no value in correcting a stranger on the internet.
I much rather have conversations irl, and I do, so I have no time/energy left for an online conversation. I'd much rather spend my time with my girlfriend, programming or anything else.
Everything feels so permanent online. I know I'm going to regret things I've said in this post in the future, my mind will change, maybe I won't lurk anymore after writing this!? The permanent nature of online communication goes the against how I should be as person, my opinions shifting and changing as I experience more of life, not held back by some random thing I said on a forum 5 years ago.
When I post, I open myself up to being attacked by people online. I can avoid this simply by never saying anything online.
To illustrate a point, I finally got round to creating an account on stackoverflow about half a year ago, and I still have only one point. I just wanted to vote on questions, but I can only do that if I have at least 15 points on my account, and that requires writing comments/questions (I think). For me, that means contriving 15 comments that succeed at playing some social game, that I simply don't have the time or energy for, so I've given up on ever voting on stackoverflow.
The privacy issue is real. I am not a lurker here, but every time I comment anywhere online a voice in my head says “it is not rational to do this. This mostly works against your self-interest.” However, I am not someone who is primarily driven by self-interest.
First comment here, been reading HN for a few years now (proper actively - I spend way too much of my day here). I also tend to mostly read comments without even opening the article they're commenting on first. I don't need to comment on anything on the web simply because I already know my own thoughts and if I want to discuss something that badly I can always do so IRL. There's also always someone with a similar opinion posting so I could follow that conversation if I wish. I fully understand that if everyone was like me it wouldn't work but the thing is they're not. There's enough people in the comments here and on the web as a whole commenting - and it's enough for me to read those and then discuss IRL if I have the need. I like reading what other people say so much that if I start participating I'll waste even more time on here.
I've been reading almost daily since probably the beginning. I comment very rarely. Most news in general is garbage, but I do enjoy tech + startup news and enjoy reading comments here before clicking on to the source. It's fast, simple and I use http://hckrnews.com as my portal into ycombinator.com.
I almost left during the year of the US primaries as the news was majority political and simply more garbage, so I'm glad that got cleaned up.
Often I don't have anything "more" to say on top of what has been said, so I wont add noise. That may be a common thread with lurkers. When I do have a unique perspective and I feel adds value and not noise I may comment, keyword is "may".
I couldn't care less about karma, popularity, social scores or the like (just more garbage). As long as this site and it's users continue to provide value to me by filtering and aggregating tech news I will continue to use it.
Just another lurker mooching off of non lurkers. Selfish yes, but it works.
Sometimes I won't add a comment because of the chilling effect of a future employer or online mob finding it and reading something into my words. It's not worth being contrarian on the internet, or there's no space for devils advocate anymore. Most of the time I will comment and it's fine though.
Sometimes, unrelated, I will write a comment and then when my thoughts are formulated, I delete it because I have benefited from the conversation and there wouldn't be any additional benefit or use from me posting it.
No reason to engage. I think "discussing" a topic with another "online persona" is almost always a waste of time. I also find most comments to be speculative, argumentative, uninformed opinions, trolling, jokes or trash. It is great finding a decent comment chain, but usually I'm late to the show(like now)!
When I was young I enjoyed commenting and voicing my opinion, after 25 years online, I no longer derive satisfaction from it.
I've been reading HN semi-regularly for over half a decade, but only created an account ~1.5 years ago and my first comment was last month. This is my second comment as well, and probably my 10th across all social media in the last year.
The topics on HN generally align with my interests and the quality of discourse here is fairly high, but I'm rarely willing to make the additional mental effort of participating. I prefer to research any points I make and back them up with data, and it's not worth my time to do so only to end up arguing with trolls or people who refuse to reconsider their position when presented with new information.
I've made comments in the internet only when I was a 16 years old. In a tiny forum community, where everyone known each other. Some weird shitty things happened because of my post on this forum. After this event became lurker, and post extremely rarely, only anonymously on sites like 4chan to ensure my safety from any crazy guy from the internet.
People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those users that could not reasonably contribute, the percentage of contributors is much higher.
There are other factors at play at Wikipedia too. In my native language, Danish, Wikipedia is all but dead. Years ago, I tried contributing within my own field. I researched and spent hours adding relevant information to different topics, only to find out a few days after that all my contributions had been deleted by the administrators.
It's just one example, but it is true for culture, history and many other areas. If you want to know anything on Danish matters, the English Wikipedia is usually a much better option than the Danish.
I agree. While I don’t know how big the problem is, my limited experience is that notability is applied unevenly, and tends to be levelled against articles that particular editors find boring/annoying, mostly as an excuse to remove them.
Deleting articles doesn't prevent anyone from participating, since anyone can write/edit articles on any notable subject. The deletion process protects Wikipedia from search engine marketers who try to promote their clients with biased low-quality content. They can go to Quora for that.
There are a number of people in this thread explaining how the policy prevented them from participating, and usually caused them to quit participating entirely.
My comment was unclear. Yes, people who are solely interested in writing about one topic are prevented from participating if that topic doesn't meet the notability criteria.
When I said that it "doesn't prevent anyone from participating", I was only considering the editors who are interested in writing about a wider variety of topics.
For better or worse, Wikipedia frowns on editors who are only interested in editing articles on one topic. There's a page for that:
This is because these editors usually have a conflict of interest, and must make an extra effort to keep their writing free of bias.
Policies aimed at improving the quality of articles also tend to reduce participation. It's a trade-off, and I don't know that the optimal balance would be.
At one point I was playing Serious Sam, an FPS. I finished the game and let the credits roll by, noticing a quirky name "Derek Smart". I searched for it on Wikipedia and arrived at the eponymous article, describing the life and creative work of a rash and stubborn but obviously ambitious and talented video game designer.
A bit later on, there was Croteam, the maker of Serious Sam, AMA on Reddit so I asked them if the reference to Derek Smart was an inside joke or what. The reply was along the lines of "he's a dear friend of ours and our inspiration". I went back to the Derek Smart Wikipedia article, pointed out the screenshot of the credits with Derek's name, the AMA reply and asked a very innocuous question: "Can we put this in the article?"
I got a reply that what I did is termed "original research" and the only acceptable way to include the reference would be if some noteworthy third party, such as Washington Times, mentions and explains the connection, meaning all the work I did up to that point was in vain. That's when I completely gave up on editing Wikipedia as it seemed to me, and still does, absolutely Sisyphean. Editors of that article then went on to argue how to phrase the incident where Derek Smart assaulted a vending machine to best fit the article.
The implication of "no original research" and "noteworthy sources of information" means a large mass of regional events and persons can't be included in the English Wikipedia unless they clear this arbitrary bar of noteworthiness that can still be gamed with ease: a) be an employee of a mainstream news source, b) publish a biased article on any given topic, c) create an anonymous Wikipedia account, d) create an article on the topic or edit an exiting one to embed the information you published and e) marvel as Wikipedia editors revert the changes under the guise of preventing vandalism.
Automated edit-correction tools are another grave issue for Wikipedia, as they instantly revert an article to its sanctioned version set by a reputable Wikipedia editor. How is Wikipedia "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" again?
Wikipedia does a lot to prevent new users participating. The mediawiki software is very confusing and has a lot of different functionality crammed in to the same page edit tool that doesn't even make sense.
I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission was rejected because my sources were not academic enough so I removed those sources and added the only official source in existence which is a zip file containing code examples and example files. My second edit was rejected for not sourcing all of my info.
Literally the only info available is the zip and forum posts. I mainly used the forum posts while learning and verified it against the data I was seeing in the file. How am I meant to share this info for others to benefit from? If I make it in to a blog post it's not an acceptable source but if I post it as a PDF and pretend its some wanky research paper then it probably would get accepted.
> I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it.
One of the core principles of Wikipedia is "No original research". Your proposed article sounds like it was just that. The Wikipedia editors would rather have you share that research in a blog post or similar.
Well all the info I have about it comes from a single source published by the developers of the format but apparently just one reference isn't good enough.
That source (published by the developers) is a primary source. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tetriary sources that are based on secondary sources and not directly on primary sources.
In other words, unless there are reliable secondary sources to base the article on, it is considered original research and is not a good fit for Wikipedia.
I guess part of the reason that new contributors feel bad is confusion about the goals and nature of Wikipedia itself.
It's not just goals and nature. It's rules that can be pretty silly and unhelpful when they're taken to extremes rather than applied sensibly. In this case you have documentation that can't be referenced in a Wikipedia article. Yet, if someone wrote a blog post that liberally quoted that documentation, that would probably be an acceptable source.
The basic ideas of not doing original research or relying on primary sources are fine. But writing just about any article requires synthesizing multiple sources to some degree. Rules are one thing. Saying that the documentation is not a suitable source for information about a file format is something else.
Wikipedia does consider the documentation suitable for supporting information in the article, but not suitable for establishing the topic's notability.
The article needs independent sources (as in, secondary sources that are financially and editorially independent of the company who develops the .mix file type) to show that the topic warrants an article.
If an article has enough sources cited to show notability, primary sources like documentation pages can be used. If notability is not shown, then the topic doesn't meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria and the content of the article is moot.
Without this requirement, any company would be able to publish promotional articles on all of its products, and exclusively use its own web pages as citations. Wikipedia's notability guidelines are in place to prevent spam and to ensure that topics only get articles if they can be written about in a neutral way.
The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia. The notability guidelines are there to prevent people from writing about things that can't be verified by reliable sources, and it's a mechanism to help ensure that articles are accurate.
It is a very notable file format used by many devices and lots of software can read it. The only reason its hard to reference is because the company that develops it basically just publishes a C file with how to use it and everyone uses that to write their own implementations.
Whether something is notable or not is subjective. Since many editors collaborate on Wikipedia, there's a common standard that editors use to judge whether a topic is notable.
The test is called the "general notability guideline". In short, any topic needs to have at least 2 citations to different sources that meet all of the following requirements:
1. The source provides significant coverage (at least 1-2 sizable paragraphs) of the topic
2. The source is reliable
3. The source is a secondary source that is editorially and financially independent of the subject (and of the other source)
So if the official documentation isn't enough and info on random websites isn't enough than what possible source can be used? Do we have to find a group of academics to look at the file and write a PDF saying "yep the official docs are indeed correct"?
You can absolutely cite the official documentation, and it's considered a reliable source for your article.
However, it isn't considered an independent source, since it was written by a company with a vested interest in the topic.
To prove that the file type is notable, you'll need at least different 2 sources that meet all 3 requirements: they must provide significant coverage of the topic, be reliable, and be independent of the topic.
You don't have to use these sources to write all of the content in your article, but they do have to be cited as references to pass the notability test.
The three most common kinds of reliable sources are:
- Articles or web pages from a reputable news organization, magazine, or web publisher (with an editorial team)
- Books from a reputable publishing company
- Publications from a peer-reviewed academic journal
Offline and non-English sources are accepted.
If you can't find at least 2 sources that meet these requirements, then the topic doesn't pass the notability test and isn't suitable for Wikipedia. In this case, you're probably better off sharing your article somewhere else, such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or your personal blog.
Provided those two different newspapers wrote on her life in detail, not just a mention, yes. See the following section of the notability guidelines:
"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
Interesting... and along the same lines as the parent comment, if two independent blogs had written about the file format in detail, I wonder if that’s enough.
Most tech blogs have just one author, and their posts don't go through a high-quality editorial process. Wikipedia calls these blogs "self-published sources", and they usually aren't considered reliable sources.
I think the notability guidelines are wrong headed.
There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to whether something is deemed to be 'notable'.
Worse, you put off people like the grandparent who actually attempt to contribute.
We all want accurate and reliable sources, but why not work with people, rather than just deleting?
Or why not a 2 stage process. Have a staging area for pages that aren't good enough. Then promoted to wikipedia proper when good enough?
What happens in X years time, when that file format is 'notable'? You've lost the person most inclined to write the document, and lost historical context from a living document.
The BBC had a habit in its early days of reusing 'old' film. What could have been a treasure trove is now lost. I cant help feeling wikipedia is being similarly short sighted.
> The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia.
Grandparent said it was rejected because of the citations, not because of any supposed lack of notability. Are you implying that reviewers refuse articles for other reasons than the ones they actually give?
(Edit: from what I gather on this thread, the citations were both secondary and substantial, so the notability criterion was probably met.)
Lack of citations establishing notability means wikipedia generally assumes something isn't notable enough, and per GPs words no such sources exist. (I'm not saying this is necessary a great and problem-free system, but that's how it works as far as I understand)
Putting a blog post would already be a positive contribution. Then reference it a bit, for instance by answering relevant questions on stackoverflow and linking to it to give more comprehensive details.
Over time your page will naturally get referenced by Google and other search engines.
Too bad it's not accepted in Wikipedia, but as long as the information is easily findable and organized as an easy to read and comprehensive enough reference, your work will be useful to many.
File format is .fit its used in a lot of GPS devices specifically for cycling. Its not super hard to find info on but the info is scattered over random sources
I'd say that many times, that's true of Swedish topics too. I wonder how well that fits with eg Wikipedia in other languages where English may not be so fluent though, eg German?
The German Wikipedia is large and sees a lot of activity. Articles about topics relating mostly to Germany, Austria or Switzerland are usually better than the English ones. Other articles are often somewhat biased towards a readership from those country, which is actually helpful if you live there.
Lower English language fluency in the general population, compared to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, supports this of course. But also the fact that German remains a scholarly language to this day (in the humanities but also in some branches of engineering).
I went through an almost identical process with English Wikipedia many years ago. Added to a sorely incomplete entry with carefully written and sourced info, to find it gone a few days later. Tried a few tiny updates in case new users were restricted somehow (this was never made obvious), so simply corrected some obvious grammar and spelling mistakes. Nearly all of those were backed out too. At which point there's only one option, give up.
I've encountered torrent sites that make more effort to make newcomers feel welcome.
Never tried again, and won't, despite running across much that's inaccurate, plain wrong or has poor language over the years.
I have a story like this, but I did the work (that was backed out) over a decade ago. The domain was not especially political (something related to history of music notation). It sticks with you because when you are already an expert in an area, and spend days contributing high quality content with good references only to have it vaporized without comment/reason, it is deeply demoralizing and creates long standing resentment. I vaguely remember the subject matter, yet remember distinctly the feeling of having all that work purged. I’m sure Wikipedia politics have changed since then, but my desire to contribute has been pretty well quashed.
Yep. I made an attempt to get into it over a decade ago, and it didn't help that I was heavy in the Flash game/animation scene and felt that was the best way to contribute. I say it didn't help, because so few of those pass the ridiculously restrictive 'Notability Test' of Wikipedia.
The animation could have 50 million views and be known across the internet, but because no 'reputable news organization' wrote about it, i.e. no CNN or BBC article or whatever, they would routinely be brought up for deletion and quickly killed.
Which always seemed strange to me, that this new fangled technology that took advantage of the power of the Internet wouldn't find anything on the Internet itself worthy of gracing its virtual pages. Especially since, as Wikipedia itself states, "Wikipedia is not Paper", and doesn't have a physical limit to what it can talk about or include.
It always annoyed me that these things wouldn't get passed the notability filter, but the most obscure Star Trek episode would have a dedicated page with a full synopsis and details and Easter Eggs, despite the fact that there couldn't have been a news article about that specific episode anywhere out there and the author had to be drawing from the episode... I mean, primary source, itself in order to get that information, which is something that gets squashed elsewhere (No primary sources!)
The hypocrisy just got to me big time. And then when I'd fix spelling or grammar issues on other random pages and see every single one of those get reverted without comment, it was clear that doing anything on Wikipedia was just a big waste of my fucking time. While I still read it to get a really rough handle on topics sometimes, I will never 'contribute' to it again, including every time that giant "We Desperately Need Your Financial Support" message from Jimmy Wales comes up on the site once a year.
I'd love for there to be an alternative where the admins aren't such deletionist zealots, but alternatives just don't exist.
I should also state that I had such a negative experience trying to contribute to Wikipedia that it still riles me up thinking about it to this day. And there's not a whole lot out there that riles me up.
Generally speaking these days, whenever I see a non-minor / specialist article in need of correction, I tend to rely on the talk section to make points that maybe an editor can apply better.
That's what I did for Wikipedia's article on software synthesizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_synthesizer), which in 2014 was rather out of date, particularly on its "typical" examples and other elements.
The article does look a fair bit better now. It does seem to still carry a little awkwardness (eg statements like "a software instrument is akin to a soundfont" which is not really correct) and a few out-of-date moments (eg why mention Csound and Nyquist as music programming language examples but not mention more common examples these days such as Max/MSP or PureData?) and some other quibbles I have. But it is better. Maybe I'll have to make a few more talk points someday. :)
Personally, I do think Wikipedia for the casual contributor is unfortunately broken. But given the amount of trolls and agenda-oriented people out there, I actually can understand why there is a high barrier to entry. It's just a bit unfortunate because it also restricts the diversity of the contribution ecosystem. I'm not sure how to reconcile the two personally...
Wikipedia's notability rules are generally about ten/twenty years out of late, and seem to be designed on the assumption the internet doesn't exist. As you said, they often miss out notable works that aren't reviewed by what they class as 'mainstream' sources, and they also often end up failing to consider the amount of credibility someone may have in their own area of expertise.
For instance, in the gaming world, I often look at Serebii.net as a good example of where Wikipedia's credibility priorities are misplaced. To them, it being a fan site run pseudononymously makes it less credible/reputable than a publication like IGN or Vice or what not, but in the actual community/among those who know of the topic, it's actually the far more credible source. The owner has written in magazines, been quoted by popular media sources, used as a reference by those seen as more reputable, etc.
But Wikipedia doesn't think like this. To them, credibility equals being paid as part of a major publication, and it doesn't matter even if you're a distinguished professor writing on your blog or academic site otherwise. And this then hurts the niche topics you mention even more.
Subject-matter experts, such as distinguished professors, are considered reliable sources regardless of where their statements or writings are published. I'm not sure if it has always been this way, but it is currently written into Wikipedia's policy:
You're right about fan sites. It's harder for people outside of the fan community to evaluate whether a fan site is reliable, and that contributes to the skepticism you see.
That's because we don't have the (as the OP puts it, insane) temperament to fight some battle for days on end for something we really don't care that much about. It takes effort to dig up some random edit from years ago that wasn't important enough to fight about then and certainly isn't worth the stress to fight about now. It's a lot easier to just bitch about this obviously real problem instead of having to make the same kind of effort we didn't even do the first time to somehow justify and defend our anecdote.
> It takes effort to dig up some random edit from years ago
Yes, but a simple link to which article it was would be enough. What also might be useful is a user name and/or a rough estimate of what the time period was, but without even an article name, there is nothing anybody can do about fixing these things.
It was a lower tier event or personality of WW1 or WW2. Not a Churchill, Paton or D-Day, but something lesser without reaching insignificant. It was 10 or 15 years ago - in the days when it was still common for articles to be incomplete or missing. I couldn't estimate when that period of Wikipedia ended, but I'd guess at least 10 years+. I'd be amazed if someone hasn't managed to fill the gap since, as articles are generally much more complete. Current Wikipedia has other issues.
It was some hours I spent on a topic I knew well, and had a good selection of books on my own shelves to cite, triggered by finding an incomplete or missing article, or a glaring error. Nothing more. After the challenges contributing I lost interest and moved on. I was doing Wikipedia a favour and trying to contribute, they apparently weren't interested. I'm not going to fight for it, but as a result I'm not open for trying more, or ever again.
As for username, I have no idea whatsoever, but offhand I can only remember one of the several LJ usernames I had, some I used for months rather than just a few days. Mind I doubt I could accurately list all the topics I blogged about on LJ, either, but could cover the main interests easily. I'm not even sure a username was needed at all but it may well have been.
Same experience here. Grammar corrections should only be back out if they create true problems with regards to intent. And if that’s the reason, it ought to be made clear, through discussion, what the problem is.
Just post on your own repository on github instead. It’s the new wikipedia minus worrying about deletionists and notability. Just a matter of time until non-developers become comfortable with it.
That doesn't mean the communities aren't functional. The lurkers are still voting on the commenters. There's various internet communities who've tried different ways to keep that judgement mechanic high quality, and with varying degrees of success. HN is maybe one of the best.
The ability to create and to judge might well be separate. How many food critics are good chefs, and vice versa? Perhaps it's due to not having a horse in the race.
What's fascinating is that we have these people who contribute huge amount of content, like the review guy that's mentioned.
Some of these guys are even interactive. I've had programming questions answered by Jon Skeet, and it just boggles the mind how he can be so productive.
There's probably some specific life circumstances that have to come together for us to benefit from a guy like that.
I think that’s a key element to the success. It introduces an obvious upward bias in karma, but I don’t see that as a problem.
For one, it prevents creating new accounts to downvote someone that pisses you off. For me personally, it means I downvote only for “adds absolutely nothing and is somehow harmful to HN community”. I probably upvote : downvote at 20:1 or greater.
When deciding if a comment voting system is good or bad, I look heavily towards the outcome, and secondarily towards the mechanism. I think outcome on HN is second to none.
Fine. HN is the best among the contenders, but that's not something that one ought to hang one's hat on. Posts don't rise on their own merits here. If that is a goal, there is much room for improvement. There are a number of situational factors that influence whether any post will receive attention. These include, but are not limited to timing, competition, the new post reader archetype and his/her motivations to participate, etc.
I don't think that limiting downvotes to accounts with X karma is a significant contributor to the problem of getting attention to a new high-quality post on a fairly high-volume site.
- mandatory 60 second re-click to submit a comment, without edits
- mandatory 60 second re-click on votes after a rate threshold is exceeded
- multiple choice votes to express motivation, intention, feedback
- do not publish karma numbers
- publish "example threads" that show values being practiced, including dead links/comments examples
- randomly assign usernames every 12 months
- tags and tag feeds
But for many of the top creators mentioned in the article I strongly suspect that writing reviews, making comments or editing Wikipedia is a part of their identity. Something that gives their life meaning.
And to be fair, writing reviews or editing Wikipedia certainly is a meaningful thing to do.
These 1%'ers have a massive impact on the world. An impact they couldn't necessarily have if their motives were financial.
> what other motives do people have for the content they create online?
Often the best kind. They want to share a joke, or a piece of knowledge. I found this kind of material is of much better quality than paid one.
Of course, sometimes we don't know if the "payment motive" really was removed. Marketers and paid trolls do receive money for posting to on-line communities.
I feel like this is a _division of labour_ argument. Sure, most of the people consume content in one way or the other, but they also produce things (tangible or intangible) if they are employed.
The picture presented in this article is incomplete. There is a constant stream of people attempting to become supporters or contributors and going back to their respective brackets when thry fail to do so.
Some are discouraged entirely and some try again later.
As the original Reddit thread pointed out, a fully-automatic edit system is required to use a separate bot account. Edits like this, is called a semi-automatic edit, or "cleanup tasks", or "maintenance". It includes adding proper categories, fixing links and typos, correcting some deprecated Mediawiki syntax and templates to standard code, etc. Editors can use mulitple tools to do this job, with a mouse click and proper regular expressions, you can edit a dozen of pages.
Even on a social network such as Facebook, a minority creates content. By creating I mean taking their time to write something or post their own photos. Most just share links. For a website like reddit or any other kind of site relying on user content, you can see that as an opportunity. It's not that 97% are not posting. It's that your user base attracts 30 times more other users to consume the content and therefore giving you great traffic.
The world of contributing, moderation, the fury of non-casual individuals (various sponsored trolls, agitators, marketing professionals, legal overzealots), and how the ownership of platforms is centralised (most platforms are owned by US based companies, and/or media broadcasting hegemons) are dark and full of terrors. No wonder people stay the heck away to preserve their sanity.
I suppose a related question is if every single person were to comment, would that be beneficial in any way?
I personally think we'd get a lot of duplicate comments stating the same thing which would reduce the overall quality of the topic at hand. An example that proves this is Ebay's user reviews. You have a lot of people participating in reviews because it's a review system that works both ways, so it's in the both user's best interest to review and rate. But most reviews are duplicates.
YouTube's comment system, which has a younger audience mainly, is rife with spam, trolling and comments that add nothing to the discussion. Is this what we want everywhere? Are those people outliers too? Or people with more spare time than people who purely browse?
I wouldn't use the term "outliers" then to describe these people. I would simply call them "people with initiative"... And in some cases "people with initiative who also want to help".
>question is if every single person were to comment, would that be beneficial in any way?
you would end up crowded out with middle-of-the-road comments. Which is really interesting, because nobody would really enjoy that I think, yet it would be entirely representative of the viewer base.
There's no need to guess what it would look like―just go to /r/all posts on popular subreddits. 200 top-level comments, and people still add new ones with zero useful info and zero chance of being seen by more that a dozen others.
Reddit is an echo chamber. Almost nobody contributes to the conversation, but they sure are quick to exercise insecurity for very minor things. I deleted my account there last year and life has improved as a result.
I agree. It's my opinion its become toxic over the past few years. Generally speaking I prefer unmoderated discussion forums. I rather choose what to read instead of being "protected".
This is interesting because the least toxic places on Reddit are highly moderated (askscience, and askhistorians are the two biggest examples). Indeed, Hacker News is just essentially a highly moderated subreddit, which is its attraction.
HN it may have pretentious articles, the comments are the most substantial. Lately I've been lurking through HN Classics (1) (Many research papers and pdfs posted on HN that are old) and the comments are the best part of them.
You can see that distribution on most popular YouTube videos: 0.1% will comment, 1% will like or dislike. The 99% will only watch. And then imagine what percentage is actually creating the content in the first place.
Nice to see some numbers, but not in any ways surprising.
The phenomenon is not limited to the Internet. In any group of humans, you will always have a small subgroup of active members and a "silent majority". It doesn't matter whether you look at nation states, community churches or your local school's parent-teacher organisation. In general, the larger a group is, the smaller the percentage of active members will be.
Voluntary organisations often expend a lot of effort into getting their "inactives" more involved; some manage this better than others. But somehow, being a passive consumer is the default mode of most people in most circumstances. Human nature, I guess...
331 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadFirst, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me.
Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, via mechanisms whereby others who {agree, can find utility, can profit} are incentivized to act as amplifiers. The cost function to repeat a message drops precipitously every time it’s repeated (influences status quo). I’m not sure it’s particularly surprising that internet social forums behave by the same rules — and are even optimized to replicate them mechanistically (upvotes).
I mean... not be dismissive, I guess it does strike me as particularly neat that the internet provides a medium for these people to productively share insight and identify new niches where they can potentially add value to the rest of the world. Where would we on HN be without, say, patio11? :)
I don't know which foster the best quality discussions, but I feel the HN way is a bit impersonal.
When I don't see the replies, they're easy to ignore.
At some point (I have no idea when), Reddit also added a "disable inbox replies" button to comments, so that you can prevent notifications on a comment by comment basis.
It's pointless to comment if one cannot add new information, perspectives, arguments, or humors to the thread, as a result, one really needs to make an effort to engage in the discussion. In practice, it means you'll need a proper keyboard, and a fast Internet connection to search for references. At least, at there, or at Reddit, or even at 4chan, this principle applies. I mean, you can make pointless comments, but you'll lower the SNR of the entire community, or your comment will be ignored or filtered on 4chan, or downvoted (or not getting votes) on HN/Reddit/Slashdot.
There are other places where the barrier-of-entry is lower, like the comments section below the stories on "ordinary" news websites (not HN), etc, but make an comment is even more pointless.
I guess the best counterexample I can think of is Twitter. It's no more than 140 chars and highly personal, so making a knee-jerk comment is common, and you can use a mobile phone instead of a proper computer to do so.
I'd also presume (and it is a presumption!) that people who are commenting on one platform will likely also to be commenting on another. As in, I would presume they would establish a conversation as the preferred method of internet discourse they digest, as opposed to a one way consumption of data.
This also gives me an opportunity to use one of my favourite Cronenberg quotes: "The monologue is his preferred method of discourse" - Videodrome
This is especially true if the content itself gives authoritative or complete information about something, as Warnock's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma) described:
""" The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations:
* The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."
* The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.
* No one read the post, for whatever reason.
* No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.
* No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.
— Bryan C. Warnock """
In this way, I think the voting system became popular, not only because it's usable a mechanism to select interesting information, but also gives an important feedback to encourage the poster, same for the "Like" button. However, they has their own problems.
In truth the polarizing of the Internet is causing a lot of us to be lurkers who may have things to say but do not want to engage in emotional content with strangers, because everything is interpreted so emotionally these days.
Most people (who can) read. That's a lower effort (and most of the time sufficient) than writing.
But I remember teenage me, over 20 years ago, being very reserved about writing online because I considered my grammar too bad and I didn't want to embarrass myself.
And back then there wasn't even anything social media, where blunders like that could lead straight back to "real" me, the whole idea still made me anxious.
Can't even begin to imagine how teenagers these days must feel with social media being literally everywhere and recording pretty much everything they write for the foreseeable future.
At least nowadays they have access to some pretty good grammar correction tools ;)
Maybe out of fear of saying something wrong and getting debated on it - though it's quite civilized here. They might have seen too much of other websites where things turn less civil :)
You get publicly scored on your contributions to the discussion. Most people are turned off by the idea of discussions being adversarial, point scoring, confrontational.
And in that respect, I consider the barriers to comment contribution to be very high indeed.
* is it true?
* is it necessary?
* is it kind?
That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies").
Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and templating new users is pretty hostile). And until very recently the noticeboard had two different sections, a holding pen and the main board. (They've got rid of the holding pen).
Username creation is less hostile right now that it was a few years ago, but that can change at any moment if someone choses to trawl the new username lists.
1. Must represent a single person, not a company, organization, website, band, partnership, or other group of people
2. Must not be deceptive or impersonate someone else
3. Must not be unreasonably long
4. Must not be inflammatory or imply that you intend to troll
If you create an account that doesn't meet this policy, an administrator will prevent you from editing until you choose a new username, and you can continue afterward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy
You're absolutely right in that Wikipedia needs to improve its user experience to ensure that new editors know what the rules are before they accidentally violate them.
It's repeated for every single policy page - they are enormously long and complex for every single topic. There is nothing remotely like a friendly beginners guide to helping - be that fixing some poor language, or correcting a mistake. You have to plough through the meta Wikipedia policy encyclopedia and figure out what's relevant or not the hard way.
On my experience many moons ago, Wikipedia was one of the most hostile sites I've ever encountered for new users. I dread to think how a subject expert who isn't also an IT expert finds it.
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Seems fine to have the sussinct description at the top followed by details on the same page. If there really are lots of people that have issues picking a username (these policies seem petty typical so I’d expect most users to be fine) then a link from the create account page would be a good idea.
For a few years the new username lists were trawled by vandal patrols and there was a lot of biting of newbies -- so much that "don't bite the newbies" had to be added to the policy pages.
For example: the section on "confusing usernames". This was added to avoid people suggesting they were a bot account if they weren't a bot account, or were an admin if they weren't an admin, or to prevent impersonation.
So, if you register as "kjwenflkjclnaksdnalmsd" that's confusing, but it's not against the policy. Except a lot of people reporting usernames hadn't bothered to read the policy, and so they were just reporting names like that as confusing. For sometime people using their real names in a non-latin script were being blocked because their name was "confusing". This again led to changes in policy.
What WP really needs to do (and what they've actually done) is have a bot that checks usernames and places them on a list with descriptions of the problems, and warnings about why it might not be a problem. (There are differences between "WhitePower88" and "MartyJenkins88") -- and then have people checking the list.
No, an admin may instantly block you permanently, or may temporarily block you until you change your name, or may temporarily block you while they discuss it with you, or may not block you but apply one of two templates, or add your name to a username for discussion board where you'll have to try to justify your name.
EDIT: Reads some stuff about his company. He knows that information is factually incorrect. It's not harmful to his company, but it is misleading to people reading Wikipedia. He signs up for an account.
If he signs up a "xargleblarg" he's fine, he can edit the article.
If he choses to be open and honest and he signs up as "Bob from BobCo" he faces instant blocks across multiple policies (COI, Spam, spam username), even if those policies are being incorrectly applied.
The only interactions I had with Wikipedia are reading articles. Even I know it is frowned upon to edit your own articles.
And it's really inconsistant: depending who's looking at the name the new user may get instantly blocked permanently; may have to go through RFC/usernames, may have to discuss with admins on usernames for admin attention or on ANI, may have to discuss with admins on their userpage, may have to discuss with non-admins on their userpage.
Anyone can edit it, but only those with enough obsessession can meaningfully make a change (beyond fixing typos and such) that will persist. That was my impression anyway, after spending a bit of time trying to contribute and it seems to be very much inline with the message in the OP.
I don’t bother anymore.
You know why the political process is so opaque? Fundamentally, it's because the people who are there making stuff happen had the time and inclination to be there. They stuffed envelopes, went to events and ate lots of rubber chicken, and did stupid nonsense to be a councilman or chief of staff or whatever.
The same thing happens in these scenarios, but with different types of "toil" to gain acceptance.
I'm not trying to be a contrarian on this point but some social forums (e.g.: reddit, where this was linked from) end-up being sgemented into their own forms of echo-chambers, where any dissenting outliers - however valid - are voted into oblivion, simply because it doesn't agree with "muh viewpoint".
IMHO, that reinforces status quo, rather than influences it. I realise that this mightn't be the case with all or even the majority of social forums but it's the loudest that gets the most attention and since we're discussing something directly linked from redditstan, I figured it worth mentioning (since the aspect of influencing the status quo angle crumbles in this specific regard).
To give an example: Create an account on reddit and comment a valid point in the donald, even if it's down-voted into oblivion, go and then comment on something in politics or worldpolitics or the like. Wait for someone to go look at your post history and see that you commented in the donald and watch the tide turn against you, simply because of your participation - even if that comment is directly contradictory the original post in the donald. Just by association, that influence of the status quo is immediately eroded way because it's deemed "invalid" because, again, "muh viewpoint".
Any possibility of influence is lost, at that point. Repeat it day and night, it won't eventually influence the status quo until enough people repeat it and I think that's, probably, more along the lines of what you meant: It's not the number of times it's repeated, it's the volume of that repition's saturation into the larger group that's intrinsically more important. A single person repeating a message over 30 years has far less weight than people (en masse) repeating the same message. Granted, it - sometimes -takes a single person to incite the spread of that message, simply repeating it ad infinum won't reach the end-goal of influencing the status quo.
/endRantThatWasntParticularlyAimedAtYou
Again, I'm not trying to be contrarian because you bring up valid points - save for Theories of Relativity because they were review before being published by someone.
A good example, which was quashed from its inception, was the Copernican Theory of Heliocentrism: Though, very much valid, it was oppressively pushed from gaining ground by "muh religious viewpoint[s]". Even when substantiated by Galileo, this wasn't influential enough to change the status quo - with Galileo living the remainder of his in house arrest.
To lazily quote Nietzsche, in this regard: "All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
1. Mentioning Gab as a possible site to sign up for is "pretty blatantly out of line" and a violation of the Stack Exchange Code of Conduct, and
2. If they discovered that a job candidate had a Gab account, they would throw out the application based upon that fact alone.
So it's not just internet communities; we've got academics openly bragging that even engaging with a community they politically disapprove of, regardless of your individual views, will lead to them barring you from employment in academia.
Even assuming that's true (and I don't know or care if it is), it's unclear to me why it should reflect on the community. If tomorrow somebody were to leak a tape of Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky ranting about their hatred of some race, it wouldn't somehow reflect poorly on the character of anyone with a Hacker News or Stack Overflow account.
First and foremost political opinions have no place in most professional settings and no influence on someones work. If I recall correctly it's even illegal to judge someone based on their political affiliations in many countries.
Further, someone could have an account there to comment against the radical opinions or because he has friends with those opinions, which brought him to the network. And surely some more reasons why someone might have an account without sharing the extremist views of the outliers there.
New ideas in this context are not limited to what disagrees with the overall consensus. Simiple refinements make real changes over time.
I agree most actors we see on TV and movies are outliers (even within the total population of actors). I don't agree they are consequently better than most other people at acting. I think they're marginally better, somewhat practiced, but really "into it" as a career.
Likewise, I think you're underestimating how "good" someone is at a thing if they do it all day. It is difficult to not become good at an activity - for some subset of what that activity entails - if you do it all day long. I think most actors are good at some subset of acting and most Wikipedia editors are good at some subset of editing.
If you dribble a basketball all day long for five years you'll become remarkable at the narrow skill of dribbling unless you deliberately try not to. You probably won't get significantly better at the broader activity of basketball, but dribbling will become like walking for you. In the same way, I don't think there is a large difference in the way actors and Wikipedia editors become good at their activities. They just spend a lot of time in a particular niche.
Part of this is also just the options that first-rate actors open up for you as a writer or director that less capable ones cannot. If you think of the performer's talent as kind of a box that you can fit your narrative and emotional depth in, you just wouldn't try to ship something unless you have a box big enough to hold it.
If you have someone like Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellan on hand you can give them long, baroque speeches and they will nail it. With a less capable actor you would be forced to keep it simpler because most of that stuff might sound corny as hell in less capable hands.
1. Luck does indeed play at big role in getting a break, the right roles, the right director, etc. A lot of people who could have become big stars don't. People know this and leap from there to the whole thing being pretty random.
2. It's often not obvious what makes a great actor that much greater than someone who is not quite so great. Film probably accentuates the differences. But even with mid- to top-level professional theater, the whole cast is probably pretty solid, but the stars really shine in hard to put your finger on it ways. In more "normal" professional roles, it's usually a lot easier to peg why someone is just better than someone else.
Let me try to explain with a bit of an overstatement: Most TV is crap, but year after year they keep making it. People making it cannot be good at it? Well actually they are. They found the sweet-spot by maximizing the profit in terms of eyeball captured they will make from the least amount of effort. That is success.
Now-a-day successful politicians are far better at making people vote for them than actually realizing the platform they are elected on. They are literally good at the game of democracy, but don't know what to do with the spoils. The difference between those two seems to be "fake-news".
Lets assume that the prolific reviewer on Amazon is completely legit. He is obviously good in the sense of efficient at reading and writing reviews. That we do not see the "good" in an outcome of having so many reviews written by the same person does not make his activity less good as an activity.
Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.
This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.
It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.
This is such an important point it needs to be repeated.
The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.
Stats per BLS: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
I sat down and read every...single...link.
What I discovered was that not only had he clearly not read anything he'd posted but that what is allowed to pass for a publishable study is borderline laughable.
After going through it and then realizing that several "prominent voices" on my assorted feeds use the exact same approach, it became apparent that these folks only goal was to keep a conversation thread going in order to amplify the headline reach of a post. Slightly more sophisticated spamming essentially. The only solution was to realize what was happening and refuse to engage.
Now the only conversations I'll have about topics online are a) off of Facebook and b) logical conversations that can be had without link bombing.
The more conversations I've been involved in, the more I've realized that if it seems like what's being said doesn't add up...there's usually a reason.
On reddit you can submit posts all day but you only see the light if others upvote you.
In short I think you have to be both obsessive and skilled, which is something like the real world.
Sure, but we should consider which outliers most internet discussions end up encouraging. They're going to encourage people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions. It's going to encourage people who spend less time writing their comments, because if you're spending 15-45 minutes making sure your comment is of high enough quality you're simply not going to be able to make many comments. If you spend a few seconds/a few minutes writing one, you can make a lot. It's going to encourage comments when people are outside of their own areas of expertise or when they don't have much to say (because you're not going to be seeing all the people who refrained from commenting).
You mentioned voting, but the same issue applies. Someone who has fewer time obligations is going to end up upvoting/downvoting a lot more comments than someone with an very active offline life. Someone who votes before reading an entire comment is going to be able to make a lot more votes than someone who does. Someone who upvotes/downvotes everything because of how they feel is going to be giving out more votes than someone who wants to reserve those for truly bad/truly good comments. Someone who checks whether or not a comment is true is going to have less time to vote than someone who doesn't. Someone who has time to refresh a page every 10 minutes throughout the day is going to be voting earlier, affecting what comments/posts even get seen by less active user (people with other things to do miss a post because really active users downvoted it off the front page within 30 minutes).
A lot of people seem to be unaware that this is an issue, and think the internet is representative of society at large. But commenting and voting as much as you want encourages certain kinds of content from certain kinds of people (a small subsection of people[1]), and discourages content from others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
> people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions
seems like a bit of a category error. There are any number of stable online groups that should be considered under the rubric of "community/social" activities. People participating in them know and expect things of each other, just as they do in a face-to-face group.
The same goes for my news sources and other content. Sure, I enjoy the occasional mainstream YouTube video, but if I'm looking up something technical -- I prefer to read articles and blog posts from actual people with firsthand experience.
How many people posted letters to news papers in the hay day of paper news..
These are real, actual people who submit comments. And those people are anonymous and free to post whatever lies they care to come up with on forums such as this one.
Is is just that you don't care enough to reply, feel like your opinions are unpopular, don't feel like you have anything to say, or something else?
Of course, sometimes when reading comments I get the feeling that you people are all entirely, inexcusably wrong, and I feel an urge to set the record straight. Normally on HN, it doesn't take long for someone to step up and explain exactly what I was thinking with an eloquence I couldn't have matched. And the world is right again. :-)
Your comment now is marked "5 minutes ago" and seems game for a reply, but later today when it's "5 hours ago" or longer, I'd feel like it has expired and any reply would be lost and never seen.
Not commenting is the natural state for most people. Maybe the question isn't why these people don't post, but why active commenters do.
As a lurker for me most of the times I feel like I am on window shopping of ideas. Not looking anything in particular.
Sometimes I have a question to pose, or I disagree with the premise of the submission (sometimes I'm one of the few people to do so).
I'm a singular, non-influential person. I don't believe I'm exactly changing hearts and minds writing HN comments. I do like the discourse I get, though.
For me personally, I just don't care and don't get any reward in the idea of conversing with some random person on the internet. The chances are, I'll never see you again on here or irl, remember your online name (I remember faces, not names), or you will have any real impact in my day to day life. This is how I feel about every commenter online. I don't talk to random people on the street, so why would I talk to random people on the internet? To me, there is little difference.
I value face to face communication much higher than text chat. I really enjoy reading peoples faces and expressions when chatting, to the point where I find talking to others online is the equivalent of having a conversation where everyone has a paper bag on their head when.
If I think someone is wrong on the internet, I just don't care. I read their comment, think to myself "They are wrong/an idiot" and get on with my day. I see no value in correcting a stranger on the internet.
I much rather have conversations irl, and I do, so I have no time/energy left for an online conversation. I'd much rather spend my time with my girlfriend, programming or anything else.
Everything feels so permanent online. I know I'm going to regret things I've said in this post in the future, my mind will change, maybe I won't lurk anymore after writing this!? The permanent nature of online communication goes the against how I should be as person, my opinions shifting and changing as I experience more of life, not held back by some random thing I said on a forum 5 years ago.
When I post, I open myself up to being attacked by people online. I can avoid this simply by never saying anything online.
To illustrate a point, I finally got round to creating an account on stackoverflow about half a year ago, and I still have only one point. I just wanted to vote on questions, but I can only do that if I have at least 15 points on my account, and that requires writing comments/questions (I think). For me, that means contriving 15 comments that succeed at playing some social game, that I simply don't have the time or energy for, so I've given up on ever voting on stackoverflow.
I almost left during the year of the US primaries as the news was majority political and simply more garbage, so I'm glad that got cleaned up.
Often I don't have anything "more" to say on top of what has been said, so I wont add noise. That may be a common thread with lurkers. When I do have a unique perspective and I feel adds value and not noise I may comment, keyword is "may".
I couldn't care less about karma, popularity, social scores or the like (just more garbage). As long as this site and it's users continue to provide value to me by filtering and aggregating tech news I will continue to use it.
Just another lurker mooching off of non lurkers. Selfish yes, but it works.
Sometimes I won't add a comment because of the chilling effect of a future employer or online mob finding it and reading something into my words. It's not worth being contrarian on the internet, or there's no space for devils advocate anymore. Most of the time I will comment and it's fine though.
Sometimes, unrelated, I will write a comment and then when my thoughts are formulated, I delete it because I have benefited from the conversation and there wouldn't be any additional benefit or use from me posting it.
When I was young I enjoyed commenting and voicing my opinion, after 25 years online, I no longer derive satisfaction from it.
The topics on HN generally align with my interests and the quality of discourse here is fairly high, but I'm rarely willing to make the additional mental effort of participating. I prefer to research any points I make and back them up with data, and it's not worth my time to do so only to end up arguing with trolls or people who refuse to reconsider their position when presented with new information.
There are other factors at play at Wikipedia too. In my native language, Danish, Wikipedia is all but dead. Years ago, I tried contributing within my own field. I researched and spent hours adding relevant information to different topics, only to find out a few days after that all my contributions had been deleted by the administrators.
Here is the Danish site for one of the most beloved Danes: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup
Here is the English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup
It's just one example, but it is true for culture, history and many other areas. If you want to know anything on Danish matters, the English Wikipedia is usually a much better option than the Danish.
There are some situations where the non-English Wikipedias have far more information than the English ones though, because of how "notability" works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
Deleting articles doesn't prevent anyone from participating, since anyone can write/edit articles on any notable subject. The deletion process protects Wikipedia from search engine marketers who try to promote their clients with biased low-quality content. They can go to Quora for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Reas...
When I said that it "doesn't prevent anyone from participating", I was only considering the editors who are interested in writing about a wider variety of topics.
For better or worse, Wikipedia frowns on editors who are only interested in editing articles on one topic. There's a page for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Single-purpose_accou...
This is because these editors usually have a conflict of interest, and must make an extra effort to keep their writing free of bias.
Policies aimed at improving the quality of articles also tend to reduce participation. It's a trade-off, and I don't know that the optimal balance would be.
It's a trade-off, and I don't know what the optimal balance would be.
A bit later on, there was Croteam, the maker of Serious Sam, AMA on Reddit so I asked them if the reference to Derek Smart was an inside joke or what. The reply was along the lines of "he's a dear friend of ours and our inspiration". I went back to the Derek Smart Wikipedia article, pointed out the screenshot of the credits with Derek's name, the AMA reply and asked a very innocuous question: "Can we put this in the article?"
I got a reply that what I did is termed "original research" and the only acceptable way to include the reference would be if some noteworthy third party, such as Washington Times, mentions and explains the connection, meaning all the work I did up to that point was in vain. That's when I completely gave up on editing Wikipedia as it seemed to me, and still does, absolutely Sisyphean. Editors of that article then went on to argue how to phrase the incident where Derek Smart assaulted a vending machine to best fit the article.
The implication of "no original research" and "noteworthy sources of information" means a large mass of regional events and persons can't be included in the English Wikipedia unless they clear this arbitrary bar of noteworthiness that can still be gamed with ease: a) be an employee of a mainstream news source, b) publish a biased article on any given topic, c) create an anonymous Wikipedia account, d) create an article on the topic or edit an exiting one to embed the information you published and e) marvel as Wikipedia editors revert the changes under the guise of preventing vandalism.
Automated edit-correction tools are another grave issue for Wikipedia, as they instantly revert an article to its sanctioned version set by a reputable Wikipedia editor. How is Wikipedia "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" again?
I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission was rejected because my sources were not academic enough so I removed those sources and added the only official source in existence which is a zip file containing code examples and example files. My second edit was rejected for not sourcing all of my info.
Literally the only info available is the zip and forum posts. I mainly used the forum posts while learning and verified it against the data I was seeing in the file. How am I meant to share this info for others to benefit from? If I make it in to a blog post it's not an acceptable source but if I post it as a PDF and pretend its some wanky research paper then it probably would get accepted.
One of the core principles of Wikipedia is "No original research". Your proposed article sounds like it was just that. The Wikipedia editors would rather have you share that research in a blog post or similar.
In other words, unless there are reliable secondary sources to base the article on, it is considered original research and is not a good fit for Wikipedia.
I guess part of the reason that new contributors feel bad is confusion about the goals and nature of Wikipedia itself.
The basic ideas of not doing original research or relying on primary sources are fine. But writing just about any article requires synthesizing multiple sources to some degree. Rules are one thing. Saying that the documentation is not a suitable source for information about a file format is something else.
The article needs independent sources (as in, secondary sources that are financially and editorially independent of the company who develops the .mix file type) to show that the topic warrants an article.
If an article has enough sources cited to show notability, primary sources like documentation pages can be used. If notability is not shown, then the topic doesn't meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria and the content of the article is moot.
Without this requirement, any company would be able to publish promotional articles on all of its products, and exclusively use its own web pages as citations. Wikipedia's notability guidelines are in place to prevent spam and to ensure that topics only get articles if they can be written about in a neutral way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
While not every topic belongs on Wikipedia, there are a number of other places where your article would be appreciated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_outlets
The test is called the "general notability guideline". In short, any topic needs to have at least 2 citations to different sources that meet all of the following requirements:
1. The source provides significant coverage (at least 1-2 sizable paragraphs) of the topic
2. The source is reliable
3. The source is a secondary source that is editorially and financially independent of the subject (and of the other source)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_n...
A manual for the file format would not meet requirement #3, since it's a primary source that was published by the company who developed it.
This rule is in place to prevent companies from publishing information about their own products, and then promoting them on Wikipedia in a biased way.
However, it isn't considered an independent source, since it was written by a company with a vested interest in the topic.
To prove that the file type is notable, you'll need at least different 2 sources that meet all 3 requirements: they must provide significant coverage of the topic, be reliable, and be independent of the topic.
You don't have to use these sources to write all of the content in your article, but they do have to be cited as references to pass the notability test.
The three most common kinds of reliable sources are:
- Articles or web pages from a reputable news organization, magazine, or web publisher (with an editorial team)
- Books from a reputable publishing company
- Publications from a peer-reviewed academic journal
Offline and non-English sources are accepted.
If you can't find at least 2 sources that meet these requirements, then the topic doesn't pass the notability test and isn't suitable for Wikipedia. In this case, you're probably better off sharing your article somewhere else, such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or your personal blog.
https://en.wikibooks.org
https://en.wikiversity.org
I also find it ironic that Wikipedia notability is so tied to traditional publishing sources.
ADDED: I admit to falling pretty heavily on the inclusionist side; I'm pretty skeptical about notability at times.
There are two places where editors can ask for help: the Teahouse (for new editors) and the Help Desk (for anyone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk
"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
Since she is your family member, you're asked to disclose that you have a conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
But the answer is yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to whether something is deemed to be 'notable'.
Worse, you put off people like the grandparent who actually attempt to contribute.
We all want accurate and reliable sources, but why not work with people, rather than just deleting? Or why not a 2 stage process. Have a staging area for pages that aren't good enough. Then promoted to wikipedia proper when good enough?
What happens in X years time, when that file format is 'notable'? You've lost the person most inclined to write the document, and lost historical context from a living document.
The BBC had a habit in its early days of reusing 'old' film. What could have been a treasure trove is now lost. I cant help feeling wikipedia is being similarly short sighted.
/rant (not aimed at you btw)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio...
Drafts in AfC will not be deleted for being non-notable, but they will also not be indexed by search engines.
When a draft is ready to be published, a reviewer looks over it and ensures that it is properly cited, before moving it to the encyclopedia proper.
"Only experienced editors should ever create an article from scratch. Others should first create a draft page and build the article there."
And as you say they aren't indexed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Userspace_draft
Userspace drafts also won't be deleted for non-notability, and they can be published whenever the editor feels that they're ready.
Neither of the draft spaces on Wikipedia are indexed by search engines, because these staging areas generally aren't proofread by other editors.
Grandparent said it was rejected because of the citations, not because of any supposed lack of notability. Are you implying that reviewers refuse articles for other reasons than the ones they actually give?
(Edit: from what I gather on this thread, the citations were both secondary and substantial, so the notability criterion was probably met.)
Over time your page will naturally get referenced by Google and other search engines.
Too bad it's not accepted in Wikipedia, but as long as the information is easily findable and organized as an easy to read and comprehensive enough reference, your work will be useful to many.
Also out of interest, what is the file format?
Lower English language fluency in the general population, compared to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, supports this of course. But also the fact that German remains a scholarly language to this day (in the humanities but also in some branches of engineering).
I think that may be a problem for Wikipedia in such countries. People can read/write English good enough that they just go directly to English.
It's pure speculation on my end though. But I'm a non-native English speaker but I never go do my native language's Wikipedia.
I've encountered torrent sites that make more effort to make newcomers feel welcome.
Never tried again, and won't, despite running across much that's inaccurate, plain wrong or has poor language over the years.
The animation could have 50 million views and be known across the internet, but because no 'reputable news organization' wrote about it, i.e. no CNN or BBC article or whatever, they would routinely be brought up for deletion and quickly killed.
Which always seemed strange to me, that this new fangled technology that took advantage of the power of the Internet wouldn't find anything on the Internet itself worthy of gracing its virtual pages. Especially since, as Wikipedia itself states, "Wikipedia is not Paper", and doesn't have a physical limit to what it can talk about or include.
It always annoyed me that these things wouldn't get passed the notability filter, but the most obscure Star Trek episode would have a dedicated page with a full synopsis and details and Easter Eggs, despite the fact that there couldn't have been a news article about that specific episode anywhere out there and the author had to be drawing from the episode... I mean, primary source, itself in order to get that information, which is something that gets squashed elsewhere (No primary sources!)
The hypocrisy just got to me big time. And then when I'd fix spelling or grammar issues on other random pages and see every single one of those get reverted without comment, it was clear that doing anything on Wikipedia was just a big waste of my fucking time. While I still read it to get a really rough handle on topics sometimes, I will never 'contribute' to it again, including every time that giant "We Desperately Need Your Financial Support" message from Jimmy Wales comes up on the site once a year.
I'd love for there to be an alternative where the admins aren't such deletionist zealots, but alternatives just don't exist.
I should also state that I had such a negative experience trying to contribute to Wikipedia that it still riles me up thinking about it to this day. And there's not a whole lot out there that riles me up.
That's what I did for Wikipedia's article on software synthesizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_synthesizer), which in 2014 was rather out of date, particularly on its "typical" examples and other elements.
The article does look a fair bit better now. It does seem to still carry a little awkwardness (eg statements like "a software instrument is akin to a soundfont" which is not really correct) and a few out-of-date moments (eg why mention Csound and Nyquist as music programming language examples but not mention more common examples these days such as Max/MSP or PureData?) and some other quibbles I have. But it is better. Maybe I'll have to make a few more talk points someday. :)
Personally, I do think Wikipedia for the casual contributor is unfortunately broken. But given the amount of trolls and agenda-oriented people out there, I actually can understand why there is a high barrier to entry. It's just a bit unfortunate because it also restricts the diversity of the contribution ecosystem. I'm not sure how to reconcile the two personally...
For instance, in the gaming world, I often look at Serebii.net as a good example of where Wikipedia's credibility priorities are misplaced. To them, it being a fan site run pseudononymously makes it less credible/reputable than a publication like IGN or Vice or what not, but in the actual community/among those who know of the topic, it's actually the far more credible source. The owner has written in magazines, been quoted by popular media sources, used as a reference by those seen as more reputable, etc.
But Wikipedia doesn't think like this. To them, credibility equals being paid as part of a major publication, and it doesn't matter even if you're a distinguished professor writing on your blog or academic site otherwise. And this then hurts the niche topics you mention even more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
You're right about fan sites. It's harder for people outside of the fan community to evaluate whether a fan site is reliable, and that contributes to the skepticism you see.
Yes, but a simple link to which article it was would be enough. What also might be useful is a user name and/or a rough estimate of what the time period was, but without even an article name, there is nothing anybody can do about fixing these things.
It was some hours I spent on a topic I knew well, and had a good selection of books on my own shelves to cite, triggered by finding an incomplete or missing article, or a glaring error. Nothing more. After the challenges contributing I lost interest and moved on. I was doing Wikipedia a favour and trying to contribute, they apparently weren't interested. I'm not going to fight for it, but as a result I'm not open for trying more, or ever again.
As for username, I have no idea whatsoever, but offhand I can only remember one of the several LJ usernames I had, some I used for months rather than just a few days. Mind I doubt I could accurately list all the topics I blogged about on LJ, either, but could cover the main interests easily. I'm not even sure a username was needed at all but it may well have been.
The ability to create and to judge might well be separate. How many food critics are good chefs, and vice versa? Perhaps it's due to not having a horse in the race.
What's fascinating is that we have these people who contribute huge amount of content, like the review guy that's mentioned.
Some of these guys are even interactive. I've had programming questions answered by Jon Skeet, and it just boggles the mind how he can be so productive.
There's probably some specific life circumstances that have to come together for us to benefit from a guy like that.
For one, it prevents creating new accounts to downvote someone that pisses you off. For me personally, it means I downvote only for “adds absolutely nothing and is somehow harmful to HN community”. I probably upvote : downvote at 20:1 or greater.
When deciding if a comment voting system is good or bad, I look heavily towards the outcome, and secondarily towards the mechanism. I think outcome on HN is second to none.
When reading something online I always ask myself what motive the person had for writing it.
But for many of the top creators mentioned in the article I strongly suspect that writing reviews, making comments or editing Wikipedia is a part of their identity. Something that gives their life meaning.
And to be fair, writing reviews or editing Wikipedia certainly is a meaningful thing to do.
These 1%'ers have a massive impact on the world. An impact they couldn't necessarily have if their motives were financial.
Often the best kind. They want to share a joke, or a piece of knowledge. I found this kind of material is of much better quality than paid one.
Of course, sometimes we don't know if the "payment motive" really was removed. Marketers and paid trolls do receive money for posting to on-line communities.
Some are discouraged entirely and some try again later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plymouth_Brethren...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raymond_Ramazani_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
I personally think we'd get a lot of duplicate comments stating the same thing which would reduce the overall quality of the topic at hand. An example that proves this is Ebay's user reviews. You have a lot of people participating in reviews because it's a review system that works both ways, so it's in the both user's best interest to review and rate. But most reviews are duplicates.
YouTube's comment system, which has a younger audience mainly, is rife with spam, trolling and comments that add nothing to the discussion. Is this what we want everywhere? Are those people outliers too? Or people with more spare time than people who purely browse?
I wouldn't use the term "outliers" then to describe these people. I would simply call them "people with initiative"... And in some cases "people with initiative who also want to help".
you would end up crowded out with middle-of-the-road comments. Which is really interesting, because nobody would really enjoy that I think, yet it would be entirely representative of the viewer base.
(1) http://jsomers.net/hn/
So it's not only that most people aren't creators, most creators aren't even creating much.
The probability that you read an article of someone is inversly related to "the author being regular".
Maybe that's also the reason why only a fraction of people are rich?
The phenomenon is not limited to the Internet. In any group of humans, you will always have a small subgroup of active members and a "silent majority". It doesn't matter whether you look at nation states, community churches or your local school's parent-teacher organisation. In general, the larger a group is, the smaller the percentage of active members will be.
Voluntary organisations often expend a lot of effort into getting their "inactives" more involved; some manage this better than others. But somehow, being a passive consumer is the default mode of most people in most circumstances. Human nature, I guess...