> On any given day, its top links might include a Medium post about technical hiring
Isn't it quite ironic to see the article suggesting that HN top link might include Medium post. I've usually read not-so-positive feedback about Medium posts. Isn't it the case?
When you're looking at a page of 30 links, the signaling value of a domain is useful. Medium is a low-barrier place to publish, and has discovery built in, so it ends up attracting a lot of bad writing and promotional material. That, combined with the degraded reading experience, is why I am happy to judge a book by its cover in this case.
A publication's "editorial voice", ranging from grammar and typography, to selection and discussion philosophy, are significant. There's a reason we see things as "New York Times" or "Fox News" or "Mad Magazine" or "Cosmo" or "The Economist" or "Soldier of Fortune" in voice or tone.
This is harder to pin down with blogs and social media, though distinctions can emerge, whether through self-selection, path-dependency, gross scale, algorithms, or some combination of the set.
Prejudice can be misused, but its advantage (to the judger) is that it makes judgement cheaper by reducing the set of what needs to be considered, at least for an initial judgement.
That's characteristic of any domain in which there's an information overload, or in which distinctions are subtle and difficult to identify initially. And argument, by the way, for dealing with copious information less by enhanced processing and more by expedited (and cheap!) discarding heuristics.
Medium has good content behind an increasingly infuriating presentation. Mechanically it's the opposite of HN, but for various reasons (reach, possibility of reimbursment) people do write some quality content there.
Since anyone can write for medium, and anyone with an HN account can post medium links here, there are huge amounts of medium content. So we see a lot of that 90%, as well as the 10% that's useful.
“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.”
This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and constantly look for better ways.
What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists.
There was also the pervasive sense of being on the side of the rest of the team, even though highlighting their contribution was the first thing Katie Bouman did. And at least Andrew Chael, who did write the plurality of the code in the GitHub repo, did come out strongly in favor of her and was horrified of the hate she got. Quote:
"So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop."
It's curious that, at least in my subjective impression, the tech community has a far larger problem with women than any of the other groups that have traditionally suffered discrimination: racism and especially homophobia really are extremely rare, at least overtly. But the uglyness Katie Bouman, or Ellen Pao, or Marissa Meyers brought out seems to be alive and well.
If a man received personal acclaim for a discovery, and someone looked at the repo and found that someone other than the man wrote most of the crunchier code, then yes I'd evaluate the acclaim for the man the same way.
Note most of the acclaim aimed at the scientist, rather than the team, was from the media. Whom as usual, likes to omit their own role.
If it is the case that she didn't contribute the most complicated stuff, then I can assure you it is not the first time in history that the face of a project is not the one that did the hardest work.
Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
This is all said with the caveat that I didn't follow this 'controversy' and never cared to look at the contribution distribution of all the project members.
No. But if someone else checked the repo, I'd be interested. That said the media would be less likely to publish 'this young man took a photo of a black hole'.
> Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
Yep. Also mentioned in my comment you're replying to.
I think of this conflict as 'developers versus the media' - the media having pushed the narrative of 'a young woman who took a photo of a black hole'.
The media (who like to remove their own influence from discussions) have turned it into 'sexist developers vs young female scientist'. They've been very successful at doing that, yet again, because, well, they're the media. It's easy to shape a story when you control all outlets deemed noteworthy enough to cite.
Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I. So even if you disagree with the characterization, it certainly wasn't just the media, but also your fellow developers. It was a shameful moment (one of many, most of a similar kind) for HN that reflected horribly on developers, and the media called it up on that, as they should.
Whoever is "right", it wasn't just the media, but also lots of developers, who felt it was a shameful display of misogyny. So it is certainly wrong to claim that the media spun this story a certain way out of the blue.
Also, if I didn't think my opinion was correct it wouldn't be my opinion.
One could say the exact same thing except for the other position. Certainly there exist a number of journalists who think the media’s reporting on the topic was biased in order to garner more clicks and/or push an agenda, so it is wrong to claim Bouman just fell victim to sexists. Total non-argument.
One could say anything, but while it's unsurprising that women's achievements are highlighted because they are objectively a minority in a field that, like other fields, was shown to suffer from sexism in numerous studies, the response was different from when a man's achievement is highlighted, and that, too has been shown in studies. So I do think empirical observation is on my side as well.
Maybe the response is different because if a man’s achievement is highlighted, the fact that a man did it isn’t highlighted, which isn’t exactly the case for women (apparently a woman in the team suffices for an achievement to be credited to a woman), making these two kinds of articles about fundamentally different things: “X was achieved” vs. “A woman achieved X”. One of these is far more loaded politically and hence of course more likely to elicit strong responses. There’s no reason that indicates misogyny in any form.
Studies show otherwise, and I think that the gut reaction of those who read that discussion also shows that at least some developers felt that way, if not in general, then at least in that particular case. Also, that women's participation in software has drastically decreased since the eighties to the point they're now a small miniority is just a fact, and so focusing on them is natural, if not justified. Various causes for outbursts of xenophobia and misogyny have also been studied, and no one thinks they're unexepected, but that has nothing to do with their actual nature. I always anticipate a "strong reaction" on HN when women are discussed, but I'm still saddened by it.
I could only recommend to the curious readers of HN, if they are interested and certainly if they think they should voice their "strong reaction," to try looking at the rather vast scholarly literature that research has produced over the past decades. It's not a matter of a difference of opinions among people with equal knowledge of the subject matter, but usually one between those who have more knowledge and those who have less.
> the gut reaction of those who read that discussion also shows that at least some developers felt that way, if not in general, then at least in that particular case.
> ...because if a man’s achievement is highlighted, the fact that a man did it isn’t highlighted, which isn’t exactly the case for women (apparently a woman in the team suffices for an achievement to be credited to a woman), making these two kinds of articles about fundamentally different things: “X was achieved” vs. “A woman achieved X”.
You dispute that claim, and say the consensus scholarly view is otherwise?
The media spun the story in the first place (the reductive 'a woman who took a photo of black hole') because stories of women achieving things generates clicks.
The media spun the story in the second place (the incredibly simplistic 'developers hate women') because the media dislikes people arguing with it and because sexism generates clicks.
From my perspective the story is: some people on HN which profess to value knowledge, scholarship and professionalism and "reducing" things for the sake of simplicity, express strong opinions on a matter of which they know little, their behavior mirrors archetypical behavior studied in the literature, and then rage when they're "reduced" based on scholarship they don't know. This is too long, so I'd summarize it as "HN commenters stuck in a bubble of ignorance rage on a topic they know nothing about."
It's hard having a conversation with you as you don't seem to respond to what the points anyone is making when you write a follow up comment. What is the literature you're repeatedly referring to? HN and the scientist seem to be in agreement on the work not being that of an individual, why is that ignorant?
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that it was the work of only one individual, and I'm referring to the literature (you can Google for it) showing that women face, among other kinds of discriminatory treatment, increased scrutiny. In other words, the reaction of some on HN (thankfully a minority, but a predictable and loud one) is a textbook case of sexism. Not recognizing that is not a matter of opinion but a simple ignorance of the scholarship on the subject.
As a counterpoint, comapre that with eg. reaction to QuickJS, when it was announced. People did not know who's to be credited for most of the work (only that two people claim copyright in the code), but if you look at the comments, it's all praise for the better known name, Fabrice Bellard, and almost no mention of the other person.
People will praise who they want to, and will bother to verify, only if it disagrees with their prejudices in the first place.
There's also a difference if those prejudices are based on something like past achievements of the praised person, or on something unrelated, like being a woman.
The only double standard is that when people are skeptical of a woman, a bunch of thirsty men jump to her defense, and turn it into a bigger issue. Not to mention the media's incessant need to profile women doing things and having a giant backpatting session for her and themselves. They are so sure women can do anything men do, they act like it's unprecedented everytime it happens.
Here's a crazy idea. Maybe any of the numerous other people who worked on that project were pissed too that she was given all the attention, and they had every right to be.
If someone pored over a guy's github, nobody would care, and certainly no random woman would jump to his defense. Somehow this is proof that men oppress women.
The reason people were trawling through her Github contributions and comparing them to other members of the team she worked with, and then posting about lines of code as if that's a measure of the value of someone's contribution to a project, was absolutely to undermine her work and show that she wasn't deserving of credit (despite the fact she was repeatedly quoted saying it wasn't all her and that it was a team effort).
When that story was on the front page it was one of the few times I've thought about leaving HN. It was embarrassing.
It was an overreaction which, however, was only enabled by absolutely lazy journalism. They basically took Bouman's Facebook post with a photo of her smiling next to the black hole claiming that she produced the picture, blowing her contributions way out of proportion. Some reports corrected this later that day, but by then, the shitstorm and investigation had already started. Perhaps understandably--she did not produce the picture. One could argue that Bouman's reaction was also way too delayed and she did not enough to clarify the situation, but this is perhaps understandable assuming she did not follow social media very closely.
The entire fiasco was mainly caused by the obsession of the media to put women at the forefront.
She did great work, and so did dozens (hundreds?) of others on that project.
She wasn't deserving of the level of credit that the media gave her when they cast her as the star, visionary, and quasi-leader of the whole enterprise.
Nobody was ever against Katie. They were against the way the media handled the story - by slanting the story to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the discovery itself, and then calling everyone who had a problem with that sexist while entirely eliding their own role in the controversy.
It was entirely a conflict between the media and the people calling out the media for obvious bias. As always, the media's response was to build a narrative where their critics were just trying to hurt [insert victim/victim group here].
'Nobody was ever against Katie' is a bold claim not at all backed up by the thread or the harassment she received which was addressed by her colleagues.
It seems like rather than own up to the fact that yes there were people that were remarkably awful to her and attempting to downplay her contributions it's easier to just blame the media.
Okay, I'll retract "Nobody was ever against Katie" since clearly some individuals, somewhere, were. Of course there were people who were awful to her. In any controversy, some Internet weirdos are awful to everyone involved. That's how the Internet works today. It means absolutely nothing; it's not significant.
99+% of the people who were critical of that situation, including me, never did anything against Katie. I don't have numbers but I suspect 99% also had nothing against Katie opinion-wise either. It's entirely against the notion that one person should be selected for media celebration entirely based on their genetics. That's wrong, wrong, wrong and I'll argue against it proudly any day.
What's disgusting is the media's taking this insignificant background noise 1% and making the entire story about it, specifically in order to distract from the criticisms leveled against them.
It's about the constant refusal to even address the media's choice when they elevated her. A refusal that is still going on in this thread.
Was it right to elevate her like that solely because of her gender? Or did the media do a wrong?
I thought it was just the annoyance of having the lefty/media point of view pushed hard. Whenever someone that isn't a white male achieves something, there's this push to let the whole world know that a "minority" has accomplished something.
It just comes off as a "In your face! Racist white people." I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
>It just comes off as a "In your face! Racist white people."
It shouldn't, though.
Mentioning gender in relation to a woman's accomplishment is not an implicitly anti-male statement, nor is mentioning race in relation to the accomplishment of a person of color an anti-white statement. Nothing in any article about Katie Bouman was disparaging of men or white people or anyone.
>I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
Meaning no one who disagrees with your opinion on the matter is sane? Yet reacting defensively and interpreting any mention of gender or race as hostility doesn't seem particularly sane to me.
It’s not this story, it’s a global feature on both comments and stories which serves as a “undo” for fat fingering the upvote button. Before this feature you’d often see comments along the likes of “sorry, I accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote.”
Strongly agreed. I fat-finger quite badly when browsing HN from mobile device; this improvement let me finally stop reflexively pinch-zooming the upvote button before pressing it.
I fat-finger a lot, especially on mobile where these tiny little arrows are a challenge. And one thing I notice is that since both the arrows disappear, you're never quite sure if you did. You have to question your fat fingers yourself, and if you're unsure, Undo gives you the option to take a second shot. But you're never entirely sure.
> And one thing I notice is that since both the arrows disappear, you're never quite sure if you did. [...] But you're never entirely sure.
The undo link says "unvote" when you upvoted, and "undown" when you downvoted. And yeah, after every single click on one of these arrows, I check the undo link to make sure I clicked the right one.
It's a very interesting take to put a face on people who we only know for short acronyms and interaction which usually happen when things are not going smooth.
It's easy to think moderation might be too active (or not active enough) though it's not us sitting on their seats.
(Though I agree with the critique that the site is "too orange" and I'm all too happy to use the available customization option)
Millions of readers, the amount of active commenters is much lower.
In addition, HN doesn't get much of the "classic" troll crowd (no matter if 4chan/8chan/outright real Nazis/gamergate) or Trump supporters - from the occasional politics thread aside, there's nothing much of interest for them here, and so the biggest blocks of trolls simply stay away.
Partly due to a virtuous circle; the community downvotes the more obvious ones into invisibility, and persistent trolls get banned, and the discussions are curated to select less fertile topics, and the controversy-ometer pushes flamewars off the front page.
The moderators here are very good at doing work upfront to save themselves work later, by making the site infertile ground for troublemakers.
I do. The direct call-out of a specific group of people for their position on the political spectrum is pretty much directly against what (I think) we're trying to do here. It's unnecessary, too. Could have just left it at "classic troll crowd".
Eh. I read it less as "general people that happen to support the current administration" and more as "posters on t_d," which is a very different thing in my mind, and yea, does point to users that are inherently trollish/toxic.
He's lumping Trump supporters together with Neo Nazis. Also hitting on all "inflammatory" topics at once. If someone on the "other side" would do that, the comment would be dead in seconds and the poster be punished by dang.
As the article goes "The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.", let's see what we can do here.
The latest HN comment dump I could find with a quick search was from May 2018 [1].
There were 237,646 comments in total that month, made by 36,358 unique users. 75% of users posted 5 or fewer comments, with a median of 2. The most prolific user wrote 798 comments, dang managed 6th place with 425 comments.
Even if the numbers doubled since then, there is no need to moderate millions of users, as only (well) tens of thousands of them are actively participating.
The "Show HN: This upvotes itself" came to mind. :)
But regarding the article: I don't think HN is getting worse. But why it might look like it is is that it has become a very very busy site - which makes it seem hectic and thus might appear "worse".
Joking aside, if there were to be forum awards, Hacker News would top it all the time.
Best moderated, high level, most interesting discussion forum award goes to ...
Related: My daughter's second grade teacher was Mrs. Emily Chewning, of Scottish extraction. She told me that when the first parent-teacher conferences happened, a number of parents were surprised at her appearance: kids always referred to her as "Miss Chew" and from the sound of the name, parents assumed she was Chinese.
Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you!
Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
Overall it is a lot better. The topics, timeline, moderation, structure and even comments. And a think some people might enjoy that.
But it also sort of highlights the greater problem which is that most people who frequent these forums these days just aren't that interesting, or interested. Or it is at least hard for those who are to show that and get something out of it.
I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet".
> I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts.
In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it?
Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course.
> The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
Reddit is actually pretty great. It's easy enough to evade the more-less-desireable parts of it. I can assure you some of the best textually-based content the last X years have happened there.
I agree. Unfortunately, I have the impression it is already going in the downwards trajectory. The new redesign contains all the red flags. When "old.reddit.com" stops working, I suspect it's over for me.
I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable discussion forums, mailing lists, etc. And the more gated and the more obscure they are, the more reasonable (and insular) they are.
What you're saying is 100% true. I personally dislike HN moderation because it stifles discussion in a big way.
A perfect example is the other poster who basically got called to task by dang for asking for sources to a claim. Dang characterized it as "unsubstantive" and lowering the signal to noise ratio.
For myself, a reasonable discussion is one which it's expected to be asked to cite sources. A community in which not doing so gets you called out.
Discourse on HN is too touchy feely, people are generally afraid to challenge others in a straightforward manner, so they end up using a lot of words to do so. It's like being in that meeting where the manager is using flowery language to extol the virtues of the company, when in reality everyone is there for reasons that don't involve the company itself.
I just kind of tolerate it, but in no way, shape, or form, do I view the discourse on HN as generally being honest or useful.
> I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it
I'm glad your favorite community has sustained itself for 20 years, but with this statement you remove it so far from the category HN belongs to that it's incommensurable.
It's great that there's room for lots of different internet communities to thrive with different strategies. I've always felt there's room for many more—there are lots of opportunities for communities to start with different initial conditions and grow into qualitatively different things. I wish people would start them. But let's not pretend that they all have the same problems. HN's category is that of the large, public, anonymous internet forum, and all its hard problems stem from that category.
Plenty of folks consider HN to have devolved into complete and utter dogshit; there aren’t many memes but there is a pretty heavy whiff of the Californian ideology, and given the choice I’ll usually take the memes.
(In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
Definitely the members IMO; a moderator can snipe out the occasional troll, but if all members are being pricks there's nothing that can be done about that. What you need is to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, etc. You need the community to call one another out and keep one another accountable. And you need to nip any broken windows in the bud - Reddit's comment threads often spiral out of control and into a spammy mess of memes and references for example, simply because that's part of their culture. It's harmless enough on Reddit, but if that happened on HN the comments section would diminish greatly in value.
One of the other forums I frequent would be chock full of pricks by HN standards. They are known for being jerks on other forums that cover the same interest. It's still a very good community as long as you don't take everything personally.
≥What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.”
I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN.
Often I kill my comment before I actually click "Reply", especially if I know my comment will be too divisive, or if it doesn't add to the quality of previous comments.
Sometimes I upvote a comment because it helped me question/ change a personal dogmatic view.
> I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN.
The guidelines are somewhat of a joke, and are only followed (even by mods) when it is convenient to do so.
For example, I've been repremanded in the past by our supreme leader dang for posting comments like "do you have a source for that?", because he assumed it was too hostile while he completely ignored his own 'hacker' 'news' guideline of 'assume good faith' (I was literally asking someone to source the information/argument they posted here.. but hey good job on completely derailing that discussion dang!)
"do you have a source for that?", especially when phrased that way, is a statement made in bad faith, because it indicates that you believe that there's a chance the statement is unsourced (as opposed to "can you please cite this?").
I find it very difficult to believe that is a direct quotation from dang. Not only that, your parent called dang "supreme leader" (i.e. dictator, guilty of atrocities). This is clearly absurd and hyperbolic verbiage. Extremely "colorful" language is modern rhetoric of the worst kind.
> Ok, but "got any sources for that?" is a rather unsubstantive contribution, and then going on tilt about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines outright. Would you mind raising the signal/noise ratio of what you post here?
It seems the attempt to correct a low "signal / noise ratio", in this instance, seems to be back firing.
It wasn't accurate. They mentioned the lesser part of why I moderated the comment and omitted the greater part, which is what most people do when telling a story about how we suppressed them unfairly. That's presumably why such stories never come with links, which would allow readers to make up their own minds about what happened.
> That's presumably why such stories never come with links
No, I didn't include a link because I was posting from my phone, and "hacker" "news" doesn't include a sane way to search through thread history for specific comments. I'm glad someone else went through the trouble.
But hey, you're free to continue to not assume good faith, right?
I said most people and presumably as a way of not jumping to that conclusion about you. The pattern in general is very consistent. But I can see how it would be annoying to read that, if your preference really was to provide a link.
The claim is lopsided. @dang implies how the original comment wasn't all that great... but wasn't a real problem, & it wasn't until the comment was edited to include the downvotes that @dang intervened. That the commenter re-raised the issue again here as the reason for @dang intervening in the first place seems to be incorrect, as I read it.
I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option.
This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.
I'm of the opinion that it is best to err on the side of strictness. Once you make a reasonable exception, you open a precedent, and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
> and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
The guidelines of the site I think are the ultimate precedent. If Dang dont get ya the rest of the community likely will. HN is somewhat self-moderating after all. I have seen users point out to abuses of the community guidelines.
I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
There should be some fuzziness about decisions otherwise you encourage gaming to see what can just get past censors. It sounds unreasonable but it works well in practice.
I don't think you realize what you're advocating for. There's protection from the hate that lives on the internet, and then there's grooming a narrative. What you're asking for is the latter, not the former.
I know it's anecdotal and people live their own experience, but in my own experience dang is the only moderator I can recall having a conversation with where it WAS a conversation and not some authoritarian declaration. He even seems to go out of his way in comments to explain his thoughts and I have seen him change his mind and admit things as well. I wasn't aware he was Canadian but it funnily feeds the positive stereotype of politeness in our northern neighbors. Most people in positions of power online seem to be little Joffrey types with take it or leave it attitudes regardless of how you speak to them.
Also add me to the people who didn't know it was "Dan G" for the longest time and loved "dang" as a name.
no, you just don't fall into the cracks that dang dislikes. I've seen him go after people who aren't causing problems because he doesn't like what they're saying. I've seen it multiple times actually.
His go to is to call it conspiracy regardless of what's actually being said.
When I get something wrong, I'm happy to admit it and correct it. At the same time, people make all sorts of claims about horrid things we supposedly did, and most of those leave out important information.
Either way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds.
you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution".
You are now telling me I should be citing a source.
If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster.
I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubstantive if there's a claim against you personally?
As for allowing others to make up their mind, that would be what the poster in the other thread was presumably trying to do, and you shut him down. And that's really the point.
A comment like "got any sources for that?" without adding additional context is low effort and inching towards trolling.
Another difference is while the parent post of that person's comment it would be nice to include sources, it is about a general topic people can attempt to look for public sources themselves. Your comment you are accusing a forum user (dang) of something and there is no reasonable way to look for sources backing up your opinion/claim.
no, asking for sources is legitimate, it's a crazy world you live in where being asked to give a source for information is low value and/or low effort.
A comment consisting of nothing but "got any sources for that?" is certainly "rather unsubstantive". But that is not why I replied to it. Had that been the only thing wrong with the comment, I wouldn't have. It was the following:
> Edit: lol, downvotes for asking for sources? "Hacker" "news" is just full of gems!
... that caused me to reply as a moderator, because that breaks more than one of the site guidelines, as well as being lame. This is routine moderation.
Both the original commenter and now you have given a distorted version of what happened there, as anyone who looks at the original thread can easily see. If that's what you have to resort to in order to come up with examples of moderator abuse on HN, we must be doing pretty well. Better than I'd have expected, in fact, given that we've posted 38,000 of these and no one bats a hundred.
and now you've chosen to be unfair. I don't have access to the original comment, something you know, yet you accuse me of distorting facts. You've also lumped me in with the other poster as if we're the same person or the same group.
The only thing we have in common is not really liking your work as a moderator, and the way it's stifled discourse on HN. You have to go to other places for that, I mostly use HN as a news source.
also, since I forgot to address it in my other response.
asking for sources is not unsubstantive, not in the least. It's one of the most substantive things you can do, both as someone providing information, and as someone trying to evaluate the information being provided.
The fact that you've come to feel that asking for sources is less important than not making others feel uncomfortable goes a long way towards why I don't view HN as a place for decent discourse.
> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet
Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.
I highly doubt "2 moderators" would be able to do anything if half of the community was composed of trolls. The fact that trolls are very few in the first place, and not welcome by other members who flag them and downvote them to hell, make it possible for it to work even with a low level of moderation.
> Making trolling less visible / viable practice is the work of moderators.
Downvoting, flagging works even when the mods are not around. I am pretty sure that a comment flagged too many times is greyed out and almost invisible (and that happens without mods).
Again, if we are to believe there are only 2 full time moderators on HN for the amount of comments going every single minute, it's virtually impossible to rely on mods alone for proper discussions: simple maths.
No, it really does make a difference. I've got a close friend who's been involved in many discussion forums, both as user and mod. His experience is mods are the critical link that prevent the community from descending to ugly chaos.
The community helps... but someone needs to be doing some policing to limit the effect of the bad actors or the community starts to get pissed off/wander off/degrade into pettiness.
When I first started commenting, I remember being shocked (and annoyed) at how downvoted I got for making the kind of reply-snark that gets tolerated (if not upvoted) on Reddit – and that tone-setting is certainly a function of the community.
But that was almost a decade ago. The mindset of the tech community has gotten far more political (not a bad thing, but a natural consequence of "software eating the world"), and it's really hard to imagine that HN would have turned out like it is today through self-policing alone.
Even if we assume HN were to collectively agree on taking a hard stance against anything political in nature (which still seems to be the case sometimes, given that the mods have to occasionally step in and manually de-flag and protect threads), that would've likely turned off a number of current HN users who see HN as a great place to discuss tech's greater implications and role in society.
I agree and want to put /. as an example. In the 2000's I used to visit /. as much as I visit hn now. At that time there were plenty of great comments and sometimes even people like John Carmack posted there. Sure there was GNAA spam and similar, but the mod system took care of that.
Nowadays the mod system remains but the community has moved on and although the stories are good, there is no intellectual discussion.
A similar thing happened to OSNews. Another news aggregator I used to visit a lot.
what's happening here is reddit-style comments have been slowly but steadily creeping in. I dont blame the mods directly, but indirectly they should have just capped membership once the tone lost its tech edge and comments began to drift to "me too!/relevant username/orange man bad/etc" about 30-40% (by my estimation) of HN comments are what reddit comments were a few years ago. The only way to fix that is to throttle membership.
Why do opinions like yours always seem to come from accounts less than a year old?
Unless you're presenting yourself and your own comment history as an example of the problem... in which case, the opportunity is always there to try a bit harder.
It isn't, because unless you've been lurking for years or have an alt account, you're just being an elitist poser. People have been complaining about HN "turning into Reddit" for so long that it used to be listed in the guidelines as a common, semi-noob delusion.
>Why do so many of your comments in your post history denigrate women and minorities?
Point them out to me, please. I'm usually defending women and minorities here, and often getting downvoted for the effort.
If you continue to break the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you again. Could you please not do that? Using HN as intended is not hard if you want to.
The moderators help determine the community. Insufficient moderation changes the community: the most obnoxious voices drive away reasonable ones. New users who prefer that mode of discourse stay; users who want "reasonable discussion" are discouraged and go elsewhere.
It's easy when a community is small. The more prominent the community gets, the more it tempts people who enjoy stirring things up.
In the end I'm not sure if any moderation scheme can prevent that, to be honest. There will always be people who consider it a challenge to see what they can get away with, either by trying to stay just under the moderators' radar or by returning every time they're banned. Provocation makes people defensive, and then their own replies turn harsh, contributing to a negative perception of the community.
I do hope that this community avoids it as long as possible. I've discovered it only recently and am enjoying it. But past experience suggests that it, too, will one day degrade.
I've been waiting for an excuse to compliment the mods here, without it being off-topic. They do a great job! Of course, it also helps that the community here is more reasonable than most.
This. I've been put in the corner by dang more than once, and I like to think that it made me a more considerate commenter-on-the-internet. Maybe even a more considerate person. Thanks!
Also, I think that it's pretty special that the vast majority of the comments on this article is people disagreeing about what HN's prevalent opinion is. It's easy to have all kinds of opinions when you don't moderate (eg 8chan), but it's hard to moderate a forum and at the same time not let it become a monoculture.
I've seen comments claiming that HN is a neoliberal / libertarian cesspool, and I've seen comments claiming that anything mildly non-PC gets downvoted into oblivion. If both the far left and the far right feel like HN represents the "other side's" opinion, then maybe there's a pretty decent middle ground being struck.
I don't see the moderation here as particularly strict nor as the original source of all the goodness.
I think having the right set of rules for the site's discussion (maintaining of which is a moderator job) and having a generally "good" population as an initial condition were the keys to setting the mods up for success. The mods' job then becomes to maintain the community's high level of discourse.
I see a lot of comments which violate the site guidelines in a fairly minor way. To me, strict moderation would involve curtailing those (to the site's detriment in general, a la Reddit, Wikipedia, or stackoverflow). Instead, I think we have strict guidelines and fairly tolerant moderation thereof. (I also find it interesting and telling that I felt normal to say "we have" in the previous sentence, rather than "news.yc has".)
PS: This is not meant to take anything away from what the mods do. It's critically important and they do a good job from my viewpoint. I think I got my hand slapped once in a decade (and I don't even now recall what it was, but I do recall that I agreed that I deserved it and it was handled reasonably).
I strongly agree. Although, to quibble, I think calling it strict moderation is selling it short. In addition to having coherent standards, dang is thoughtful, fair, and tolerant. I say this having been on the wrong end of quite a few warnings. If this forum is ruled with an iron fist, it sure has a thick layer of velvet around it. All moderation is subjective, but dang does a great job of staying intellectually honest and true to the site's mission. I very much get the old school hacker vibe.
I've been here since 2013 and I noticed a massive improvement in the submitted articles and comments once dang became a moderator. Thank you dang and sctb.
Amidst all the ambient craziness of our ever-changing world, I raise a glass to Hacker News, the team who moderate it and to all who wish to make it a community driven by erudite discussions :)
I'll drink to that. There's a constant tension in my life between time devoted to reading books vs. time perusing HN stories and comments. It's hard to reach a good balance.
There exists a public feed of all comments (just click on 'comments' in top bar), but we don't monitor the site that way. It's too much. We basically read the threads spottily like anyone else, plus rely on moderation lists, such as what has been flagged by users.
No, we don't. I used to have client-side software that would highlight specific regexes in comment text, but it stopped working one of the times that we rewrote the client-side Lisp that we used (Parenscript -> Lumen -> Arc) and I haven't gotten around to getting it working again.
For what it's worth, my only interaction with dang was being gently chided for a slightly glib dismissal at the top of a comment I made. The phrasing I used is very common (and treated as harmless) where I was brought up in Yorkshire. But he was right; without the benefit of that context it came over as rude. I've been a bit more careful since.
I've gotten into a couple of arguments with dang and have never found him to be unfair, although I do think he sometimes interprets criticism of the site or the community as an insult to him personally.
That said, it's better to have moderators who care than moderators who don't.
Usually when I read a comment like this, I find that the commenter is grossly misrepresenting the situation, usually by leaving out important details. But in this case, yes, that seems like an accurate description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20467198
Personally, I like Dan's "Nietzschean flamewars" phrasing, and I sort of agree that "trying to get him to conform to slave morality" was a personal swipe. But if so, only barely. This could well be an example of overly sensitive moderation.
The real problem with that thread (in my opinion) is that Rayiner's comment was allowed to stay flagged to death. One might not agree with his opinion, but it's a viewpoint worthy of reply (as you did) rather than censorship.
Really surprising to see that comment, which, full disclosure, I agree with, get flag-killed. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it get a few downvotes. But rarely have I ever seen a thorough, well-sourced, and civil comment actually be flag-killed. If anything, the shallow replies to his comment are the type of things that typically seem to get downvoted (though not necessarily flagged either).
I think this is a side effect of self-moderation. By making everyone in the community (over a certain threshold of participation) a mini-mod you turn rules enforcement into a popularity contest. Valid, interesting, yet unpopular points get suppressed. Rules violations that are popular get ignored, and sometimes even lauded.
There is no reason, based on the HN guidelines, that the referenced post should have been downvoted, let alone flagged. Whoever did so abused their power to make such decisions.
I agree with what you said, but my presumption has been that the HN status quo would generally be receptive to the argument that u/paulmd made, or at least, not offended/angered enough to flag it. Especially it being so well-written, and in response to someone whose argument was entirely speculative or based on emotional appeal, and who didn't bother using basic capitalization or punctuation.
It's even more surprising since HN had the "vouch" feature since before Dec. 2016 [0]. My best guess is that people might have reflexively downvoted/flagged upon seeing the opening sentence of "Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account".
Might have been bad timing, too. I don't know how many people vouch for comments; I do so when appropriate, but every now and then I discover comments I would have vouched for had I seen the thread when it was live.
There's a counterbalancing option to downvotes and flags - you can "vouch" comments. Enough people using it[0] can make the software unkill a comment provisionally, though doing this puts your own reputation and vouching rights at stake, since according to [0], vouched comments are eventually reviewed manually.
--
[0] - Not sure what's the power of a vouch relative to a flag or a downvote, but my impression is that it's stronger.
Yes, and I use both when I feel it's appropriate. However, it's still fundamentally a popularity contest rather than guidelines enforcement. If enough people simply don't like what a post has to say it will stay grey/dead.
I'm coming to the opinion that downvoting should not grey out posts, or that there should be some number of downvotes (greater than 1) required before it starts. It should be harder to suppress constructive, on-topic posts just because a bunch of people don't like the point.
Yet, it happens all the time. For this example, the most likely explanation is the down-voters read the first two words and wrongly concluded that the remaining 1000 were going to be a racist rant. Within milliseconds they made the decision to downvote and move on.
This "drive by down-voting" happens regularly here. I've had comments downvoted within seconds of posting--clearly the voters could not have had time to read the entire text. They see a few key words that trigger them, hit the arrow, and move on to the next job. Unfortunately, there's no way in JavaScript to tell whether someone's actually read the thing they're down-voting, so we get these knee-jerk keyword-based brigades.
To test this, sometimes I'll write something where the first sentence is provocative, but the rest is (I hope) a solid, nuanced argument. Usually it's at -1 or -2 within a minute, and then over the next few hours slowly crawls back up to +2 or +3 as people actually read it.
>To test this, sometimes I'll write something where the first sentence is provocative, but the rest is (I hope) a solid, nuanced argument. Usually it's at -1 or -2 within a minute, and then over the next few hours slowly crawls back up to +2 or +3 as people actually read it.
I cannot but confirm this behaviour.
Also I noticed that (my guess is that there is some form of subliminal self-defense reflex by some categories) there are a few themes (not political, not social) that seem to attract downvotes.
It happens all the time. Constantly and consistently. If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged. It's always been this way.
>The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
You cannot discuss things in an actual academic manner on this forum. It is a tech enthusiast forum that happens to have a lot of money surrounding it.
Recently I've started going through the greyed/flagged comments at the bottom of every post - you would be surprised how often there are reasonable, well thought out comments downvoted or flagged because it hit a nerve with enough HN users.
> “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work.“
Software might be eating the world, I don't think people will eat software anytime soon.
It's a good reminder that we can't solve all problems by just throwing some code at it. Unfortunately ...
I've been enjoying the "Against the Rules" podcast [1] hosted by Michael Lewis [2]. It's related to moderation so I'll post it here.
The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing.
Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potentially dry topic. (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar's Poker, etc.)
I've been on a bit of a Michael Lewis binge myself recently, just finishing his book "The Undoing Project" - would definitely recommend if you're even tangentially interested in human psychology. It's a great introduction into why we make errors on a cognitive level and is a great follow-up to some of the concepts discussed in Moneyball.
AtR is a really good podcast, I agree. Lewis is great at writing/ presenting in an engaging manner. Listening to the podcasts felt to me like listening to short audio books of his. Who knows if moderation in the way he analyses it will rebound again in the future, one can only hope...
Although being - sometimes wildly - at odds with many of the leanings, assumptions, and perceived biases underlying the generality of HN, and often not sharing editorial viewpoints as expressed by dang and sctb, I am consistently in awe and absolutely drooling fanboy adulation over the quality of the moderation and everything else which keep - miraculously - this site running, healthy, useful, and mostly spam-free. From over here in a very different set of values and mind: Thank you for all that.
As for the article: King Canute was a Danish and for a while English king. Never Swedish.
Very interesting article :-) I had no idea that the community is this large and that there are only two moderators.
The article could have explained the other part of the moderation better - the user moderation provided by up and down votes. Bad comments are not only flagged but also tend to be pushed further down the page towards oblivion, while better comments tend to be lifted up towards the top of the page.
Anyways, King Canute: He was Danish, not Swedish :-)
Thanks to Dan and Scott for their moderation, and whilst the article highlights some of negative aspects of discussion on HN, I for one keep coming here because it's still on average the most reasoned and thought provoking part of the internet I'm aware of - so, thanks to you all for your positive contributions :)
>Then my eyes moved down the thread, where a third user had left a new comment. It read: “King Canute was supposed to stop the tide, you couch alluder.”
It seems to me that comment is a joke. Playfully nitpicking word choice while putting in a bit of banter. But the article seems to be taking the comment as a serious argument/insult.
I can tell you as a person who has been spanked by dang a few times that there truly are people who can be ignorant in the other direction.
I have written a number of replies that to me were simply neutral questions but which felt like an attack, from what I can tell, because they were harshly downvoted and I was even throttled by the mods.
I have to assume that’s on me and I have largely stopped asking for clarification because I seem to do it without sufficient empathy or something.
dang did reply thoughtfully to my inquiries about what I had done and that actually made me feel worse! I know those two are busy doing way more important things and I hate making their day worse.
This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia.
If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all nice and civil.
Political issues are obviously divisive and it's perfectly fine to keep stuff like the El Paso massacre of the front page. But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Yes, articles about, for example, discriminatory ML do often make it to the front page. But in my impression, that topic (as well as employment discrimination, culture-wars-adjacent scandals in tech academia etc) are far more likely to be quickly flagged into oblivion than similarly political takes that just happen to be in line with HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-<x>).
The article impressively articulates what toll divisiveness takes on the moderators: Even if I read the same ugly comments, I am unlikely to experience the sharpness of emotion that apparently comes with considering the community one's baby, and making it's failures one's own. When such divisiveness is then reflected in the "real world" of mass media, the pressure only increases.
But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
... the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
What kind of power do you think we have? We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Not having power, or having less power than before, makes the discourse even more important.
> We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook.
The idea that people should stay off Facebook is part of that narrative. That is how the industry can claim that they are changing the world, but at the same time aren't to answer for any of the changes.
> Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Social influence isn't so much what is said and done in isolation, but what is and isn't accepted. Things like what you see as a problem, why it is a problem and how it should be addressed influences what happens next.
I understood this to mean the power of appreciating the societal consequences of technology, and the responsibility of educating others about those consequences, both positive and negative.
Not much more than anyone else. The few people with power in the world are already known. The parent comment highlights the flaw of moral superiority common in the tech/HN crowd where people tend to feel far more important than they are.
In actuality we're no different than the billions of others on the planet and no amount of Silicon Valley startup experience is going to change that.
Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)
Well, it's certainly going to cause many people to discount your opinion because they presume you have an racist agenda. It looks like a username consciously chosen to create offense while being plausibly deniable. Please be cautious of causing harm to a community for sake of social commentary. Needlessly creating offense is a negative, but maybe you can figure out how to use the dissonance to turn it into a net positive.
I chose it because it was first initial - last name, although I did have a tall German speaking friend who would always say "Nicht lang, aber ganz kurz" every time he'd see me. It took me a while to figure out what he meant. So depending on what you are into, maybe.
Could you clarify why you thought this? What evidence do you have that supports this? The big thread shows that the top comment agrees that 8chan should be left alone. [0] and the comment chain shows that there seems to be something like a significant minority against 8chan, but it doesn’t appear to be a prevailing majority.
It’s a persistent Misreading of Internet forums as a mode of discourse, both in how people consume them and how people participate in them, that we tend to regard their discussion threads as a mechanism for determining group consensus on a topic. Cloudflare is dropping 8chan? Let’s get together and decide whether we collectively think that is a good thing or a bad thing. Once we’ve established that fact, we can move on and refer back to that decision in future discussions, like a mathematical lemma.
If you instead think of a forum thread as an airing of opinions - a chance to find out what is the range of perspectives on the topic that exist in the community, and be exposed to nuances you wouldn’t have thought of on your own, the exercise takes on a different tone. People who came to that thread thinking that it’s obviously a good thing are exposed to arguments that disagree, and vice versa; maybe some people are persuaded to shift their viewpoint, or maybe not, but everybody learns that a topic that they might have assumed was uncontroversial is actually one on which reasonable people might disagree.
It can be jarring for the nerd-inclined to accept that just because they have arrived at their opinions through, obviously, clear rational analysis of facts, that does not mean that everybody else, when presented with the same facts, will necessarily reach the same opinion. The illusion that you can read an HN thread and say ‘well, the pro arguments seemed more coherent and got more upvotes than the anti ones, so presumably the community consensus is pro’ ignores the fact that the anti arguments were also made by members of the HN community, and we’re not bound by collective decision making. You are allowed to read the thread and adjust your own priors and come to your own conclusions, having hopefully been exposed to some perspectives you might otherwise have missed.
Yes, I agree with what you're saying. But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that. I presume they do have evidence and conclusions and I'd like to know about it.
I think that people tend to perceive HN as overwhelmingly believing whatever the opposite of their opinion is any time there is a significant debate on something. Unless there is overwhelming support for our own position, we feel that we are in a hostile environment.
Part of helping to work against this is to challenge and ask for genuine evidence with an open heart. I don't want to assume that that is what the poster is believing, but it also clashes with my understanding of reality.
My assessment of that thread is the same as it always is when a thread gets a huge number of comments: sentiment fits a roughly normal distribution, with the mean position being something approximating "this is a really difficult question and either course of action has significant risks and pitfalls", and every step away from the mean point of view placing increasing importance on one particular aspect and decreasing importance on the other aspects.
If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be a huge number of comments, as we would quickly find consensus and move on to the next topic.
If you look at the top three root comments on this thread:
- The first one [1] points out that different standards are applied between 8chan vs Facebook/Twitter/etc, and disagrees with Cloudlfare's decision on free speech grounds. But then many people disagree and debate this position.
- The second one [2] asks a neutral question about Cloudflare's exposure to legal liability for content on its platform if it is making decisions about what content is allowable or not. Then people discuss that question.
- The third one [3] acknowledges the complexity of the topic, devoting each of the first two paragraphs to what the writer considers to be almost-equally meritorious but opposing points of view, then concludes that on balance the Cloudflare decision is right. But then many people disagree and debate that position.
To properly answer your challenge, one would have to examine all 1400+ comments and classify them by their level of support for/against the Cloudflare decision, which is somewhere between impractical and impossible.
But from my scanning through the comments, I don't see any "prevailing" or "overwhelming" position emerge, and I see many of the commenters wrestling with the inherently vexed nature of the issue.
Sorry, I’m not challenging that requires a thorough breakdown. The challenge is the low bar of whether or not a topic has an overwhelming majority of opinion. Which you agree the evidence doesn’t support on a fairly casual glance and analysis of top voted comments and their responses.
To be clear, my contention is that we should expect there to be no overwhelming or prevailing opinion, and that a quick look at the top-voted root comments and their subthreads seems to support this expectation.
For what it's worth, I think we're taking this discussion a bit too seriously, as the person you were initially replying to was being at least a little humorous and self-deprecating.
The parent comment they replied to made an assertion of the form HN's prevailing view on blah is X, and they replied to the effect of that's funny, my perception was that the prevailing view was opposite-of-X, which is a neat example of the hostile-media effect, and I think the commenter was aware of that.
It's interesting though, that it was the counter-point that you saw the need to challenge, not the original assertion :)
Do you assert that the prevailing or overwhelming opinion was in favour of one particular position? Can you provide evidence for that?
I'm very conscious that we could go around in circles on this :)
If they are of the view that there was no clearly prevailing position on that topic, then we're in consensus and we're all done with the discussion :)
>> But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that.
My read on it is that the person wasn't making an assertion of fact on this, they were making a wry observation that their perception of a prevailing view was the opposite of their parent commenter's perception of a prevailing view, thus demonstrating the hostile media effect in action.
It's interesting how one or two dissenting views amongst a majority neutral or even supportive results in "This place is <insert bias> now!" I wonder why absolute agreement is required for some people to not feel attacked or marginalized.
The current top comment. IIRC it was fluctuating wildly while it was on the front page. After it's gone, comments can get reshuffled, because some people might keep replying/reading/up&downvoting (arguably those with more of a "vested interest" - likely those that disagree with the original article)
I'd approach it from a different point of view (Cloudflare can choose with whom it does business), but still got the same general idea. Interestingly enough, some of the highest-voted posts aren't always the "prevailing opinion" - some times. Lots of comments get ranked highly because others recognize they are cogent and support them. They may disagree, and so comment, but might still vote in favor if the argument is well-reasoned. I do this personally, when I can.
Hacker News doesn't simply arrange comments by the number of upvotes they receive, it also considers the karma of the commenters and the freshness of the comments. Also, when submissions aged and comments settled, the current top comment would always get a lot of upvotes due to its position, and lock them "in place" by the strong positive feedback.
So I doubt if reading the top comments is a very objective method for evaluating controversial discussion (it has a strong correlation, but maybe not the best). Often, I see very heated discussion and competing comments moving up and down until nobody is interested in spending more energy in the debate.
P.S: Invasive profiling and tracking can be a very effective (and possibly, the only) method to uncover insights on the dynamics of online forums like Hacker News. If we track users' every move, it could make great contribution to sociology and psychology researches, and may even help answering unsolved questions in order to building a better community for everyone. Unfortunately, it's too dangerous and unethical to use, I won't support it, but I'm always curious to know the results.
Interestingly, I originally believed HN is pure-upvote based, then I learned it from other HN comments that says karma affects ranking and I believed it.
So I'd say it's just an unsubstantiated rumor/misinformation getting circulated in the comment section from time to time, combined with the impression of HN having a "magic algorithm", so many believed it without any fact-checking. Also, the quick-moving nature of HN comments somehow created a confirmation bias that makes the idea appeared to be true.
I would have believed you, since I feel often the same names are highly upvoted. Though this can have natural causes. Like them writing better comments. Or just popularity based on name recognition. Such feedback loops naturally existing without being explicitly implemented by HN sounds highly plausible.
Is looking at what the top comment says a good way of gauging consensus? I read that thread and walked away with the impression that the majority view was that "deplatforming" 8chan was mostly OK. This because most of the on-topic comments seemed to hold that viewpoint.
I learnt of the news about 8chan from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055 — which was on the HN’s first page before it was replaced by the slightly longer thread you linked to. The top comment in that thread is decidedly against the chans.
There’s also been a lot of mentioning of Popper and his paradox of intolerance in these threads. A post [1] in the thread you referred to (it also was among the top ones when that thread appeared on the front page), for example, began by saying that "Popper taught us that we can't be tolerant towards intolerants" ("taught us" implying that this statement has grown to become general wisdom).
If HN’s prevailing sentiment has since turned in favor of 8chan, I am very happy to hear that.
>Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats.
Those threads wouldn't have passed the thousand comment mark if HN had anything close to a prevailing attitude on the matter. As with many contentious issues, people tend to believe HN is unilaterally biased against them, sometimes to the point of that bias being enforced by the moderators.
>Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.
8Chan and its contingent of neo-nazis were free to communicate as they wished until the site started to become a cultural nexus for racially motivated mass shootings in the US. I don't think deplatforming them was unwarranted. They have the right to their views, but not the right to force any establishment to host those views, even when people start dying over them.
Also, there are still plenty of places on the internet for such people to congregate and communicate. They can start a private Discord server and post manifestos from the race war there if they want.
Yes, and the reality is also that, if you run a company, you sometimes have to do what you have to do. If popular opinion turns on some policy or employee, you may have to make a tough decision whether or not it's something that you would necessarily do in the absence of potential business consequences.
It's easy to second-guess or criticize such actions from the outside, but sometimes you just have to be pragmatic.
Shouldn't they do a bit of research instead? Like, research whether the people attacking your company/employee/policy are actually customers who'd have an impact on your business if you ignored them? The problem with a lot of social media controversies is that no one actually asks whether the people complaining are actually representative of either the majority of the population or the userbase for the affected service or company. In a lot of cases, I suspect if they did ask that, they'd realise that a few people getting annoyed online can be safely ignored and that doing so may earn you more not less business. Or not change a thing.
2019 is the year when reality caught up with the Internet in a way that it hasn't since before social media. Internet culture was never really about unequivocally accepting things, but about thinking for yourself. The need to rationalize the Internet only happened once the Internet started to mean money. Which resulted in many holding opinions that are more the idea of an idea, rather than the idea itself. That will usually mean, at least perceived, "flip-flopping" once something is challenged. And that is to some extent what is happening now.
I've seen both opinions, and many more nuanced variants thereof, argued in a well-reasoned, persuasive manner here on HN.
Adding my voice to the "good riddance" side of the aisle: thanks to what freedom of speech, association, etc. actually mean in the legal / constitutional context, said twats are guaranteed a space for communication - the real world! They can stand on a corner or picket their local City Hall and spout all the hateful nonsense they want.
(They can't, however, verbally assault bus drivers / police officers, or yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or directly incite violence, or disturb the peace at all hours of the night, or needlessly interrupt judicial / civil proceedings, or...point being: even in the US, the exercise of free speech comes with limits and responsibilities.)
Like publicans of yore banning rowdy drunks from the premises (which itself came with political / legal overtones; see https://www.amazon.ca/America-Walks-into-Bar-Speakeasies/dp/...), many owners of online spaces are deciding - as is well within their rights as owners of a private space - to ban users and groups who disproportionately degrade the experience for all others.
(This is my general surface-level opinion, without getting into discussions like https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/rnhzlo around the amplification of extreme voices by short-sighted metrics optimization, or debates on whether providing space for hateful voices effectively denies free speech to the targets of their hate, or explorations of the tradeoffs different open, democratic societies have made around hate speech.)
Private entities can put restrictions on their private space, but doing so implies that they no longer provide the same freedom of speech guaranteed to citizens on public spaces, so they are indeed restricting the freedom of speech.
...and now we've touched on a fundamental philosophical question: is freedom of speech a natural right or a legal right?
There's also potentially an assumption here that free speech is overall reduced through restrictions on it. As a thought experiment: suppose that, within a society of _n_ people, some small _k_ of them are "louditarians": they believe that part of the right to free speech is the inalienable right to speak as "loudly" as possible (for whatever value of "loud" matters over various media) so that no one else can effectively speak. This raises a few difficult questions:
1) To what degree the free speech rights of louditarians and non-louditarians mutually exclusive?
2) If you were a non-louditarian in this society, what would you do?
3) If you had control over this society, would you let the louditarians speak? Would you limit their speaking rights?
My general position here:
1) Almost entirely: when louditarians speak, they prevent the effective exercise of free speech rights by non-louditarians; non-louditarians can only meaningfully have free speech if louditarians are carefully managed.
2) As a non-louditarian, I'd advocate for limits on louditarianism (as best I'm able; this may first require the creation of non-louditarian-only spaces where I can be heard). In the absence of those limits, I'd probably feel like I was being effectively silenced by louditarians.
3) This is the difficult one, and I lean towards "yes - reluctantly, warily, and with limitations". Some examples: maybe louditarians can only speak at certain times (see: nighttime "disturbing the peace"). Maybe the practice of louditarianism is banned from certain spaces, like offices and legislative chambers (see: contempt of court, noise bylaws). My reasoning is utilitarian: I'd rather _n - k_ non-louditarians be able to speak, even if that means curtailing the rights of _k_ louditarians.
In other words: I strongly believe that, by imposing limitations on louditarians, I'm increasing the overall freedom of speech in this hypothetical society. (Not to mention the quality of life, mental health, and vitality of public discourse.)
My secondary reasoning is that louditarians seem to think that speech is a right without responsibilities - in effect, they believe that their right to free speech is more important than that of non-louditarians. IMHO, this violates the social contract of functioning modern societies, and for what? So an obnoxious fringe group can be really, really loud?
Yes may be for vocal speech, but for platforms build around written forms of speech like most online forums, how does that analogy hold since then the right of one to say a thing does not restrict another body's right to say a different thing at the same time.
Generally freedom of speech issues arise largely for written word, than the spoken word.
This metaphor might be saved if you consider amount of (limited) public attention to be analogy to amplitude of sound. You can softly type in your niche forum all you want, but nobody will hear you if there is somebody else screaming into the twitter megaphone nearby.
Ah - the goal is not necessarily the choice / freedom of readers, but that of other writers who might be drowned out, intimidated, or otherwise coerced into silence.
When this happens across a large and popular enough cross-section of media, though, it could easily start to have a noticeable effect on readers.
Hateful voices are identified by passionate assertion.
The passionate asserters arrogate to themselves the power to bound the conversation and otherize dissenters.
That wasn't my attitude at all, it was that it was mixed for the most part. You had to just scroll down a bit, which I do admit takes time and a while.
People are subject to various sampling biases, recentism, and other such biases and give can give them a non-representative sample of any forum. I will admit that HN has become more political since 2013 or 2014 when I joined, but still, compared to any other subreddit or forum it is still mostly better.
You'll probably find with some digging that the "prevailing" attitude depends on time of day, changes completely from similar submissions from one day to the next, and might start out one way in a story only to wildly shift after a certain amount of time or comments.
This is likely for any of the following (non-exhaustive) reasons:
-Different prevailing opinions of people in different parts of the country/world combines with common participation times.
-How likely the title is to attract a specific ideology (or both).
-How long or dense the article is combined with when it hits the front page, as it may get passed around some subgroups informally prior to that point.
-The lag time between early comments and quick agreements and the group of comments that come later in response to those comments with deeper thinking of the topic and/or substantive facts or anecdotes that crystalize opinions on the subject.
Just think, how many times have you read comments about how "all the comments here seem negative, but..." only to count only 3-4 negative comments out of almost a hundred by the time you're reading them? That's because the nature of the discussion changed over time or as people decided it was worth posting that positive comment they hadn't thought worthwhile. It's fairly common.
Pardon me for stating a related opinion here - I tend to like to let my thoughts on these things churn around for a few days before expressing opinions rather than scream immediately about the obvious side.
Something that bothers me about this whole trend of "deplatform everyone whose opinion I don't like" - once some person or group is near-universally deplatformed, they become sort of a boogeyman. You can attribute any position you want to them, and they have no way to confirm or deny that they believe that. You can accuse anybody of secretly agreeing with them or being one of them, and there's no good way to refute it. You can claim that they're secretly everywhere and all-present, and there's no data to confirm or deny that. It feels kind of like a 1984 2-minutes-hate thing where you're expected to scream outrage at something that you can't prove even exists in a meaningful way.
If we expand this thought, we get that even the most outrageously extreme opinions should be allowed to exist and operate openly. If only so that there is a real source that anybody can go to in order to see what they really do and do not believe, in their own words. So they can have an authoritative way to be for or against a person or thing or policy. So anybody can create a estimate of how big and influential they really are, based on objective data.
Going further, certain people in power like to have a voiceless boogeyman that they can use to scare everybody with. What better way to get everyone running around in fear, and getting them to get off of their butts and pull that voting lever for your side, or else those scary boogeymen might get them?
Note that this could apply equally well to a number of different things that have been treated this way over the years, including communism, nazi-ism, Islamic terrorism, white supremacy, etc.
Do I seriously believe this and want to go with it? I'm not completely sure right now. I'd like to let it churn around some more and see if anything else comes out.
>(...) once some person or group is near-universally deplatformed, they become sort of a boogeyman. You can attribute any position you want to them, and they have no way to confirm or deny that they believe that.
Except that hasn't happened, and doesn't happen. No person or group which has been deplatformed is incapable of communicating publicly, and most, if not all, have simply moved to the dark web.
>You can claim that they're secretly everywhere and all-present, and there's no data to confirm or deny that.
Plenty of data exists. Deplatforming doesn't remove all data about a person or group from the entire web in perpetuity, that's not how the web works. Remember "once it's on the web, it's there forever?"
Hell, 8chan is already back online.
> It feels kind of like a 1984 2-minutes-hate thing where you're expected to scream outrage at something that you can't prove even exists in a meaningful way.
You're ascribing an all-consuming and existential power to deplatforming that it doesn't have.
>What better way to get everyone running around in fear, and getting them to get off of their butts and pull that voting lever for your side, or else those scary boogeymen might get them?
But isn't this argument trying to get everyone running around in fear of platforms that remove extremist content, or else the slippery slope of censorship will eventually get them? Why is it that we're not supposed to fear the unchecked spread of hate speech or the ability of extremist groups to organize online, but we're only supposed to fear anyone who wants to stand in their way?
Consider the ulterior motive when the false dichotomy we're presented with in these discussions is always "let the nazis say whatever they like, on all platforms, without restriction, in perpetuity throughout the universe, or else suffer the boot of Orwellian fascism stomping on your heads forever."
Where do you see this? I checked their Twitter and normal URL, and they sure seem to be currently down, and no indication that they've been up since the last set of deplatformings.
Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point. No thanks on debating with that.
There was an HN post only yesterday about the community moving to the dark web[0,1]. Being "back online" doesn't necessarily mean returning to the same URL and host.
>Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point.
And I get the feeling you were being intentionally hyperbolic in order to make a weak and poorly supported point seem stronger than it was, by appealing to fear and cynicism rather than data.
You're probably right that further discussion wouldn't be productive, though.
A good test to see if a topic make sense to discuss on HN is if people are willing to calmly discuss the merits of it.
The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who does not share the same perspective is not welcome in the discussion and the environment from that confrontation produce the opposite of thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Political discussion does not need to end like that and many topics which does not have the above property do pop up in HN.
That might have few false-positives (being wrong when we say "this is good for HN"), but the false negatives would be huge. There's plenty on topic that still devolves into flame wars. Off the top of my head, these seem clearly on topic but discussion devolves: Vim vs Emacs. Javascript vs anything. Static vs dynamic types. Apple's keyboards. OpenAI.
> But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
Absolutely true. The failure of mods (and even pg?) to recognize this is the single disheartening and cynical thing about HN.
PG gets it half right in his advice to "keep your identity small" when he observes that people cannot argue rationally about something that touches on their identity.
But the other half (which PG and the mods get spectacularly wrong) is that what we think of as "political" beliefs, characterized by groupthink and lack of scrutiny/falsifiability, are typically held about every topic other than an individual's area of expertise.
A mature HN reader skilled in technology, is least likely to undergo an emotional/identity-driven flight of fancy about political issues pertaining to technology. An immature HN reader will either be naively apolitical ("Oh, I just build AI tech, it isn't my concern that it's being used to round up refugees for execution") or will turn off the technical insight in favor of loyalty to some political group (repeating talking points, etc.)
Of any community I've been a part of, HN offers the best hope for grounded, rational discussion of important political topics surrounding technology.
Just as someone who stands by and does not try to stop a lynching is guilty of doing nothing, the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference, which is that controversial or troubling aspects/implications of technology or tech firms simply be ignored.
With the advent of Palantir (which has had lots of stage time at Startup School), defense technology became cool. Google under Schmidt became a major lobbying force and defense contractor. Facebook is not far behind, etc. HN mods are constantly surrounded by stories of "successful" firms in the defense contractor space, and just as it is viewed as cynical to be dismissive of the worth of "another startup doing social picture sharing", it is similarly viewed as cynical to question the good citizenship and motives of a firm in the defense/surveillance space.
HN (and HN mods) are a product of the surrounding culture. As a share of GDP, surveillance and defense spending has never been higher during peacetime. In other words, it's a bull market and HN is ultimately a beneficiary of the growth of surveillance and defense tech. Hence its interests are overwhelmingly right wing when it comes to suppressing criticism and threats of that tech.
There are other politically relevant areas for discussion besides the ones I've focused on in this comment. I chose them simply because I think they are top of mind for a lot of people even though the difficult philosophical and political issues relating to them are under active suppression by HN mods.
A mature HN reader skilled in technology, is least likely to undergo an emotional/identity-driven flight of fancy about political issues pertaining to technology
Heh, except for anything programming language related, what the best web framework to use is, whether end-to-end encryption actually works or is just security theatre, etc.
There are lots of technical topics that people attach their identity to and would look indistinguishable from politics to outsiders. And it's the same in any industry. Look at some of the debates in the educational world.
I think pg's "keep your identity small" essay is one of the most insightful and influential (on me) essays I've ever read, and believe it or not (probably some who review my comments history won't) but I try to practice it in daily life. But it argued to choose what you care about carefully, rather than incorporate nothing into your identity at all. It also didn't argue that people can't debate those issues rationally, if I recall correctly, just that it's harder to do so.
the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference
Come now. I'm one of those naughty troublemakers who has sometimes felt that the mods here enforce a particular line of thinking (e.g. Damore is awful and so controversial he can't be talked about, wtf) but you can't possibly claim HN bans politics when maybe 20-30% of the stories discussed here are political in nature.
Emotionally heated technical discussions are perfectly fine though since they are so inconsequential; at the end of the day no one is going to be ostracized or violently attacked someone over their shit choice of spaces over tabs.
> but you can't possibly claim HN bans politics when maybe 20-30% of the stories discussed here are political in nature.
Well, many of the most crucial stories have been nipped in the bud when speculation is flying every which way. I'd argue that the brief moment of uncomfortable uncertainty, when speculation is flying, is actually the most valuable point for analysis in the trajectory of any issue... before those with the power to influence have had a chance to frame the issue the way they see fit, not letting it go to waste to further their goals, etc.
HN mods find this kind of unmoored analysis very discomfiting, and they act with a nearly instinctual zeal to put a stop to it. Political discussion is fine as long as it is in the shadow of a conceptual framework that is considered authoritative. This is by definition a highly conservative, top down, anti-intellectual view. That mods view comments that contradict it as "flame wars" (rude acts) illustrates that they are anchored in an archaic manners culture that worships hierarchy and authority. FWIW we all know there are HN users who can send a message to a mod and get a user shadow banned no questions asked.
Since there are so few mods it is totally plausible that their own psychological quirks and desire to fit in would have a significant impact on their moderation patterns.
> except for anything programming language related, what the best web framework to use is...
I don't think this disagrees with my point, since most often the thing that is being objected to has not been used extensively by the objector. Bike shedding is less a form of political discussion than it is a result of tech culture that seeks authoritative absolutes in a world that only offers relative trade-offs. The worst offenders I've worked with are the sort who really wish there were a religious leader who would declare that programmers who use Mongodb are going to hell :), and they are not people I want on my team.
For moderation, the only fair system is one where all moderation decisions are backed up by a public note explaining what happened and why, both for story promotion, burial, and penal decisions about users such as shadow bans.
Surely being a mod is challenging. I'd expect that combining the challenging roles of judge, jury, and executioner into one would exact an emotional toll.
I fully agree and I think you're making a much more nuanced argument now.
I think HN's moderation has problems with certain topics that have mysteriously become high-voltage in certain social circles, like Damore/men's rights/etc. But crucially, no worse than other general purpose discussion sites and mostly it's still better. You can show dead, view flagged stories etc. The problem is comments that trigger Valley liberals tend to be criticised by the mods on the grounds that other people would respond badly to them, which is annoying, because it's actually those who respond badly that should be given a finger-wag, you'd imagine.
But still that's a far cry from banning politics, which HN doesn't do, and it doesn't even ban discussions on those hot topics, they're just much more likely to be flagged by users. I read HN with showdead turned on and by starting at the (oddly hidden) /active URL, which shows flagged stories, so I have a pretty good sense of how much stuff gets flagged and why. It's a mix of things and not entirely easy to predict. It's not politically biased in exclusively one direction either. To some extent what gets whacked seems to depend on what time it gets posted, ditto for comments. Try criticising the EU on any HN thread during the European daytime and lots of outraged Europhiles will vote you down to -2. Then when the Americans wake up and the "EUropeans" go to bed, the same post will get positively re-rated. It's clearly a matter of voter identity and not the wording of the posts themselves that are the issue.
I used to love Slashdot's style of user-driven moderation. It did require people to pick adjectives to justify their mod decisions, and then the meta-mod process helped weed out abusers. It's a pity it never caught on outside that site. HN's approach is very different, and some days I think it's worse, other days I think it's better. I'm not sure Slashdot had to deal with the same kind of political problems we have today though. Perhaps the closest was open source vs Microsoft, or something like that. I don't recall the same kind of extremist social positions that burn so much bandwidth on all discussion platforms (that don't ban them).
> FWIW we all know there are HN users who can send a message to a mod and get a user shadow banned no questions asked.
That's false. It's remarkable how something false turns into something "we all know". How you can imagine HN is run that way, let alone declaim about it publicly, is beyond me.
Anyone can "send a message to a mod" (just email hn@ycombinator.com). No one can "get a user banned". All anyone can get us to do is take a look at what they're concerned about—and that we do for everyone.
Your psychological analysis of us as discomfited anti-intellectual authoritarians (with quirks) is remarkable too, as it suggests that you have a mind reader. If you had a mind reader, though, you'd have known how false the above smear was, so the odds are that your voyage into the depths of our unconscious is imaginary as well.
> As a share of GDP, surveillance and defense spending has never been higher during peacetime. In other words, it's a bull market and HN is ultimately a beneficiary of the growth of surveillance and defense tech. Hence its interests are overwhelmingly right wing when it comes to suppressing criticism and threats of that tech.
I've seen plenty of criticism of the defense industry here.
Nobody's "keeping the topics sterile". Threads about "the ugly sides of technology" are common on Hacker News. Of the topics you mention, surveillance is frequently and massively discussed; as for Palantir, https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story....
You have focused on the stories being allowed on HN. My issue is with the aggressive throttling and shadow banning of users who post polite comments in support of unpopular* views (rather than just letting the upvote/downvote system do its job).
I'm sure being a mod on HN is difficult, but by punishing users with throttling without explanation is not only rude, it creates the wrong incentive, turning HN into a game of avoiding the throttle bully rather than just participating in discussions with an open heart and mind.
Please add features to make moderation decisions more transparent to the victim and also to the rest of the HN community, so that we can all have more trust in what is going on.
* by unpopular I do not mean abhorrent, racist, or other such content, I mean views that do not fit into the normal left vs right political spectrum or which may require more than one comment to articulate to someone who lacks the required background.
Oh, I didn't realize (and if you said it, sorry I missed it) that you were talking about comments rather than submissions. We rate-limit accounts when they have a history of posting too many unsubstantive comments too quickly, and/or getting involved in flamewars. I know it's annoying and a crude tool, but it's one of few ways we have to address that problem in software. If I knew a less rude way to do it, I'd love to replace it. The overwhelming majority of these cases, though, are ones in which accounts really were abusing the site.
We're happy to remove rate-limiting if people email us and give us reason to believe that they won't do those things in the future. Moreover, we take the penalty off accounts when we notice that they've been contributing solidly to HN for a while, as opposed to whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio. Not that we catch every case of that.
I think each account should show its history of being rate limited, and the mod who initiates it should cite specific comments that were used as evidence of wrongdoing, as well as describe the nature of the wrongdoing.
The mechanism itself isn't necessarily a problem, it's the arbitrariness of it and the lack of accountability. Most people have some degree of accountability in their job. I think HN mods are an exception.
> whatever they did earlier
It would be impossible to audit whether this is being done judiciously or fairly without a page listing all such moderations, their context, etc.
> whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio
I'd argue that moderation itself reduces the s/n ratio. If I notice a pattern where one user continually posts low quality comments, I'll be inclined to ignore or downvote that user. If the user got throttled, then it removes my ability to notice the pattern.
Similarly, if stories are re-titled (a common abuse of moderation) I may not realize I've already read the discussion or the linked content and read/click it again.
Worse yet, re-titling submissions often removes any clue about what made the submission interesting. Ironically the moderation practice of titling the HN submission with the article title introduces more click-baity titles into HN than would exist due to submitters' tactics.
No offense is intended by my feedback. I do think the moderators have a few pretty glaring blind spots and I am hoping that my feedback is well received.
> Most people have some degree of accountability in their job. I think HN mods are an exception.
I might have thought that too before working with a community this large, but the degree to which we're accountable is much more intense than anything I've experienced in a job before. When every misstep is met with instant outrage and hard pushback, you learn to adapt to feedback quickly.
People think we control HN, and to some extent we do, but we are controlled by HN to an even greater extent. This is maybe the most important thing for understanding how HN works. HN consists of a big system (the community) and a little system (the moderators) and the two interact via reciprocal feedback.
There's a third system too (the software), but I left it out for simplicity.
Late to comment here, but wanted to throw in something I haven’t seen in the article or scanning the comments.
I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do.
However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity to spread misinformation into legitimate channels like HN in order to further their particular narratives.
Being patient and polite is one method to deal with misinformation, but a skilled actor is adept at spreading the misinformation while being equally polite and dragging out discussions to the point of attrition.
Unfortunately the Tibetan monastery falls apart when a bad actor like China decides to intentionally take advantage of these polite rules of discourse through subtle manipulation via misinformation, institutionalism, and other means to influence/protect a status quo with false narratives.
It is unfortunate that the HN rules value politeness, tolerance, and patience above eradicating misinformation and ignorance. Bad actors will intentionally take advantage of Tibetan and westernized rules to their own benefit.
We should not restrain ourselves in discourse with one hand tied behind our back when we encounter parties that spread misinformation and perpetuate more ignorance. Identifying individuals that are being less than honest in a firm, direct, and fair manner is more constructive than allowing the charade to continue. Sometimes those comments are flagged as inflammatory or offending the individual spreading bad information because their poorly informed ideas are under attack (rightfully so).
We can’t protect ignorance. All we can do is act with good intentions correspondingly exchanging information. When that like correspondence is repeatedly abused to ignore facts or spread misinformation, we must act instead of wait for good intentions to reveal themselves (a bad actor has no intentions of changing) and meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people have read and latched onto their misguided theories.
If the individual is being above the board, the facts will come to light and the situation is usually self-resolving. If the individual cannot defend their position, that is a good indication the HN community is perhaps better without that individual.
You may say that we should strive to create a culture of politeness and respect. I agree in so far as we must then come to terms with the fact that culturally, deception and dishonesty are also taken as being impolite and disrespectful—which presents a bit of a conundrum if we are paying close attention to our virtues.
Random downvotes without comments say you can’t think of a good response or reason to support your opinions.
There are a number of problems with this, but the main one is that people's perceptions of dishonesty, disingenuousness, and manipulation in others are terribly exaggerated. Odds are that the other person simply disagrees with you—and if their view seems obviously outrageous, wrong, or stupid, this is because people are much more divided than we realize. Disingenuousness exists, but the assumption of disingenuousness in others is nearly always wrong and comes out of a failure to understand how different someone else's experience is.
Users are much too quick to reach for explanations like "you must be a foreign agent" when even the public record of the other user's comments—let alone the private data we look at—show that to be trivially unlikely. Foreign agents exist, of course, but foreign agents as an explanatory device for things one finds provocative online is, to a first approximation, a fiction. Same for astroturfing, shills, and the other things users accuse each other of in arguments.
That doesn't mean ignoring the possibility of manipulation—it just means that we should look for evidence. I can tell you that when we look for evidence, we basically never find it. Even if we're being fooled by clever manipulation in some cases, it's painfully clear that in the overwhelming majority, there's no there there. What there is, is people reaching for 'disingenuousness' as a simple explanation for what they find painful and offensive.
That assumption blocks any solution. There's no way to resolve pain and offense without recognizing the experiences of the other side.
You mention China. I can tell you that all the flamewars I've seen about China since they started blazing in the last year or so have been examples of what I've said here.
China was chosen as the example “agent” in this case because they are a nation that is emblematic of manipulation (in currency, IP theft, free markets, etc.). China was also chosen for the historical imagery, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee while capturing a peacefully sovereign Tibetan territory in 1959 and killing 87,000 directly in the conflict and 430,000 dead in the ensuing occupation.
That is to say that China was chosen for reasons beyond the literally obvious example of state agents. I know from experience state actors are rare, as well as being rare to detect. My rub is that latching onto China or Russia state agents as the only concerning actors that spread misinformation is not accurate. Somewhat more common are paid or unpaid social media shills/trolls that have many generalized accounts to forcefully influence topics.
But in my experience misinformation is spread most by those with vested interests, deeply gross misunderstandings of the world, strong attachment to personal biases they only believe and never bother to confirm or disprove empirically, reductionist and oversimplifications and un-nuanced tidbits learned from an introductory course of some topic, and so on.
These individuals overwhelmingly choose to ignore facts presented to them and espouse their incorrect views (perhaps hiding behind politeness or qualifications or an institutional authority). The view that such an individual will eventually with enough patience, see truth... is rather intractable and untenable.
I’m afraid you have latched onto but one example, possibly missing its purpose of imagery in the comment and neglecting to consider the other examples of bad information and bad actors which are actually fairly common that spread damaging tropes (that while inaccurate, continue to circulate nonetheless).
You've made this so general that it applies to literally everyone in every contentious argument. We all have vested interests, deep misunderstandings, strong attachments, personal biases, oversimplifications, and everything else you mention. So in that sense, yes: there's falsehood and misinformation all over the place. But I don't think seeing others as the problem is going to get us very far; seeing others as the problem largely is the problem.
That really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, I’m afraid. It seems to offer a form of cover and protection for views that are known the be problematic and continue to spread. Partisanship and hyper-focus on views corresponding your identify are bad, we should not provide cover for it and partisan views not supported by facts via polite discourse. We should not allow these poorly supported views to spread. It seems HN has no actual stance or response that directly addresses this issue. Some of HN’s guidelines provide shelter for enabling unsupported views. Choosing to the focus the light inwards on yourself doesn’t really solve or address this issue in the modern age of misinformation, and the Tibetan analogy was chosen to illustrate the dangers by turning inward too much and ignoring the dangers. Does that make sense? I think I’m being fairly direct and specific here.
Of course people post "unsupported views". We don't ban users for being wrong—who would be left if we did?—and we don't have a truth machine.
When people argue like this, in my experience, what they mostly want is for us to ban the views they disagree with. We can't do that. Running a complex community like HN is nowhere near that simple.
I agree that is not a good reason to ban everyone that is simply mistaken. But I have seen users flag one another for absolutely no reason other than they dislike their views being colored as incorrect, or dishonest when the behavior is repeated again and again. That is rather absurd and provides shelter for ignorance. I’m sure those people are very intelligent in their actual area of expertise, but their immaturity shows through in other areas and it’s rather toxic to witness a mod stepping in to say their pride has higher priority than letting someone directly confront their ignorance with facts and truth. Yes this is the internet, we all have better things we could do with our time than debate with strangers. However this also one of the most intellectual and influential havens for discussing tech and nearly anything else found to be interesting.
Modern times have also brought on about a host of new issues where technology can be both beneficial and a detriment to society. The rapid spread of misinformation is a major technological and social issue. How are we going to navigate the new era that is becoming more complex, conflicts are increasing, and people are becoming more partisan and incorrectly reinforced because technology and modern life makes it very easy to filter out the inconvenient facts that they need not be confronted with?
My point is we should not be assisting the enablement of misinformation. Being a hotbed for powerful people and powerful ideas, there is a certain amount of responsibility that needs to be accepted in preventing the spread of misinformation. Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.
Alternatively, those that don’t like an atmosphere where less than well informed views are actually challenged may very well choose to leave on their own accord, and they will no longer be spreading misinformation here. Bans are probably not needed at all really, we just shouldn’t be enabling.
> Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.
Very well put. This is my biggest concern as well. HN mods prevent resolution by punishing participants in back and forth discussion for being part of a “flame war”. It is an incredibly coarse and un-nuanced view of debate.
> But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Which is exactly how we end up with endless articles and 'discussions' of boeing 737s on 'hacker' 'news' by people who think they are pilots and aircraft designers (hint: they are none of those). I would bet the vast majority of people on 'hacker' 'news' are not responsible for any of this, they just like to beat these topics into the ground, uncorrecting each other along the way.
I really dislike this gatekeeping. Threads on aviation in particular seem to draw people with a phenomenal amount of knowledge. Even if they're not professional pilots/plane designers, just very well-read amateurs, why is their information less valuable? Encountering people with insane amounts of niche knowledge is one of my favourite aspects of this site.
The political discussions that make their way into HN are very US-centric and that excludes me and countless others who actively participate here. A lot of such discussions are not real enough to me - they are problems of a much more privileged world. If we were to have truly political discussions, we'll need to include all the other countries of the world, which none of us would want. There are other places where political conversations are dime a dozen, but no other place like HN for technology, and things that "gratify one's intellectual curiosity".
I do think it is an underappreciated point, but also arguably why politics should be part of discussions. Not having to talk politics is really something that is earned. It is when you have a solid enough foundation to your field or profession that you feel secure enough in to not have to address it. In computing or software, we don't really have that. So people run out of vocabulary rather quickly, ending up in arguments like nationalism or free speech because there often isn't an intermediate layer of something like regulation or duty that you can be discussed by everyone. That is ultimately more a factor of the "everything goes" attitude, because if "everything goes" everything is also relevant to the discussion.
Hear, hear. The job of HN is not to discuss every topic worth discussing. It is to discuss those topics (intelligently) which few (if any) other places on the internet have discussion of by an informed group.
That's like saying because we can't fix everything, we should fix nothing.
There's no need to include everything. HN is selective. It's in English. The reason it can't have posts about the responsibility of SV towards the tech and social impact they make is because that would pierce the veil of fake narrative that supports SVs continued unexamined influence.
The reality is the mods are not the tip of the spear. There are others mods above them who intervene to set policy and crush off plan posts. A truth this place can never acknowledge.
Totally agree, my only wish is the mods would 100% stop editing the original link titles. They should respect the original authors title for starters, and the new title isn’t always better. Whether or not the title is click bait-y, well leave they to the community to decide (aka if the article has merit etc)
It’s also confusing if you've already clicked on it and checked it out - suddenly there is another similar interesting story - oh wait nope it’s the one I already checked out.
> Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia.
Indeed, I will happily fan-boy for the New Yorker here, they usually succeed in capturing the nuances of topics I happen to be familiar with.
Gell-Mann seems more applicable to mass market news outlets; whereas NYer writers will often spend months -> years researching a subject.
I don't think Hacker News is diverse enough for most political conversations to be useful. There's biases just because we're heavily skewed towards engineers, but there's subtler problems too. For example, how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective.
Hacker News cannot solve all the world's problems. Not even all the problems related to technology. It's ok to focus on the things we can do effectively. HN isn't the only forum to discuss important issues.
> how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective.
I can't say I know what that is, but are you sure about this? The HN community is overwhelmingly not in California, and comments about California seem to me to skew to the critical and negative.
I'm not sure, but I would eat my hat if it's not the single largest voting block. The influence is not about praise or criticism, but what is easily understandable or what resonates with lived experience.
There's a lot of different people on HN. I don't mean to say we're all the same. It's just that voting is a low-pass filter.
I was going to say it's for sure not the single largest voting block (but don't eat your hat! that can't be good for you). But I suppose it depends on how you define "block".
Inverting the question, do you think it would be possible to do accurate geographic clustering based solely on HN voting patterns (ignoring time of vote)? I'm doubtful. I think the problem with calling California the "single largest voting block" is that it's so far from homogenous. While California probably has a slightly different ratio of clusters than other states/countries, I suspect the clusters themselves are essentially non-geographic. It would likely be the biggest fiasco in the history of HN, but it would be wonderful to see what patterns could be pulled out of the private voting data if you were to make it available to researchers.
"Gackle replied. “We can’t stop that any more than King Canute”—the ancient Swedish king who demonstrated the limits of his power by trying, in an ironic spirit, to command the sea—“could stop the waves.""
Canute was King of England, Denmark and Norway. He was not Swedish. I think that The Newyorker is trolling Hacker News by dropping this quote in.
I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.
I would argue that HN culture is evolving within the culture it exists in. I don't recall the beginning of the decade having so many intersections of tech and everyday life. In the beginning of the decade, Google wasn't known to have paid off high level employees for sexual harassment, Facebook wasn't known to have hordes of contractors watching horrible stuff for their job, no one knew the good and bad effects of the 'gig economy' yet, etc.
That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard NPR tell listeners they could visit "their FB" or follow them On Twitter in 2010. I got a visceral bad feeling.
In the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was not to disclose personal info on the internet because it was understood that "the IP stack" was designed with maximum liberty and tolerance for all kinds of garbage (with personal tools to filter, and the assumption of personal responsibility). Comparing the dynamics of Usenet vs. FB is quite revealing and brings insight into the discussion about distributed vs. centralized power. We've dumbed everything down to the point of ridiculousness.
Not the person you're replying to but I wrote a script to track when I got upvoted and downvoted and that parsed my comment tree for the past 24hr.
The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me.
This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
I looked at my overall karma once per minute and keeping a running total in a text file as well as the increase/decrease from the last file.
For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates.
Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities
I rarely get downvoted, but I feel that most of the ones I have received are unjustified. It usually comes from posting nuanced details that go against a prevailing narrative in a contentious thread.
I'm at the point now where I immediately hide submissions that seem like they have anything to do with American health care or American transportation.
> certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.
Typically when I find my statements are downvoted it is because I had a quip that could reasonably be construed as negative, combative, etc. I tend to edit and remove those bits.
When I find things to be "reflexively" (probably the wrong word) downvoted, it is in regards to simple questions. Simple example, there was an article regarding Manning's confinement yesterday. One top-level comment asked "Why is this not cruel" to which I asked the opposite, "How is it cruel?" - simple as can be. I watched that one go down to fairly negative, then bounce back up, settling on a score of 0. I don't care about the score itself so much as what that delta represents.
Perhaps I'm just too narrow minded, but I fail to come up with a reason to downvote a simple question asking for perspective that doesn't involve me reading some kind of intent. One of the core tenets of this site is to assume good faith, assume the most charitable viewpoint. When I say that I believe HN culture is dying, it is this that I am talking about. There seems to be less and less good faith discussion as time goes on.
As always, I'd love for an alternative perspective that I'm (probably) missing here.
It might be a feature of HN believing that HN is becoming more combative and snarky. Hence, simple questions like "How is it cruel?" are more often read like a quick snarky comment instead of like a simple honest question.
In other words, perhaps the perception of a drop in HN quality makes people more likely to reflexively assume bad faith.
Regardless of one's political opinions, it seems relatively uncontroversial that answering the question "how is A not X?" with the followup question "how is A, X?" has contributed very little to the conversation. "X", in this case "cruelty", might be a debatable quality, but it isn't as though we have no information about the situation. Google is chock-full of different arguments for and against Manning's various punishments. (No links from me, because that would make my opinions obvious.) If you were genuinely curious, that would have been a place to start.
The original question seems fine as a conversation starter, since for one thing it identifies a particular motivated action that most humans would agree is cruel: 'admittedly imprisoning someone for "coercive" reasons', but if the only responses it had inspired had been more meta-conversation like yours then it would have been suitable to flag the whole subthread. Fortunately there were lots of thoughtful responses.
I am afraid you are correct. As popularity rises, degredation of discussions(and never-ending o-t tangents) increase. A write-up of the quality mods in the New Yorker will not change that tide, IMO.
It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!
The external culture war is a serious problem for anyone running a functioning discussion site. HN keeps it at bay but ultimately everything interesting is in some sense political. The problem with the culture wars is making everything factional as well. Not to mention the rampant dishonesty and bad-faith arguing.
As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.
Then the beginning of the decade yes... but really not any different over the past 7 years or so (source: HN reader since the beginning).
2007-2012: The first 5 years everything was new and cool and shiny and we were just going thru the economic crash.
2012-2017: growth and scaling. Slightly more political posts, but that's mostly because tech and politics mix a lot more then the previous 5 years.
2017-present: stabilization. An even mix of similar articles, voting sentiments, repetitive opinions. The main thing missing is actual NEW ideas. We get tropes on "AI will rule the world", "10 reasons we need universal basic income", "why self driving will/will run the roads in 5 years", "FANG is evil", etc... all very predictable dicussions.
HN culture or SV culture? I suspect it may be far more a reflection of a) which continents are awake/asleep and b) the increasingly international nature of HN compared to early years.
In its earliest years HN felt to me to be a decidedly American place, steeped in the politics, culture and views you might expect of its origins. Now, there's far more Europeans, Asians - and increasingly Chinese as HN apparently isn't firewalled. The attitudes to many things have moved to being more international, whether that's in terms of politics, healthcare and regulation, or simple corrections to the trivial but often fascinating things that are just done or viewed differently around the world.
Sometimes the split shows up quite clearly with votes going one way when it's mostly the US awake, and quite another once Europe and Asia has had a chance. Early GDPR discussions were probably the clearest follower of this pattern. :)
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness.
I recently started contributing on another online community, a Slack, and I've found the rhetorical habits I've unwittingly cultivated creating a weird sort of mood. Nothing I'm saying is wrong, but HN has managed to make me somewhat oblivious to tone.
It's exactly as she describes, 'reckless'. I dare to go places that will rile people up. The silence that met my initial posts was deafening.
I initially wanted to retreat back to my familiar communities, Quora, HN. But I've never backed down from this kind of challenge before and I'm not about to now. I'm slowly managing to discover better 'hygiene' so I can fit better into this particular community of wonderful people.
But I wouldn't give back my participation in HN for anything. More than any other place I've ever found, HN makes me feel like I belong.
I may be misinterpreting what you're saying, but just in case: the critique isn't about "style", as in being too direct or offensive or anything like that. It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
> It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
Sure, that critique is all over the piece, and quite valid. So valid that calling attention to it again feels like beating a dead horse.
It was the 'performative erudition' part I wanted to share my experience with. HN has changed the way that I communicate and think, in ways that I couldn't put a finger on until I started reading the article. It's changed how I come across at work, how I interact with my friends and family.
> Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Why do people insist on things being pretty? Obviously they're overcompensating for deficiencies in some other area. I'll stop now before you start thinking I'm serious.
I have to say I love the meta-nature of this comment. Truly. I feel that the comment in the article about "performative erudition" does point to something -- something that I certainly do on HN!! -- that you are also doing in this comment while you say that the sentence in the article is about something else. You are not wrong about your point (HN sure does love its superficial legalism and uber-rationality) but the way you've said it is exactly the HN style!
817 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadIsn't it quite ironic to see the article suggesting that HN top link might include Medium post. I've usually read not-so-positive feedback about Medium posts. Isn't it the case?
A publication's "editorial voice", ranging from grammar and typography, to selection and discussion philosophy, are significant. There's a reason we see things as "New York Times" or "Fox News" or "Mad Magazine" or "Cosmo" or "The Economist" or "Soldier of Fortune" in voice or tone.
This is harder to pin down with blogs and social media, though distinctions can emerge, whether through self-selection, path-dependency, gross scale, algorithms, or some combination of the set.
Prejudice can be misused, but its advantage (to the judger) is that it makes judgement cheaper by reducing the set of what needs to be considered, at least for an initial judgement.
That's characteristic of any domain in which there's an information overload, or in which distinctions are subtle and difficult to identify initially. And argument, by the way, for dealing with copious information less by enhanced processing and more by expedited (and cheap!) discarding heuristics.
Since anyone can write for medium, and anyone with an HN account can post medium links here, there are huge amounts of medium content. So we see a lot of that 90%, as well as the 10% that's useful.
Articles on Medium range from quite insightful to clickbait junk, as is the way of most open-ish access platforms.
This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and constantly look for better ways.
What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists.
There was also the pervasive sense of being on the side of the rest of the team, even though highlighting their contribution was the first thing Katie Bouman did. And at least Andrew Chael, who did write the plurality of the code in the GitHub repo, did come out strongly in favor of her and was horrified of the hate she got. Quote:
"So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop."
(https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854496183091...)
It's curious that, at least in my subjective impression, the tech community has a far larger problem with women than any of the other groups that have traditionally suffered discrimination: racism and especially homophobia really are extremely rare, at least overtly. But the uglyness Katie Bouman, or Ellen Pao, or Marissa Meyers brought out seems to be alive and well.
Note most of the acclaim aimed at the scientist, rather than the team, was from the media. Whom as usual, likes to omit their own role.
If it is the case that she didn't contribute the most complicated stuff, then I can assure you it is not the first time in history that the face of a project is not the one that did the hardest work. Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
This is all said with the caveat that I didn't follow this 'controversy' and never cared to look at the contribution distribution of all the project members.
No. But if someone else checked the repo, I'd be interested. That said the media would be less likely to publish 'this young man took a photo of a black hole'.
> Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
Yep. Also mentioned in my comment you're replying to.
I think of this conflict as 'developers versus the media' - the media having pushed the narrative of 'a young woman who took a photo of a black hole'.
The media (who like to remove their own influence from discussions) have turned it into 'sexist developers vs young female scientist'. They've been very successful at doing that, yet again, because, well, they're the media. It's easy to shape a story when you control all outlets deemed noteworthy enough to cite.
And because, well, it was true ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I. So even if you disagree with the characterization, it certainly wasn't just the media, but also your fellow developers. It was a shameful moment (one of many, most of a similar kind) for HN that reflected horribly on developers, and the media called it up on that, as they should.
What you’re saying here is: because the opinion of me and my friends is objectively correct and yours is not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, if I didn't think my opinion was correct it wouldn't be my opinion.
I could only recommend to the curious readers of HN, if they are interested and certainly if they think they should voice their "strong reaction," to try looking at the rather vast scholarly literature that research has produced over the past decades. It's not a matter of a difference of opinions among people with equal knowledge of the subject matter, but usually one between those who have more knowledge and those who have less.
That’s a bold claim.
> the gut reaction of those who read that discussion also shows that at least some developers felt that way, if not in general, then at least in that particular case.
I can’t follow you here.
No, I think this is the consensus scholarly view.
> ...because if a man’s achievement is highlighted, the fact that a man did it isn’t highlighted, which isn’t exactly the case for women (apparently a woman in the team suffices for an achievement to be credited to a woman), making these two kinds of articles about fundamentally different things: “X was achieved” vs. “A woman achieved X”.
You dispute that claim, and say the consensus scholarly view is otherwise?
The media spun the story in the second place (the incredibly simplistic 'developers hate women') because the media dislikes people arguing with it and because sexism generates clicks.
People will praise who they want to, and will bother to verify, only if it disagrees with their prejudices in the first place.
There's also a difference if those prejudices are based on something like past achievements of the praised person, or on something unrelated, like being a woman.
Here's a crazy idea. Maybe any of the numerous other people who worked on that project were pissed too that she was given all the attention, and they had every right to be.
If someone pored over a guy's github, nobody would care, and certainly no random woman would jump to his defense. Somehow this is proof that men oppress women.
Outside of it it's just mostly unwelcome noise. If you have a suggestion then do the PR and get your code reviewed in the same way.
When that story was on the front page it was one of the few times I've thought about leaving HN. It was embarrassing.
The entire fiasco was mainly caused by the obsession of the media to put women at the forefront.
She did great work, and so did dozens (hundreds?) of others on that project.
She wasn't deserving of the level of credit that the media gave her when they cast her as the star, visionary, and quasi-leader of the whole enterprise.
Nobody was ever against Katie. They were against the way the media handled the story - by slanting the story to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the discovery itself, and then calling everyone who had a problem with that sexist while entirely eliding their own role in the controversy.
It was entirely a conflict between the media and the people calling out the media for obvious bias. As always, the media's response was to build a narrative where their critics were just trying to hurt [insert victim/victim group here].
I tend to believe her colleagues over random misogynistic Internet fuckbags.
It seems like rather than own up to the fact that yes there were people that were remarkably awful to her and attempting to downplay her contributions it's easier to just blame the media.
It's frankly disgusting.
99+% of the people who were critical of that situation, including me, never did anything against Katie. I don't have numbers but I suspect 99% also had nothing against Katie opinion-wise either. It's entirely against the notion that one person should be selected for media celebration entirely based on their genetics. That's wrong, wrong, wrong and I'll argue against it proudly any day.
What's disgusting is the media's taking this insignificant background noise 1% and making the entire story about it, specifically in order to distract from the criticisms leveled against them.
It's about the constant refusal to even address the media's choice when they elevated her. A refusal that is still going on in this thread.
Was it right to elevate her like that solely because of her gender? Or did the media do a wrong?
It just comes off as a "In your face! Racist white people." I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
It shouldn't, though.
Mentioning gender in relation to a woman's accomplishment is not an implicitly anti-male statement, nor is mentioning race in relation to the accomplishment of a person of color an anti-white statement. Nothing in any article about Katie Bouman was disparaging of men or white people or anyone.
>I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
Meaning no one who disagrees with your opinion on the matter is sane? Yet reacting defensively and interpreting any mention of gender or race as hostility doesn't seem particularly sane to me.
The undo link says "unvote" when you upvoted, and "undown" when you downvoted. And yeah, after every single click on one of these arrows, I check the undo link to make sure I clicked the right one.
The more you know - Thanks!
It's easy to think moderation might be too active (or not active enough) though it's not us sitting on their seats.
(Though I agree with the critique that the site is "too orange" and I'm all too happy to use the available customization option)
In addition, HN doesn't get much of the "classic" troll crowd (no matter if 4chan/8chan/outright real Nazis/gamergate) or Trump supporters - from the occasional politics thread aside, there's nothing much of interest for them here, and so the biggest blocks of trolls simply stay away.
The moderators here are very good at doing work upfront to save themselves work later, by making the site infertile ground for troublemakers.
this is why.
"If you voted for Trump, you're at best a troll but most likely a Nazi"
The latest HN comment dump I could find with a quick search was from May 2018 [1].
There were 237,646 comments in total that month, made by 36,358 unique users. 75% of users posted 5 or fewer comments, with a median of 2. The most prolific user wrote 798 comments, dang managed 6th place with 425 comments.
Even if the numbers doubled since then, there is no need to moderate millions of users, as only (well) tens of thousands of them are actively participating.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6v685o/complete_h...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304326
But regarding the article: I don't think HN is getting worse. But why it might look like it is is that it has become a very very busy site - which makes it seem hectic and thus might appear "worse".
Joking aside, if there were to be forum awards, Hacker News would top it all the time. Best moderated, high level, most interesting discussion forum award goes to ...
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093 from way back when.
Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?
https://blog.tildes.net/
https://docs.tildes.net/
You may also like Lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/
Overall it is a lot better. The topics, timeline, moderation, structure and even comments. And a think some people might enjoy that.
But it also sort of highlights the greater problem which is that most people who frequent these forums these days just aren't that interesting, or interested. Or it is at least hard for those who are to show that and get something out of it.
I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet".
> I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts.
In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it?
Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course.
> The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
A perfect example is the other poster who basically got called to task by dang for asking for sources to a claim. Dang characterized it as "unsubstantive" and lowering the signal to noise ratio.
For myself, a reasonable discussion is one which it's expected to be asked to cite sources. A community in which not doing so gets you called out.
Discourse on HN is too touchy feely, people are generally afraid to challenge others in a straightforward manner, so they end up using a lot of words to do so. It's like being in that meeting where the manager is using flowery language to extol the virtues of the company, when in reality everyone is there for reasons that don't involve the company itself.
I just kind of tolerate it, but in no way, shape, or form, do I view the discourse on HN as generally being honest or useful.
I'm glad your favorite community has sustained itself for 20 years, but with this statement you remove it so far from the category HN belongs to that it's incommensurable.
It's great that there's room for lots of different internet communities to thrive with different strategies. I've always felt there's room for many more—there are lots of opportunities for communities to start with different initial conditions and grow into qualitatively different things. I wish people would start them. But let's not pretend that they all have the same problems. HN's category is that of the large, public, anonymous internet forum, and all its hard problems stem from that category.
(In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
One of the other forums I frequent would be chock full of pricks by HN standards. They are known for being jerks on other forums that cover the same interest. It's still a very good community as long as you don't take everything personally.
≥What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.”
I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN.
Often I kill my comment before I actually click "Reply", especially if I know my comment will be too divisive, or if it doesn't add to the quality of previous comments.
Sometimes I upvote a comment because it helped me question/ change a personal dogmatic view.
The guidelines are somewhat of a joke, and are only followed (even by mods) when it is convenient to do so.
For example, I've been repremanded in the past by our supreme leader dang for posting comments like "do you have a source for that?", because he assumed it was too hostile while he completely ignored his own 'hacker' 'news' guideline of 'assume good faith' (I was literally asking someone to source the information/argument they posted here.. but hey good job on completely derailing that discussion dang!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428
> Ok, but "got any sources for that?" is a rather unsubstantive contribution, and then going on tilt about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines outright. Would you mind raising the signal/noise ratio of what you post here?
It seems the attempt to correct a low "signal / noise ratio", in this instance, seems to be back firing.
No, I didn't include a link because I was posting from my phone, and "hacker" "news" doesn't include a sane way to search through thread history for specific comments. I'm glad someone else went through the trouble.
But hey, you're free to continue to not assume good faith, right?
This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.
As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
Also add me to the people who didn't know it was "Dan G" for the longest time and loved "dang" as a name.
His go to is to call it conspiracy regardless of what's actually being said.
When I get something wrong, I'm happy to admit it and correct it. At the same time, people make all sorts of claims about horrid things we supposedly did, and most of those leave out important information.
Either way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds.
you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution".
You are now telling me I should be citing a source.
If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster.
I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubstantive if there's a claim against you personally?
As for allowing others to make up their mind, that would be what the poster in the other thread was presumably trying to do, and you shut him down. And that's really the point.
> Edit: lol, downvotes for asking for sources? "Hacker" "news" is just full of gems!
... that caused me to reply as a moderator, because that breaks more than one of the site guidelines, as well as being lame. This is routine moderation.
Both the original commenter and now you have given a distorted version of what happened there, as anyone who looks at the original thread can easily see. If that's what you have to resort to in order to come up with examples of moderator abuse on HN, we must be doing pretty well. Better than I'd have expected, in fact, given that we've posted 38,000 of these and no one bats a hundred.
The only thing we have in common is not really liking your work as a moderator, and the way it's stifled discourse on HN. You have to go to other places for that, I mostly use HN as a news source.
asking for sources is not unsubstantive, not in the least. It's one of the most substantive things you can do, both as someone providing information, and as someone trying to evaluate the information being provided.
The fact that you've come to feel that asking for sources is less important than not making others feel uncomfortable goes a long way towards why I don't view HN as a place for decent discourse.
Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.
Enough HN members are happy to feed the trolls (even if unwittingly) and encourage more without removing them.
Downvoting, flagging works even when the mods are not around. I am pretty sure that a comment flagged too many times is greyed out and almost invisible (and that happens without mods).
Again, if we are to believe there are only 2 full time moderators on HN for the amount of comments going every single minute, it's virtually impossible to rely on mods alone for proper discussions: simple maths.
I run a group of 20,000+ people, and if I didn't set the tone on what the group is about, regularly, the value of it would drop to nothing.
I love my community. But I absolutely recognize the role I play in keeping it a nice place to visit.
The community helps... but someone needs to be doing some policing to limit the effect of the bad actors or the community starts to get pissed off/wander off/degrade into pettiness.
in many discussion forums... that are not HN. There is only one HN, so you can't make comparison with other communities out there.
But that was almost a decade ago. The mindset of the tech community has gotten far more political (not a bad thing, but a natural consequence of "software eating the world"), and it's really hard to imagine that HN would have turned out like it is today through self-policing alone.
Even if we assume HN were to collectively agree on taking a hard stance against anything political in nature (which still seems to be the case sometimes, given that the mods have to occasionally step in and manually de-flag and protect threads), that would've likely turned off a number of current HN users who see HN as a great place to discuss tech's greater implications and role in society.
Nowadays the mod system remains but the community has moved on and although the stories are good, there is no intellectual discussion.
A similar thing happened to OSNews. Another news aggregator I used to visit a lot.
Unless you're presenting yourself and your own comment history as an example of the problem... in which case, the opportunity is always there to try a bit harder.
It isn't, because unless you've been lurking for years or have an alt account, you're just being an elitist poser. People have been complaining about HN "turning into Reddit" for so long that it used to be listed in the guidelines as a common, semi-noob delusion.
>Why do so many of your comments in your post history denigrate women and minorities?
Point them out to me, please. I'm usually defending women and minorities here, and often getting downvoted for the effort.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's easy when a community is small. The more prominent the community gets, the more it tempts people who enjoy stirring things up.
In the end I'm not sure if any moderation scheme can prevent that, to be honest. There will always be people who consider it a challenge to see what they can get away with, either by trying to stay just under the moderators' radar or by returning every time they're banned. Provocation makes people defensive, and then their own replies turn harsh, contributing to a negative perception of the community.
I do hope that this community avoids it as long as possible. I've discovered it only recently and am enjoying it. But past experience suggests that it, too, will one day degrade.
Also, I think that it's pretty special that the vast majority of the comments on this article is people disagreeing about what HN's prevalent opinion is. It's easy to have all kinds of opinions when you don't moderate (eg 8chan), but it's hard to moderate a forum and at the same time not let it become a monoculture.
I've seen comments claiming that HN is a neoliberal / libertarian cesspool, and I've seen comments claiming that anything mildly non-PC gets downvoted into oblivion. If both the far left and the far right feel like HN represents the "other side's" opinion, then maybe there's a pretty decent middle ground being struck.
Same. Thanks, dang. I deeply appreciate your work here.
I think having the right set of rules for the site's discussion (maintaining of which is a moderator job) and having a generally "good" population as an initial condition were the keys to setting the mods up for success. The mods' job then becomes to maintain the community's high level of discourse.
I see a lot of comments which violate the site guidelines in a fairly minor way. To me, strict moderation would involve curtailing those (to the site's detriment in general, a la Reddit, Wikipedia, or stackoverflow). Instead, I think we have strict guidelines and fairly tolerant moderation thereof. (I also find it interesting and telling that I felt normal to say "we have" in the previous sentence, rather than "news.yc has".)
PS: This is not meant to take anything away from what the mods do. It's critically important and they do a good job from my viewpoint. I think I got my hand slapped once in a decade (and I don't even now recall what it was, but I do recall that I agreed that I deserved it and it was handled reasonably).
Thanks dang for doing a great job.
Thanks Paul Graham, @dang and @sctb for HN.
I think sometimes overly sensitive moderation is not good.
Thanks, dang. A triumph of moderation.
That said, it's better to have moderators who care than moderators who don't.
Personally, I like Dan's "Nietzschean flamewars" phrasing, and I sort of agree that "trying to get him to conform to slave morality" was a personal swipe. But if so, only barely. This could well be an example of overly sensitive moderation.
The real problem with that thread (in my opinion) is that Rayiner's comment was allowed to stay flagged to death. One might not agree with his opinion, but it's a viewpoint worthy of reply (as you did) rather than censorship.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13094354 is the comment, which I find entirely reasonable but obviously people disagreed, or at least it was considered off-topic)
There is no reason, based on the HN guidelines, that the referenced post should have been downvoted, let alone flagged. Whoever did so abused their power to make such decisions.
It's even more surprising since HN had the "vouch" feature since before Dec. 2016 [0]. My best guess is that people might have reflexively downvoted/flagged upon seeing the opening sentence of "Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11589410
--
[0] - Not sure what's the power of a vouch relative to a flag or a downvote, but my impression is that it's stronger.
[1] - https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/
I'm coming to the opinion that downvoting should not grey out posts, or that there should be some number of downvotes (greater than 1) required before it starts. It should be harder to suppress constructive, on-topic posts just because a bunch of people don't like the point.
This "drive by down-voting" happens regularly here. I've had comments downvoted within seconds of posting--clearly the voters could not have had time to read the entire text. They see a few key words that trigger them, hit the arrow, and move on to the next job. Unfortunately, there's no way in JavaScript to tell whether someone's actually read the thing they're down-voting, so we get these knee-jerk keyword-based brigades.
To test this, sometimes I'll write something where the first sentence is provocative, but the rest is (I hope) a solid, nuanced argument. Usually it's at -1 or -2 within a minute, and then over the next few hours slowly crawls back up to +2 or +3 as people actually read it.
I cannot but confirm this behaviour.
Also I noticed that (my guess is that there is some form of subliminal self-defense reflex by some categories) there are a few themes (not political, not social) that seem to attract downvotes.
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/28232.html
>The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
You cannot discuss things in an actual academic manner on this forum. It is a tech enthusiast forum that happens to have a lot of money surrounding it.
Software might be eating the world, I don't think people will eat software anytime soon.
It's a good reminder that we can't solve all problems by just throwing some code at it. Unfortunately ...
The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing.
Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potentially dry topic. (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar's Poker, etc.)
[1] https://atrpodcast.com/
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/776.Michael_Lewis
As for the article: King Canute was a Danish and for a while English king. Never Swedish.
The article could have explained the other part of the moderation better - the user moderation provided by up and down votes. Bad comments are not only flagged but also tend to be pushed further down the page towards oblivion, while better comments tend to be lifted up towards the top of the page.
Anyways, King Canute: He was Danish, not Swedish :-)
After rigorously reading the article and the commentary here, I found the end of your comment deliciously humorous. Oh, the irony!
Also if the author or any of the moderators read this comment, Hello!
It seems to me that comment is a joke. Playfully nitpicking word choice while putting in a bit of banter. But the article seems to be taking the comment as a serious argument/insult.
I have written a number of replies that to me were simply neutral questions but which felt like an attack, from what I can tell, because they were harshly downvoted and I was even throttled by the mods.
I have to assume that’s on me and I have largely stopped asking for clarification because I seem to do it without sufficient empathy or something.
dang did reply thoughtfully to my inquiries about what I had done and that actually made me feel worse! I know those two are busy doing way more important things and I hate making their day worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20522668
If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all nice and civil.
Political issues are obviously divisive and it's perfectly fine to keep stuff like the El Paso massacre of the front page. But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Yes, articles about, for example, discriminatory ML do often make it to the front page. But in my impression, that topic (as well as employment discrimination, culture-wars-adjacent scandals in tech academia etc) are far more likely to be quickly flagged into oblivion than similarly political takes that just happen to be in line with HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-<x>).
The article impressively articulates what toll divisiveness takes on the moderators: Even if I read the same ugly comments, I am unlikely to experience the sharpness of emotion that apparently comes with considering the community one's baby, and making it's failures one's own. When such divisiveness is then reflected in the "real world" of mass media, the pressure only increases.
But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
What kind of power do you think we have? We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Not having power, or having less power than before, makes the discourse even more important.
> We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook.
The idea that people should stay off Facebook is part of that narrative. That is how the industry can claim that they are changing the world, but at the same time aren't to answer for any of the changes.
> Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Social influence isn't so much what is said and done in isolation, but what is and isn't accepted. Things like what you see as a problem, why it is a problem and how it should be addressed influences what happens next.
In actuality we're no different than the billions of others on the planet and no amount of Silicon Valley startup experience is going to change that.
Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)
>Why a new account?
Because I wanted the username.
Well, it's certainly going to cause many people to discount your opinion because they presume you have an racist agenda. It looks like a username consciously chosen to create offense while being plausibly deniable. Please be cautious of causing harm to a community for sake of social commentary. Needlessly creating offense is a negative, but maybe you can figure out how to use the dissonance to turn it into a net positive.
I'm sorry, what?
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395
If you instead think of a forum thread as an airing of opinions - a chance to find out what is the range of perspectives on the topic that exist in the community, and be exposed to nuances you wouldn’t have thought of on your own, the exercise takes on a different tone. People who came to that thread thinking that it’s obviously a good thing are exposed to arguments that disagree, and vice versa; maybe some people are persuaded to shift their viewpoint, or maybe not, but everybody learns that a topic that they might have assumed was uncontroversial is actually one on which reasonable people might disagree.
It can be jarring for the nerd-inclined to accept that just because they have arrived at their opinions through, obviously, clear rational analysis of facts, that does not mean that everybody else, when presented with the same facts, will necessarily reach the same opinion. The illusion that you can read an HN thread and say ‘well, the pro arguments seemed more coherent and got more upvotes than the anti ones, so presumably the community consensus is pro’ ignores the fact that the anti arguments were also made by members of the HN community, and we’re not bound by collective decision making. You are allowed to read the thread and adjust your own priors and come to your own conclusions, having hopefully been exposed to some perspectives you might otherwise have missed.
My assessment of that thread is the same as it always is when a thread gets a huge number of comments: sentiment fits a roughly normal distribution, with the mean position being something approximating "this is a really difficult question and either course of action has significant risks and pitfalls", and every step away from the mean point of view placing increasing importance on one particular aspect and decreasing importance on the other aspects.
If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be a huge number of comments, as we would quickly find consensus and move on to the next topic.
If you look at the top three root comments on this thread:
- The first one [1] points out that different standards are applied between 8chan vs Facebook/Twitter/etc, and disagrees with Cloudlfare's decision on free speech grounds. But then many people disagree and debate this position.
- The second one [2] asks a neutral question about Cloudflare's exposure to legal liability for content on its platform if it is making decisions about what content is allowable or not. Then people discuss that question.
- The third one [3] acknowledges the complexity of the topic, devoting each of the first two paragraphs to what the writer considers to be almost-equally meritorious but opposing points of view, then concludes that on balance the Cloudflare decision is right. But then many people disagree and debate that position.
To properly answer your challenge, one would have to examine all 1400+ comments and classify them by their level of support for/against the Cloudflare decision, which is somewhere between impractical and impossible.
But from my scanning through the comments, I don't see any "prevailing" or "overwhelming" position emerge, and I see many of the commenters wrestling with the inherently vexed nature of the issue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610548
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610552
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610453
For what it's worth, I think we're taking this discussion a bit too seriously, as the person you were initially replying to was being at least a little humorous and self-deprecating.
The parent comment they replied to made an assertion of the form HN's prevailing view on blah is X, and they replied to the effect of that's funny, my perception was that the prevailing view was opposite-of-X, which is a neat example of the hostile-media effect, and I think the commenter was aware of that.
It's interesting though, that it was the counter-point that you saw the need to challenge, not the original assertion :)
Do you assert that the prevailing or overwhelming opinion was in favour of one particular position? Can you provide evidence for that?
I'm very conscious that we could go around in circles on this :)
I think like he's arguing exactly the opposite, as he's implied multiple times:
> The challenge is the low bar of whether or not a topic has an overwhelming majority of opinion.
> But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that.
>> But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that.
My read on it is that the person wasn't making an assertion of fact on this, they were making a wry observation that their perception of a prevailing view was the opposite of their parent commenter's perception of a prevailing view, thus demonstrating the hostile media effect in action.
So I doubt if reading the top comments is a very objective method for evaluating controversial discussion (it has a strong correlation, but maybe not the best). Often, I see very heated discussion and competing comments moving up and down until nobody is interested in spending more energy in the debate.
P.S: Invasive profiling and tracking can be a very effective (and possibly, the only) method to uncover insights on the dynamics of online forums like Hacker News. If we track users' every move, it could make great contribution to sociology and psychology researches, and may even help answering unsolved questions in order to building a better community for everyone. Unfortunately, it's too dangerous and unethical to use, I won't support it, but I'm always curious to know the results.
Karma doesn't affect ranking on HN. This comes up often enough that I wonder where the idea came from. Do other forums work this way?
Interestingly, I originally believed HN is pure-upvote based, then I learned it from other HN comments that says karma affects ranking and I believed it.
So I'd say it's just an unsubstantiated rumor/misinformation getting circulated in the comment section from time to time, combined with the impression of HN having a "magic algorithm", so many believed it without any fact-checking. Also, the quick-moving nature of HN comments somehow created a confirmation bias that makes the idea appeared to be true.
I learnt of the news about 8chan from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055 — which was on the HN’s first page before it was replaced by the slightly longer thread you linked to. The top comment in that thread is decidedly against the chans.
There’s also been a lot of mentioning of Popper and his paradox of intolerance in these threads. A post [1] in the thread you referred to (it also was among the top ones when that thread appeared on the front page), for example, began by saying that "Popper taught us that we can't be tolerant towards intolerants" ("taught us" implying that this statement has grown to become general wisdom).
If HN’s prevailing sentiment has since turned in favor of 8chan, I am very happy to hear that.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20611816
Those threads wouldn't have passed the thousand comment mark if HN had anything close to a prevailing attitude on the matter. As with many contentious issues, people tend to believe HN is unilaterally biased against them, sometimes to the point of that bias being enforced by the moderators.
>Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.
8Chan and its contingent of neo-nazis were free to communicate as they wished until the site started to become a cultural nexus for racially motivated mass shootings in the US. I don't think deplatforming them was unwarranted. They have the right to their views, but not the right to force any establishment to host those views, even when people start dying over them.
Also, there are still plenty of places on the internet for such people to congregate and communicate. They can start a private Discord server and post manifestos from the race war there if they want.
It's easy to second-guess or criticize such actions from the outside, but sometimes you just have to be pragmatic.
Adding my voice to the "good riddance" side of the aisle: thanks to what freedom of speech, association, etc. actually mean in the legal / constitutional context, said twats are guaranteed a space for communication - the real world! They can stand on a corner or picket their local City Hall and spout all the hateful nonsense they want.
(They can't, however, verbally assault bus drivers / police officers, or yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or directly incite violence, or disturb the peace at all hours of the night, or needlessly interrupt judicial / civil proceedings, or...point being: even in the US, the exercise of free speech comes with limits and responsibilities.)
Like publicans of yore banning rowdy drunks from the premises (which itself came with political / legal overtones; see https://www.amazon.ca/America-Walks-into-Bar-Speakeasies/dp/...), many owners of online spaces are deciding - as is well within their rights as owners of a private space - to ban users and groups who disproportionately degrade the experience for all others.
(This is my general surface-level opinion, without getting into discussions like https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/rnhzlo around the amplification of extreme voices by short-sighted metrics optimization, or debates on whether providing space for hateful voices effectively denies free speech to the targets of their hate, or explorations of the tradeoffs different open, democratic societies have made around hate speech.)
There's also potentially an assumption here that free speech is overall reduced through restrictions on it. As a thought experiment: suppose that, within a society of _n_ people, some small _k_ of them are "louditarians": they believe that part of the right to free speech is the inalienable right to speak as "loudly" as possible (for whatever value of "loud" matters over various media) so that no one else can effectively speak. This raises a few difficult questions:
1) To what degree the free speech rights of louditarians and non-louditarians mutually exclusive? 2) If you were a non-louditarian in this society, what would you do? 3) If you had control over this society, would you let the louditarians speak? Would you limit their speaking rights?
My general position here:
1) Almost entirely: when louditarians speak, they prevent the effective exercise of free speech rights by non-louditarians; non-louditarians can only meaningfully have free speech if louditarians are carefully managed. 2) As a non-louditarian, I'd advocate for limits on louditarianism (as best I'm able; this may first require the creation of non-louditarian-only spaces where I can be heard). In the absence of those limits, I'd probably feel like I was being effectively silenced by louditarians. 3) This is the difficult one, and I lean towards "yes - reluctantly, warily, and with limitations". Some examples: maybe louditarians can only speak at certain times (see: nighttime "disturbing the peace"). Maybe the practice of louditarianism is banned from certain spaces, like offices and legislative chambers (see: contempt of court, noise bylaws). My reasoning is utilitarian: I'd rather _n - k_ non-louditarians be able to speak, even if that means curtailing the rights of _k_ louditarians.
In other words: I strongly believe that, by imposing limitations on louditarians, I'm increasing the overall freedom of speech in this hypothetical society. (Not to mention the quality of life, mental health, and vitality of public discourse.)
My secondary reasoning is that louditarians seem to think that speech is a right without responsibilities - in effect, they believe that their right to free speech is more important than that of non-louditarians. IMHO, this violates the social contract of functioning modern societies, and for what? So an obnoxious fringe group can be really, really loud?
Generally freedom of speech issues arise largely for written word, than the spoken word.
When this happens across a large and popular enough cross-section of media, though, it could easily start to have a noticeable effect on readers.
People are subject to various sampling biases, recentism, and other such biases and give can give them a non-representative sample of any forum. I will admit that HN has become more political since 2013 or 2014 when I joined, but still, compared to any other subreddit or forum it is still mostly better.
This is likely for any of the following (non-exhaustive) reasons:
-Different prevailing opinions of people in different parts of the country/world combines with common participation times.
-How likely the title is to attract a specific ideology (or both).
-How long or dense the article is combined with when it hits the front page, as it may get passed around some subgroups informally prior to that point.
-The lag time between early comments and quick agreements and the group of comments that come later in response to those comments with deeper thinking of the topic and/or substantive facts or anecdotes that crystalize opinions on the subject.
Just think, how many times have you read comments about how "all the comments here seem negative, but..." only to count only 3-4 negative comments out of almost a hundred by the time you're reading them? That's because the nature of the discussion changed over time or as people decided it was worth posting that positive comment they hadn't thought worthwhile. It's fairly common.
Something that bothers me about this whole trend of "deplatform everyone whose opinion I don't like" - once some person or group is near-universally deplatformed, they become sort of a boogeyman. You can attribute any position you want to them, and they have no way to confirm or deny that they believe that. You can accuse anybody of secretly agreeing with them or being one of them, and there's no good way to refute it. You can claim that they're secretly everywhere and all-present, and there's no data to confirm or deny that. It feels kind of like a 1984 2-minutes-hate thing where you're expected to scream outrage at something that you can't prove even exists in a meaningful way.
If we expand this thought, we get that even the most outrageously extreme opinions should be allowed to exist and operate openly. If only so that there is a real source that anybody can go to in order to see what they really do and do not believe, in their own words. So they can have an authoritative way to be for or against a person or thing or policy. So anybody can create a estimate of how big and influential they really are, based on objective data.
Going further, certain people in power like to have a voiceless boogeyman that they can use to scare everybody with. What better way to get everyone running around in fear, and getting them to get off of their butts and pull that voting lever for your side, or else those scary boogeymen might get them?
Note that this could apply equally well to a number of different things that have been treated this way over the years, including communism, nazi-ism, Islamic terrorism, white supremacy, etc.
Do I seriously believe this and want to go with it? I'm not completely sure right now. I'd like to let it churn around some more and see if anything else comes out.
Except that hasn't happened, and doesn't happen. No person or group which has been deplatformed is incapable of communicating publicly, and most, if not all, have simply moved to the dark web.
>You can claim that they're secretly everywhere and all-present, and there's no data to confirm or deny that.
Plenty of data exists. Deplatforming doesn't remove all data about a person or group from the entire web in perpetuity, that's not how the web works. Remember "once it's on the web, it's there forever?"
Hell, 8chan is already back online.
> It feels kind of like a 1984 2-minutes-hate thing where you're expected to scream outrage at something that you can't prove even exists in a meaningful way.
You're ascribing an all-consuming and existential power to deplatforming that it doesn't have.
>What better way to get everyone running around in fear, and getting them to get off of their butts and pull that voting lever for your side, or else those scary boogeymen might get them?
But isn't this argument trying to get everyone running around in fear of platforms that remove extremist content, or else the slippery slope of censorship will eventually get them? Why is it that we're not supposed to fear the unchecked spread of hate speech or the ability of extremist groups to organize online, but we're only supposed to fear anyone who wants to stand in their way?
Consider the ulterior motive when the false dichotomy we're presented with in these discussions is always "let the nazis say whatever they like, on all platforms, without restriction, in perpetuity throughout the universe, or else suffer the boot of Orwellian fascism stomping on your heads forever."
Where do you see this? I checked their Twitter and normal URL, and they sure seem to be currently down, and no indication that they've been up since the last set of deplatformings.
Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point. No thanks on debating with that.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20656342
[1]https://www.thedailybeast.com/8chan-users-migrating-to-zeron...
>Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point.
And I get the feeling you were being intentionally hyperbolic in order to make a weak and poorly supported point seem stronger than it was, by appealing to fear and cynicism rather than data.
You're probably right that further discussion wouldn't be productive, though.
The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who does not share the same perspective is not welcome in the discussion and the environment from that confrontation produce the opposite of thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Political discussion does not need to end like that and many topics which does not have the above property do pop up in HN.
Absolutely true. The failure of mods (and even pg?) to recognize this is the single disheartening and cynical thing about HN.
PG gets it half right in his advice to "keep your identity small" when he observes that people cannot argue rationally about something that touches on their identity.
But the other half (which PG and the mods get spectacularly wrong) is that what we think of as "political" beliefs, characterized by groupthink and lack of scrutiny/falsifiability, are typically held about every topic other than an individual's area of expertise.
A mature HN reader skilled in technology, is least likely to undergo an emotional/identity-driven flight of fancy about political issues pertaining to technology. An immature HN reader will either be naively apolitical ("Oh, I just build AI tech, it isn't my concern that it's being used to round up refugees for execution") or will turn off the technical insight in favor of loyalty to some political group (repeating talking points, etc.)
Of any community I've been a part of, HN offers the best hope for grounded, rational discussion of important political topics surrounding technology.
Just as someone who stands by and does not try to stop a lynching is guilty of doing nothing, the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference, which is that controversial or troubling aspects/implications of technology or tech firms simply be ignored.
With the advent of Palantir (which has had lots of stage time at Startup School), defense technology became cool. Google under Schmidt became a major lobbying force and defense contractor. Facebook is not far behind, etc. HN mods are constantly surrounded by stories of "successful" firms in the defense contractor space, and just as it is viewed as cynical to be dismissive of the worth of "another startup doing social picture sharing", it is similarly viewed as cynical to question the good citizenship and motives of a firm in the defense/surveillance space.
HN (and HN mods) are a product of the surrounding culture. As a share of GDP, surveillance and defense spending has never been higher during peacetime. In other words, it's a bull market and HN is ultimately a beneficiary of the growth of surveillance and defense tech. Hence its interests are overwhelmingly right wing when it comes to suppressing criticism and threats of that tech.
There are other politically relevant areas for discussion besides the ones I've focused on in this comment. I chose them simply because I think they are top of mind for a lot of people even though the difficult philosophical and political issues relating to them are under active suppression by HN mods.
Heh, except for anything programming language related, what the best web framework to use is, whether end-to-end encryption actually works or is just security theatre, etc.
There are lots of technical topics that people attach their identity to and would look indistinguishable from politics to outsiders. And it's the same in any industry. Look at some of the debates in the educational world.
I think pg's "keep your identity small" essay is one of the most insightful and influential (on me) essays I've ever read, and believe it or not (probably some who review my comments history won't) but I try to practice it in daily life. But it argued to choose what you care about carefully, rather than incorporate nothing into your identity at all. It also didn't argue that people can't debate those issues rationally, if I recall correctly, just that it's harder to do so.
the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference
Come now. I'm one of those naughty troublemakers who has sometimes felt that the mods here enforce a particular line of thinking (e.g. Damore is awful and so controversial he can't be talked about, wtf) but you can't possibly claim HN bans politics when maybe 20-30% of the stories discussed here are political in nature.
Well, many of the most crucial stories have been nipped in the bud when speculation is flying every which way. I'd argue that the brief moment of uncomfortable uncertainty, when speculation is flying, is actually the most valuable point for analysis in the trajectory of any issue... before those with the power to influence have had a chance to frame the issue the way they see fit, not letting it go to waste to further their goals, etc.
HN mods find this kind of unmoored analysis very discomfiting, and they act with a nearly instinctual zeal to put a stop to it. Political discussion is fine as long as it is in the shadow of a conceptual framework that is considered authoritative. This is by definition a highly conservative, top down, anti-intellectual view. That mods view comments that contradict it as "flame wars" (rude acts) illustrates that they are anchored in an archaic manners culture that worships hierarchy and authority. FWIW we all know there are HN users who can send a message to a mod and get a user shadow banned no questions asked.
Since there are so few mods it is totally plausible that their own psychological quirks and desire to fit in would have a significant impact on their moderation patterns.
> except for anything programming language related, what the best web framework to use is...
I don't think this disagrees with my point, since most often the thing that is being objected to has not been used extensively by the objector. Bike shedding is less a form of political discussion than it is a result of tech culture that seeks authoritative absolutes in a world that only offers relative trade-offs. The worst offenders I've worked with are the sort who really wish there were a religious leader who would declare that programmers who use Mongodb are going to hell :), and they are not people I want on my team.
For moderation, the only fair system is one where all moderation decisions are backed up by a public note explaining what happened and why, both for story promotion, burial, and penal decisions about users such as shadow bans.
Surely being a mod is challenging. I'd expect that combining the challenging roles of judge, jury, and executioner into one would exact an emotional toll.
I think HN's moderation has problems with certain topics that have mysteriously become high-voltage in certain social circles, like Damore/men's rights/etc. But crucially, no worse than other general purpose discussion sites and mostly it's still better. You can show dead, view flagged stories etc. The problem is comments that trigger Valley liberals tend to be criticised by the mods on the grounds that other people would respond badly to them, which is annoying, because it's actually those who respond badly that should be given a finger-wag, you'd imagine.
But still that's a far cry from banning politics, which HN doesn't do, and it doesn't even ban discussions on those hot topics, they're just much more likely to be flagged by users. I read HN with showdead turned on and by starting at the (oddly hidden) /active URL, which shows flagged stories, so I have a pretty good sense of how much stuff gets flagged and why. It's a mix of things and not entirely easy to predict. It's not politically biased in exclusively one direction either. To some extent what gets whacked seems to depend on what time it gets posted, ditto for comments. Try criticising the EU on any HN thread during the European daytime and lots of outraged Europhiles will vote you down to -2. Then when the Americans wake up and the "EUropeans" go to bed, the same post will get positively re-rated. It's clearly a matter of voter identity and not the wording of the posts themselves that are the issue.
I used to love Slashdot's style of user-driven moderation. It did require people to pick adjectives to justify their mod decisions, and then the meta-mod process helped weed out abusers. It's a pity it never caught on outside that site. HN's approach is very different, and some days I think it's worse, other days I think it's better. I'm not sure Slashdot had to deal with the same kind of political problems we have today though. Perhaps the closest was open source vs Microsoft, or something like that. I don't recall the same kind of extremist social positions that burn so much bandwidth on all discussion platforms (that don't ban them).
That's false. It's remarkable how something false turns into something "we all know". How you can imagine HN is run that way, let alone declaim about it publicly, is beyond me.
Anyone can "send a message to a mod" (just email hn@ycombinator.com). No one can "get a user banned". All anyone can get us to do is take a look at what they're concerned about—and that we do for everyone.
Your psychological analysis of us as discomfited anti-intellectual authoritarians (with quirks) is remarkable too, as it suggests that you have a mind reader. If you had a mind reader, though, you'd have known how false the above smear was, so the odds are that your voyage into the depths of our unconscious is imaginary as well.
I've seen plenty of criticism of the defense industry here.
Google is the Halliburton of information, Facebook is the Halliburton of surveillance.
You may feel it's not enough, but nothing is ever enough: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I'm sure being a mod on HN is difficult, but by punishing users with throttling without explanation is not only rude, it creates the wrong incentive, turning HN into a game of avoiding the throttle bully rather than just participating in discussions with an open heart and mind.
Please add features to make moderation decisions more transparent to the victim and also to the rest of the HN community, so that we can all have more trust in what is going on.
* by unpopular I do not mean abhorrent, racist, or other such content, I mean views that do not fit into the normal left vs right political spectrum or which may require more than one comment to articulate to someone who lacks the required background.
We're happy to remove rate-limiting if people email us and give us reason to believe that they won't do those things in the future. Moreover, we take the penalty off accounts when we notice that they've been contributing solidly to HN for a while, as opposed to whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio. Not that we catch every case of that.
The mechanism itself isn't necessarily a problem, it's the arbitrariness of it and the lack of accountability. Most people have some degree of accountability in their job. I think HN mods are an exception.
> whatever they did earlier
It would be impossible to audit whether this is being done judiciously or fairly without a page listing all such moderations, their context, etc.
> whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio
I'd argue that moderation itself reduces the s/n ratio. If I notice a pattern where one user continually posts low quality comments, I'll be inclined to ignore or downvote that user. If the user got throttled, then it removes my ability to notice the pattern.
Similarly, if stories are re-titled (a common abuse of moderation) I may not realize I've already read the discussion or the linked content and read/click it again.
Worse yet, re-titling submissions often removes any clue about what made the submission interesting. Ironically the moderation practice of titling the HN submission with the article title introduces more click-baity titles into HN than would exist due to submitters' tactics.
No offense is intended by my feedback. I do think the moderators have a few pretty glaring blind spots and I am hoping that my feedback is well received.
I might have thought that too before working with a community this large, but the degree to which we're accountable is much more intense than anything I've experienced in a job before. When every misstep is met with instant outrage and hard pushback, you learn to adapt to feedback quickly.
People think we control HN, and to some extent we do, but we are controlled by HN to an even greater extent. This is maybe the most important thing for understanding how HN works. HN consists of a big system (the community) and a little system (the moderators) and the two interact via reciprocal feedback.
There's a third system too (the software), but I left it out for simplicity.
I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do.
However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity to spread misinformation into legitimate channels like HN in order to further their particular narratives.
Being patient and polite is one method to deal with misinformation, but a skilled actor is adept at spreading the misinformation while being equally polite and dragging out discussions to the point of attrition.
Unfortunately the Tibetan monastery falls apart when a bad actor like China decides to intentionally take advantage of these polite rules of discourse through subtle manipulation via misinformation, institutionalism, and other means to influence/protect a status quo with false narratives.
It is unfortunate that the HN rules value politeness, tolerance, and patience above eradicating misinformation and ignorance. Bad actors will intentionally take advantage of Tibetan and westernized rules to their own benefit.
We should not restrain ourselves in discourse with one hand tied behind our back when we encounter parties that spread misinformation and perpetuate more ignorance. Identifying individuals that are being less than honest in a firm, direct, and fair manner is more constructive than allowing the charade to continue. Sometimes those comments are flagged as inflammatory or offending the individual spreading bad information because their poorly informed ideas are under attack (rightfully so).
We can’t protect ignorance. All we can do is act with good intentions correspondingly exchanging information. When that like correspondence is repeatedly abused to ignore facts or spread misinformation, we must act instead of wait for good intentions to reveal themselves (a bad actor has no intentions of changing) and meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people have read and latched onto their misguided theories.
If the individual is being above the board, the facts will come to light and the situation is usually self-resolving. If the individual cannot defend their position, that is a good indication the HN community is perhaps better without that individual.
You may say that we should strive to create a culture of politeness and respect. I agree in so far as we must then come to terms with the fact that culturally, deception and dishonesty are also taken as being impolite and disrespectful—which presents a bit of a conundrum if we are paying close attention to our virtues.
Random downvotes without comments say you can’t think of a good response or reason to support your opinions.
Users are much too quick to reach for explanations like "you must be a foreign agent" when even the public record of the other user's comments—let alone the private data we look at—show that to be trivially unlikely. Foreign agents exist, of course, but foreign agents as an explanatory device for things one finds provocative online is, to a first approximation, a fiction. Same for astroturfing, shills, and the other things users accuse each other of in arguments.
That doesn't mean ignoring the possibility of manipulation—it just means that we should look for evidence. I can tell you that when we look for evidence, we basically never find it. Even if we're being fooled by clever manipulation in some cases, it's painfully clear that in the overwhelming majority, there's no there there. What there is, is people reaching for 'disingenuousness' as a simple explanation for what they find painful and offensive. That assumption blocks any solution. There's no way to resolve pain and offense without recognizing the experiences of the other side.
You mention China. I can tell you that all the flamewars I've seen about China since they started blazing in the last year or so have been examples of what I've said here.
That is to say that China was chosen for reasons beyond the literally obvious example of state agents. I know from experience state actors are rare, as well as being rare to detect. My rub is that latching onto China or Russia state agents as the only concerning actors that spread misinformation is not accurate. Somewhat more common are paid or unpaid social media shills/trolls that have many generalized accounts to forcefully influence topics.
But in my experience misinformation is spread most by those with vested interests, deeply gross misunderstandings of the world, strong attachment to personal biases they only believe and never bother to confirm or disprove empirically, reductionist and oversimplifications and un-nuanced tidbits learned from an introductory course of some topic, and so on.
These individuals overwhelmingly choose to ignore facts presented to them and espouse their incorrect views (perhaps hiding behind politeness or qualifications or an institutional authority). The view that such an individual will eventually with enough patience, see truth... is rather intractable and untenable.
I’m afraid you have latched onto but one example, possibly missing its purpose of imagery in the comment and neglecting to consider the other examples of bad information and bad actors which are actually fairly common that spread damaging tropes (that while inaccurate, continue to circulate nonetheless).
When people argue like this, in my experience, what they mostly want is for us to ban the views they disagree with. We can't do that. Running a complex community like HN is nowhere near that simple.
Modern times have also brought on about a host of new issues where technology can be both beneficial and a detriment to society. The rapid spread of misinformation is a major technological and social issue. How are we going to navigate the new era that is becoming more complex, conflicts are increasing, and people are becoming more partisan and incorrectly reinforced because technology and modern life makes it very easy to filter out the inconvenient facts that they need not be confronted with?
My point is we should not be assisting the enablement of misinformation. Being a hotbed for powerful people and powerful ideas, there is a certain amount of responsibility that needs to be accepted in preventing the spread of misinformation. Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.
Alternatively, those that don’t like an atmosphere where less than well informed views are actually challenged may very well choose to leave on their own accord, and they will no longer be spreading misinformation here. Bans are probably not needed at all really, we just shouldn’t be enabling.
Very well put. This is my biggest concern as well. HN mods prevent resolution by punishing participants in back and forth discussion for being part of a “flame war”. It is an incredibly coarse and un-nuanced view of debate.
Which is exactly how we end up with endless articles and 'discussions' of boeing 737s on 'hacker' 'news' by people who think they are pilots and aircraft designers (hint: they are none of those). I would bet the vast majority of people on 'hacker' 'news' are not responsible for any of this, they just like to beat these topics into the ground, uncorrecting each other along the way.
> If we were to have truly political discussions, we'll need to include all the other countries of the world, which none of us would want
That's a really, really good point, and I'll keep it in mind when political topics arise.
There's no need to include everything. HN is selective. It's in English. The reason it can't have posts about the responsibility of SV towards the tech and social impact they make is because that would pierce the veil of fake narrative that supports SVs continued unexamined influence.
The reality is the mods are not the tip of the spear. There are others mods above them who intervene to set policy and crush off plan posts. A truth this place can never acknowledge.
It’s also confusing if you've already clicked on it and checked it out - suddenly there is another similar interesting story - oh wait nope it’s the one I already checked out.
Indeed, I will happily fan-boy for the New Yorker here, they usually succeed in capturing the nuances of topics I happen to be familiar with. Gell-Mann seems more applicable to mass market news outlets; whereas NYer writers will often spend months -> years researching a subject.
Hacker News cannot solve all the world's problems. Not even all the problems related to technology. It's ok to focus on the things we can do effectively. HN isn't the only forum to discuss important issues.
I can't say I know what that is, but are you sure about this? The HN community is overwhelmingly not in California, and comments about California seem to me to skew to the critical and negative.
There's a lot of different people on HN. I don't mean to say we're all the same. It's just that voting is a low-pass filter.
I find this the crux of the issue at large, there is no such thing as "no problems".
Therefore, what was the point of this criticism in the first place? (in the article, not your comment)
It seems to me, the author didn't like that HN actually allows open discussion and respectful (mostly) sharing of opposing views.
Canute was King of England, Denmark and Norway. He was not Swedish. I think that The Newyorker is trolling Hacker News by dropping this quote in.
>... experiment with and idea ...
That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.
Perhaps I'm just an old man yelling about "back in the day," but on these axis I feel HN is trending downward.
In the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was not to disclose personal info on the internet because it was understood that "the IP stack" was designed with maximum liberty and tolerance for all kinds of garbage (with personal tools to filter, and the assumption of personal responsibility). Comparing the dynamics of Usenet vs. FB is quite revealing and brings insight into the discussion about distributed vs. centralized power. We've dumbed everything down to the point of ridiculousness.
The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me.
This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates.
Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities
I'm at the point now where I immediately hide submissions that seem like they have anything to do with American health care or American transportation.
Typically when I find my statements are downvoted it is because I had a quip that could reasonably be construed as negative, combative, etc. I tend to edit and remove those bits.
When I find things to be "reflexively" (probably the wrong word) downvoted, it is in regards to simple questions. Simple example, there was an article regarding Manning's confinement yesterday. One top-level comment asked "Why is this not cruel" to which I asked the opposite, "How is it cruel?" - simple as can be. I watched that one go down to fairly negative, then bounce back up, settling on a score of 0. I don't care about the score itself so much as what that delta represents.
Perhaps I'm just too narrow minded, but I fail to come up with a reason to downvote a simple question asking for perspective that doesn't involve me reading some kind of intent. One of the core tenets of this site is to assume good faith, assume the most charitable viewpoint. When I say that I believe HN culture is dying, it is this that I am talking about. There seems to be less and less good faith discussion as time goes on.
As always, I'd love for an alternative perspective that I'm (probably) missing here.
In other words, perhaps the perception of a drop in HN quality makes people more likely to reflexively assume bad faith.
"They're nihilists, Donny."
The original question seems fine as a conversation starter, since for one thing it identifies a particular motivated action that most humans would agree is cruel: 'admittedly imprisoning someone for "coercive" reasons', but if the only responses it had inspired had been more meta-conversation like yours then it would have been suitable to flag the whole subthread. Fortunately there were lots of thoughtful responses.
It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!
As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.
2007-2012: The first 5 years everything was new and cool and shiny and we were just going thru the economic crash.
2012-2017: growth and scaling. Slightly more political posts, but that's mostly because tech and politics mix a lot more then the previous 5 years.
2017-present: stabilization. An even mix of similar articles, voting sentiments, repetitive opinions. The main thing missing is actual NEW ideas. We get tropes on "AI will rule the world", "10 reasons we need universal basic income", "why self driving will/will run the roads in 5 years", "FANG is evil", etc... all very predictable dicussions.
The revolution will not come from Hacker News : )
In its earliest years HN felt to me to be a decidedly American place, steeped in the politics, culture and views you might expect of its origins. Now, there's far more Europeans, Asians - and increasingly Chinese as HN apparently isn't firewalled. The attitudes to many things have moved to being more international, whether that's in terms of politics, healthcare and regulation, or simple corrections to the trivial but often fascinating things that are just done or viewed differently around the world.
Sometimes the split shows up quite clearly with votes going one way when it's mostly the US awake, and quite another once Europe and Asia has had a chance. Early GDPR discussions were probably the clearest follower of this pattern. :)
I recently started contributing on another online community, a Slack, and I've found the rhetorical habits I've unwittingly cultivated creating a weird sort of mood. Nothing I'm saying is wrong, but HN has managed to make me somewhat oblivious to tone.
It's exactly as she describes, 'reckless'. I dare to go places that will rile people up. The silence that met my initial posts was deafening.
I initially wanted to retreat back to my familiar communities, Quora, HN. But I've never backed down from this kind of challenge before and I'm not about to now. I'm slowly managing to discover better 'hygiene' so I can fit better into this particular community of wonderful people.
But I wouldn't give back my participation in HN for anything. More than any other place I've ever found, HN makes me feel like I belong.
Case in point: a few days ago an article about India/Kashmir shortly made the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612461)
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Sure, that critique is all over the piece, and quite valid. So valid that calling attention to it again feels like beating a dead horse.
It was the 'performative erudition' part I wanted to share my experience with. HN has changed the way that I communicate and think, in ways that I couldn't put a finger on until I started reading the article. It's changed how I come across at work, how I interact with my friends and family.
> Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Why do people insist on things being pretty? Obviously they're overcompensating for deficiencies in some other area. I'll stop now before you start thinking I'm serious.