I am seeing more low quality comments in the last few months with baseless claims. Has any other hn readers been seeing this? Curious to know from long time (>3 years) hn readers.
There is a growing amount of users that are coming up with interesting comments
"conspiracy" is usually something a reader do not understand, lack details, knowledge or simply just the context, or is confused about something, it's ok, it happens
Use that as an opportunity to challenge your method of thinking, acquire new knowledge, and develop argumentation skills to challenge something you feel is wrong
Argumentation remains the best weapon to fight misinformation
It's not interesting if everyone thinks the same
As long as we remain civil, we should encourage each other to challenge our views and ideas
Give HN readers some credit. "Conspiracy" does not mean "something a reader does not understand," or has failed to challenge their thinking or knowledge about. Nor do baseless or ignorant comments necessarily come from conspiracies.
Argumentation does not fight misinformation. Study after study shows that people rarely change their minds, even when faced with seemingly incontrovertible evidence. We have an innate bias to accept information that confirms our beliefs and reject information that does not. No amount of argumentation will sway a convinced flat earther or QAnon believer.
This is well-studied. I wish we had an answer to this conundrum. For what it's worth, HN for now is still the community with the highest quality discussion that I can find. #2 is far far far behind.
That's a shame considering HN is fucking awful when it comes to anything that deviates from software development. Anything regarding health, social, or environmental sciences tends to attract comments that would make even Mehmet Oz cringe. Anything about San Francisco is filled with people foaming at the mouth. It's not really a new thing but it is tiresome and rather sad that you can't read something "off-topic" without wading through a bunch of, for example, climate change deniers.
Ignoring the Oz comment I agree. I wish I could see San Francisco or mental health articles and read comments with similar quality as the tech stuff. Anytime psychiatry is mentioned there’s 100’s of parrots claiming SSRIs are a scam
The H in Hacker News kind of gives it away. Not only tech/software, but politics usually considered off-topic. Social, health, environmental topics get discussed here unless/until they veer into political arguments. Or conspiracy theories.
I haven't lived in San Francisco in decades so I find those discussions uninteresting. Those can either show the demographics of the HN audience or the Bay Area oriented tech world, or both.
Have never seen climate change denial on HN. When the COVID pandemic started HN hosted quite a few conversations about origins, severity, treatments, vaccine effectiveness, etc. That toned down over time but I still see posts almost daily about the possible origins of the virus, which probably interests some people but seems mostly irrelevant to me.
This has been my experience as well. When it comes to technology and engineering the conversations are top notch. When it comes to social issues or politics it’s certainly better than Facebook or YouTube comments, but it’s certainly not anywhere near as good.
Despite commonly expressed beliefs to the contrary here, HN is also an echo chamber even if different and sometimes better.
> Argumentation does not fight misinformation. Study after study shows that people rarely change their minds, even when faced with seemingly incontrovertible evidence.
Out of curiosity, do you have citations for these studies?
Plenty of links to blogs and magazine articles, sure. I was hoping for some help getting to the bottom of the actual studies though. Otherwise it comes across as though you’re just repeating something that you’ve absorbed from the popular corporate media.
The first link to the New Yorker article mentions books and studies. The third link goes to research.com, where you can find citations and links. I don't do psychological research myself so I suppose I "absorb from the popular corporate media," as you put it. I know you intended to disparage my sources and understanding of the topic, but I have read articles and books by actual scientists because I have an interest in cognitive biases. I don't call myself an expert on the subject.
You can do your own research if you don't find my "repeating something" persuasive. As Dr. Johnson put it, "I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
I've always wondered how long it would take for HN to succumb to an eternal September where the "rest of the world" finally joins. Whatever HN is doing to keep discussions as high-quality as they are is pretty incredible. Yes, HN has changed over the years, but the fundamental aspect of conversation quality hasn't changed significantly.
Also the karma limits. I have almost 150 comment karma and still can't downvote. I'm not sure when downvoting/report, etc. come into play, but I'm fine even if it's much higher -- it seems to be working well.
That already happened c. 2013 when signal declined as early adopters and the cool kids from YC batches were swamped and dissuaded by randos. Nowadays, there are so many on HN who aren't part of the startup, academia, or STEM scene that there isn't nearly as much signal as there was. I think the only solution for a high-signal news aggregator + comments is invite-only with a small fee.
(I constantly throw away accounts whenever they reach 1-3k karma. It doesn't mean anything and it brings out the true nature of people when they believe they have the upper hand.)
Not sure whether or not the small fee would do anything other than make it more elitist, and money is not necessarily a predictor of community member quality. The only thing a fee might do is dissuade mass spam bots, but HN doesn't seem to have a spam bot problem. Not that I have a better answer though.
Do you have some examples? To me, the lowest quality comments are always in the cryptocurrency related submissions but it's been like that for a long time. Overall, I don't feel there's been a significant change in comment quality and I rarely see conspiracy type comments being up voted.
>despite being littered with comments that were flagged/unflagged
I don't think that's a factor affecting ranking - big amount of user flags (for the whole thread) and "flame-war detector" ("when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score") do affect ranking negatively though, so I guess dang manually removed downranking factors for that thread.
> I don't think that's a factor affecting ranking - big amount of user flags (for the whole thread) and "flame-war detector" ("when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score") do affect ranking negatively though, so I guess dang manually removed downranking factors for that thread.
It's not just dang modding anymore (citation: an email to me on Nov. 4), as I understand it. So it sounds like someone else made that call if that's what happened.
The majority of HN's rules were violated repeatedly all over that thread, including the submission itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. But the problem is that rules also exist around meta-discussion of HN's own discussion quality, and it's a poor experience when discussion quality is slipping if there's not also an avenue to reasonably meta-discuss why that's the case, either as a consequence of how the platform is operating or as an outcome of society's direction in a broader sense.
I don't see why anyone would expect a topic such as this to have particularly high quality comments when the issue being discussed is itself extremely anti-intellectual.
That said, are there any comments in particular that you think step out of line, or is it most of them?
Becoming a woman is not the path for me. But it's so wild how much of this website is pro-status quo, anti-bio-hacking, anti-personal freedom on this topic. And especially anti-intellectual and anti-curious on the topic, too. Way too much culture war leaking in from meatspace.
Depends on what is meant by 'conspiracy'. If you refer to certain American and British political topics, you're not wrong. Some people whose opinions I formerly valued have been thus subsumed by the vast divisive misinformation machine to which we find ourselves subject in this age. It's not without historical precedent, but it is nonetheless a sign of the times.
It seems like there are more off-the-cuff or aggressive comments from people who can’t turn their opinions, right or wrong, into discourse everyone can participate in and learn from. (Like this one.)
Slowly educating or misinforming a forum or newsgroup over a couple of years by sharing dozens of interesting links and writing a book’s worth of novel analysis is a dying hobby.
That’s very narrow minded and incredibly short sighted. Good arguments have a thesis and supporting evidence. Conspiracy arguments have no supporting evidence.
Conspiracy arguments do have evidence. It's just cherry-picked. I think this is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory - out of all the available evidence, this small subset is "the truth", and all the rest is produced by those in the conspiracy, with the intent of misleading us. They don't let the evidence speak; they define all evidence as true if it says what they believe, and all evidence as made-up lies that contradicts their predetermined view.
But they do have evidence. And boy, do they want to tell you about their evidence, and point you to their sources.
I remember the first time, years ago, that I saw a “Reddit-style” quick take be upvoted, instead of downvoted for ignoring the guidelines. I was sure it was the beginning of the end.. and maybe it was—but it still feels like now we are at the beginning. So almost certainly lower quality now, but no where near bad enough to outweigh the good. Overall the level of discourse is still much higher than any other online community I’ve ever been a part of.
They tend to eventually be flagged (though not always), but the overton window has also generally moved on this site to becoming more accepting of them.
If you want an example, I picked a thread out via google. It's particularly high density, because that's all you can easily find with google. You'll need show dead -> on in your settings to see the worse comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406207
It really depends on the thread though. Usually, if there are more comments than points for a post, the comments tend to be reactionary and not particularly interesting.
Given the simplicity of fune-tuning LLMs these days, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m actually shocked it’s not more prevalent. I’m almost positive these systems are running on 4chan /pol/ as a means of throwing discussions off topic.
Heck, some guy on YouTube did that already and documented himself posting 20,000 posts in a few days using a fine tuned model.
What I think has happened is that the culture wars are taking over more and more topics. Not only the obvious stuff like race, LGBTQ+ rights, crime, and labor, but increasingly things that don't traditionally fall on the left/right axis: vaccines, lab leak theory, content moderation, and even programming languages to some extent (admit it, the representation of trans people in the Rust community triggers some people).
One thing that gets me is that, putting aside the question about whether one side or the other is right, the culture war stuff is just incredibly stupid. It's like people have gotten a lobotomy and their ability to do critical reasoning and respond to empirical data has been replaced with just pure tribal identity. My sense is that this is happening across the country (and perhaps to some extent the world), and HN actually has it easier than a lot of other places.
> It's like people have gotten a lobotomy and their ability to do critical reasoning and respond to empirical data has been replaced with just pure tribal identity
Culture wars expose fundamental value differences. Like when someone says “we should eliminate prisons” what’s the rational debate to be had about that? Leaving aside right or wrong, clearly people on opposite sides of that issue just see the world and human nature fundamentally differently.
I don’t think it’s really about “tribal identity” because culture war issues actually expose intra-tribal schisms. I’ve been a democrat most of my adult life but I can’t wrap my brain around some of the stuff that’s been normalized in my Romney 2012 suburb.
I see the more general problem is "automatic responses" to certain topics, where conspiracy theories are a part of that.
If Facebook is mentioned, there is always someone saying how terrible Facebook is, even if it's an article about how Facebook's datacenters run their air conditioning. They just can't help but post about hating Facebook.
Similarly, any mention of certain topics result in someone spitting out the related conspiracy theory.
Perhaps those posts are inevitable, but I wish people downvoted them due to not being relevant. It seems they trigger the right emotional response to get upvotes.
actually your comment triggered the right emotional response from me.
i couldn't agree more and it makes many articles comments section look like a copy paste.
I know it's not really your point, but I'm fine with people continuously reminding everyone that facebook is a terrible company. They shouldn't get free goodwill from ostensibly neutral articles.
I’ve deleted my Facebook account many years ago, and I don’t need to criticise them at every opportunity.
When asked why I’m not on (happens extremely rarely), I say it is against my moral conviction to be a member, and they don’t ask what I mean, because they know.
Thus, I can live a positive life without evangelising my own choices.
> that fine and well but there are a lot of people that find the constant reminding and outrage both boring and exhausting.
If a company is doing something genuinely terrible, isn't it better to continue to call them out on it even when doing that might be "boring and exhausting" to some people? If some number of people are reading those comments and learning from them, and others are gladly reminded of something they'd forgotten, is it worth having some number of other people who now have to scroll past a comment that bored them?
I think that a lot of those types of comments are so visible because many people are finding them useful and/or important and so they are getting upvoted. I do see a lot more dead conspiracy theory posts.
Personally, I feel that there are very few means to hold a company meaningfully accountable, and the few we do have are very rarely used or used successfully. Companies spend billions on efforts to manipulate how they are perceived by the public. We operate under a system that heavily favors the corporation and leaves us disadvantaged. One of the few tools we have at our disposal is our ability to inform each other about what companies are doing and how it might impact us. I'm grateful to those posters who do what they can. Even if it's something I've read 100 times before, if the problem is real I hope people don't stop talking about it, and I hope at least a few people grow sick enough of talking about it or hearing about it that something gets done to fix it. With luck there will be no more reason to talk about it and everyone can move on to talking too much about the next thing that needs fixing.
Maybe there are more conspiracies happening - there are more humans than ever and more communication channels than ever, should we be surprised if more conspiracies occur? Or are you simply referring to opinions currently deemed unpopular or outside of the Overton window? Those are the opinions I most want to hear, I can get mainstream thinking almost anywhere, it’s mainstream.
Thus, without any examples your question is impossible to answer.
The fact that this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33674562) survived for as long as it did despite wildly transphobic "automatic responses" (nitwit005's words, well put) tells me that we're probably on that downhill trend. I remember (vaguely) a particular automatic control existing to mitigate low-quality discussion by simply demoting threads with heavy flag/unflag trends from the front page, and here we have an example of a thread linking to a pretty inflammatory blog post that managed to stay on the front page for hours despite being littered with comments that were flagged/unflagged repeatedly. Even now it's #50, seven hours later.
Just with that single case study of a topic, yeah there's a downhill trend to be noted.
Edit: oh hey, the flagging actually worked this time. lol
No, you're right, I was referring to the superset (controversial threads that invite emotionally satisfying but uninspiring conversation), of which conspiracies would be a subset.
Definitely. There are frequently people who state unproven things as fact. For instance, when discussing the FBI informants' role in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. It isn't a proven fact that "the FBI planned it" or anything of that sort. Yet, many HNers asserting it was an FBI false flag.
Perhaps, but only around E.M.'s intentions re: Twitter, that I've noticed.
One or two about the supposed "real purpose" of HN, but I gather they come up from time to time anyway.
Basically any post that disagrees with Sinclair Broadcasting, Turner Broadcasting, Fox news or Disney is a conspiracy theory so there aren't many of those here because of their popularity here. But if that bothers you feel free to continue hiding comments that go against your limited view of the world.
78 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThere is a growing amount of users that are coming up with interesting comments
"conspiracy" is usually something a reader do not understand, lack details, knowledge or simply just the context, or is confused about something, it's ok, it happens
Use that as an opportunity to challenge your method of thinking, acquire new knowledge, and develop argumentation skills to challenge something you feel is wrong
Argumentation remains the best weapon to fight misinformation
It's not interesting if everyone thinks the same
As long as we remain civil, we should encourage each other to challenge our views and ideas
Argumentation does not fight misinformation. Study after study shows that people rarely change their minds, even when faced with seemingly incontrovertible evidence. We have an innate bias to accept information that confirms our beliefs and reject information that does not. No amount of argumentation will sway a convinced flat earther or QAnon believer.
I haven't lived in San Francisco in decades so I find those discussions uninteresting. Those can either show the demographics of the HN audience or the Bay Area oriented tech world, or both.
Have never seen climate change denial on HN. When the COVID pandemic started HN hosted quite a few conversations about origins, severity, treatments, vaccine effectiveness, etc. That toned down over time but I still see posts almost daily about the possible origins of the virus, which probably interests some people but seems mostly irrelevant to me.
Despite commonly expressed beliefs to the contrary here, HN is also an echo chamber even if different and sometimes better.
Out of curiosity, do you have citations for these studies?
https://www.google.com/search?q=facts+dont+change+minds
You can do your own research if you don't find my "repeating something" persuasive. As Dr. Johnson put it, "I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
I didn’t, actually.
> but I have read articles and books by actual scientists because I have an interest in cognitive biases
Yes, I was hoping you’d be able to recommend some, but thanks anyway.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
The doubtful are often the most passionate advocates
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761038595...
The act of debate tends on average to reinforce existing beliefs not forge new opinions.
>If a user has 31 Karma, they can flag submissions.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
(I constantly throw away accounts whenever they reach 1-3k karma. It doesn't mean anything and it brings out the true nature of people when they believe they have the upper hand.)
>despite being littered with comments that were flagged/unflagged
I don't think that's a factor affecting ranking - big amount of user flags (for the whole thread) and "flame-war detector" ("when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score") do affect ranking negatively though, so I guess dang manually removed downranking factors for that thread.
It's not just dang modding anymore (citation: an email to me on Nov. 4), as I understand it. So it sounds like someone else made that call if that's what happened.
The majority of HN's rules were violated repeatedly all over that thread, including the submission itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. But the problem is that rules also exist around meta-discussion of HN's own discussion quality, and it's a poor experience when discussion quality is slipping if there's not also an avenue to reasonably meta-discuss why that's the case, either as a consequence of how the platform is operating or as an outcome of society's direction in a broader sense.
That said, are there any comments in particular that you think step out of line, or is it most of them?
like I said, surprised this lasted as long as it did. This thread should've been dead before even landing on the front page.
Slowly educating or misinforming a forum or newsgroup over a couple of years by sharing dozens of interesting links and writing a book’s worth of novel analysis is a dying hobby.
But they do have evidence. And boy, do they want to tell you about their evidence, and point you to their sources.
(Ok, there are some comments about "birds aren't real" on a high ranked post right now, but that's a joke.)
They tend to eventually be flagged (though not always), but the overton window has also generally moved on this site to becoming more accepting of them.
If you want an example, I picked a thread out via google. It's particularly high density, because that's all you can easily find with google. You'll need show dead -> on in your settings to see the worse comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406207
Heck, some guy on YouTube did that already and documented himself posting 20,000 posts in a few days using a fine tuned model.
This rapidly brings in the low quality/conspiracy/baseless claims stuff.
In my experience, it is already calming back down.
One thing that gets me is that, putting aside the question about whether one side or the other is right, the culture war stuff is just incredibly stupid. It's like people have gotten a lobotomy and their ability to do critical reasoning and respond to empirical data has been replaced with just pure tribal identity. My sense is that this is happening across the country (and perhaps to some extent the world), and HN actually has it easier than a lot of other places.
Culture wars expose fundamental value differences. Like when someone says “we should eliminate prisons” what’s the rational debate to be had about that? Leaving aside right or wrong, clearly people on opposite sides of that issue just see the world and human nature fundamentally differently.
I don’t think it’s really about “tribal identity” because culture war issues actually expose intra-tribal schisms. I’ve been a democrat most of my adult life but I can’t wrap my brain around some of the stuff that’s been normalized in my Romney 2012 suburb.
If Facebook is mentioned, there is always someone saying how terrible Facebook is, even if it's an article about how Facebook's datacenters run their air conditioning. They just can't help but post about hating Facebook.
Similarly, any mention of certain topics result in someone spitting out the related conspiracy theory.
Perhaps those posts are inevitable, but I wish people downvoted them due to not being relevant. It seems they trigger the right emotional response to get upvotes.
I don't wasn't to live my life in a constant state of outrage, negativity, and hate. Sometimes I want to be open minded, curious, and enjoy learning.
When asked why I’m not on (happens extremely rarely), I say it is against my moral conviction to be a member, and they don’t ask what I mean, because they know.
Thus, I can live a positive life without evangelising my own choices.
If a company is doing something genuinely terrible, isn't it better to continue to call them out on it even when doing that might be "boring and exhausting" to some people? If some number of people are reading those comments and learning from them, and others are gladly reminded of something they'd forgotten, is it worth having some number of other people who now have to scroll past a comment that bored them?
I think that a lot of those types of comments are so visible because many people are finding them useful and/or important and so they are getting upvoted. I do see a lot more dead conspiracy theory posts.
Personally, I feel that there are very few means to hold a company meaningfully accountable, and the few we do have are very rarely used or used successfully. Companies spend billions on efforts to manipulate how they are perceived by the public. We operate under a system that heavily favors the corporation and leaves us disadvantaged. One of the few tools we have at our disposal is our ability to inform each other about what companies are doing and how it might impact us. I'm grateful to those posters who do what they can. Even if it's something I've read 100 times before, if the problem is real I hope people don't stop talking about it, and I hope at least a few people grow sick enough of talking about it or hearing about it that something gets done to fix it. With luck there will be no more reason to talk about it and everyone can move on to talking too much about the next thing that needs fixing.
Thus, without any examples your question is impossible to answer.
Just with that single case study of a topic, yeah there's a downhill trend to be noted.
Edit: oh hey, the flagging actually worked this time. lol
That's not the definition of "conspiracy" I'm familiar with. Perhaps OP could provide some examples of the conspiracy comments they're referring to.
OMG we are going to hell
I don't qualify as I'm a recent observer
cast me as one who has not vaxxed