Open-letter: Did hackernews become hateboard?
I came to this conclusion, let me know if it makes any sense.
When there is something new, haters comment on it almost immediately. Sometimes, if you look at the time of the entry, you know, it's almost impossible to form any kind of opinion in that little time that the hater hated the whole thing already.
Sad part is, (inserting my analysis) if anyone actually has a few good things to say, they pass,
1) because then they would also be attacked by the same folks who just hated the original content. Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish kind of thing.
2) (scientific/logical/rational) quality of hating content is so low (sometimes downright ridiculous), it makes smart ones refuse to take part in such thread. You know this, when that weird dude comments on your facebook status, makes everyone else dissipate.
This situation makes hackernews a place where everything is mostly hated, not renowned or embraced. A few years back, hackernews was definitely not a hateboard - it was a great source of high-quality information.
These days I come here saying to myself "let's see how much sh*t this will receive on hackernews". It makes me sad, seeing one more platform that I respect, is taken away from me.
Do you agree? Or did I happen to see the bad ones? (http://d.pr/1wCv http://d.pr/j614) If yes, how do you think this can change ? Not asking for how we can fight against, "i know it all" guy, "every new thing is worse than what i know" dude; if what I'm saying is true, there are ways that system can fight to balance negatives and positives, maybe like stackoverflow does.
What do you think?
43 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] threadTechnical solutions would make HN less like HN, and more like Slashdot, Reddit etc.
My impression is that the elders I'm used to seeing are gone or holding back. Maybe they've found somewhere else they like better, or maybe they've resorted to email among themselves.
Whatever the solution, its goal would need to be to encourage more posts by wizards and elders, and discourage posts by, um, the rest of us. I think that would be most successful with social prompts rather than mechanical prods.
You might think about making comment karma visible again. With invisible karma, the only thing one can learn from karma is how bad one's own bad posts are. If you can't see others' positive karma, you don't have the opportunity to see how strongly other people like positive posts. "Dang, he got a lot of karma for that comment. I wanna be like him."
Or has hiding karma achieved what you'd hoped?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3769027
Perhaps a third vote button - "this might belong on HN but I hate it".
A lot of the times the article is only tangentially related to the sensationalist title and this irks a lot of people.
If it's really news to you, the comment is really unlikely to be informative or deep. Actually there are people who are almost always in disagreement with news on some topic, but I don't think they're bad (see tptacek on every homemade-crypto related article).
I think the general negative response is just a result of the news themselves. Before you really get to understand/apply/have fun with some of the stuff, it will be far away from the front page already. But as long as there's at least a bit of constructive criticism in the negative ones, I think I'm fine with it.
I agree with you that the system invites comments that tend disagree.
"If this were going to work, Braille would be a lot more popular among sighted folk." dsr_
"Not to mention another big flaw. It's nearly impossible to differentiate between A, B, C, D, and E as individual letters since they are all represented by one dot." csytan
this seriously needs to be discouraged.
K, joke over for now :)
I agree. There have got to be a few clever / simple ways of discouraging low-quality hate, without discouraging high-quality hate or moving in the direction of censoring or complexity. By "low-quality" I mostly mean the derogatory and/or superficial ones.
Just throwing some out there... Ask people to voluntarily check a "this is negative" checkbox when submitting, and if they have too many of them show a "curmudgeon" badge next to their name. Or, let the poster have a limit number of "this is infair" or "disputed" points they can assign, that will mitigate the benefit to someone's karma, or ding/label the person if too many people accuse them of being unfair in proportion to their number of comments.
I know, I know, these ideas are stupid, and dumb, and idiotic, and so am I for having had them, and so is anyone within a 10 foot radius of me at the time I posted this, by proxy. Glad we got that out of the way.
Re comments with high-quality hate, they are a strength of HN. I suspect many of the more shallow comments tend to keep them away (people might be less likely to add a thoughtful / informed criticism to a thread that already has a bunch of jabs).
No doubt the future will bring some innovations for dealing with crappy comments. It would be nice if they happened on HN because it's still a great site.
If Dotsies does get anywhere, I may individually contact many of the haters on that thread, just to say "remember this bitter comment of yours that discouraged people from giving it a fair shot?" :)
Maybe when I accumulate enough karma to down vote, I'll down vote some stuff. That's the most efficient way to hate. ;)
however you'd agree that calling people names, injecting malice is not ok. a comment like this, would add value to the argument, as i'd happily go ahead and say "i hear what you say, however ..." just like i did here.
but if you call me retarded, my idea stupid, there's no room left neither for me nor anybody else to take it any further. (thanks for kudos btw :))
You see, sometimes debates can get a little heated. I'm sure you've experienced such debates yourself. Are you also talking about these debates, when people say something is 'stupid' but are still capable of having a rational discussion, or are you mostly annoyed by plain old hating?
The reason I'm asking is that I'm relatively new to HN, and thus can't really comment on any changes. However, I also think that in the time I've been here, I've seen some hatin', but definitely not a lot of it. Again, this could simply be because I'm used to communities where this is much more common, and haven't been able to see changes in HN itself.
- if paul graham says it's stupid it's different than somebody who calls everything stupid.
- calling the owner of the idea stupid.
- plain old hating.
- saying 'stupid' can also be a part of the debate, that's natural.
this is a hard problem to solve, that's why i brought it up. there is definitely not an easy way of saying this is right or wrong, but if community sets its tone, i think participants will try to be a part of that commonality.
and hopfully HN stays 'objective' and within 'reason' with polite, kind, constructive comments. when there are no rules, haters win.
Projects with mainly positive comments currently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755656
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754561
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754108
Mixed comments on this one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755276
Mainly negative:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3752447
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755574
it's the 'new' stuff (idea/startup/concept, not funny/interesting links). just based on your links, you'd notice 'mainly negative' ones are 'new' stuff. positive ones are bash, excel spreadsheet, notepad++ etc.
if PG built and posted one of his 'ambitious ideas' here (http://d.pr/if1q), say he made his new email program, i bet the most upvoted comment would be like;
"... gmail does many of those things and already has X,Y,Z ... do you have any brains at all to understand email protocol is A,B,C ... you better spend your time doing research/study/..."
this is what i'm seeing over and over again.
I think some people have too many points and like to spend them to stroke their own egos, and I think the lack of accountability breeds some sort of YCombinator feeding frenzy (aka bullying). It seems to be unique (in my experience) to YCHN, so I suspect it's something about their "karma" system. Too bad, because the news is often good, and it would be nice if the site/members were nice too.
The annoying thing is that the best way to help fix this would be to comment more, rather than less. Basically, try and beat the demotivating effects ;)
I'm not long here but I already noticed that I often receive downvotes for being positive or having a social conscience, and oddly on the one occasion I expressed a controvertial (and negative) view I received a significant amount of upvotes.
I had always thought HN was about open, free and frank discussion where everyone's view counts, but unfortunately I'm afraid to say, I'm not getting that vibe at the moment.
No. you're just upset because you're afraid HN is losing its hip factor. Your links don't point to examples of negative comments, they point to images of a couple of people making negative comments about HN.
There is nothing wrong with the comments on this message board, and attempts to censor just to meet your ideal comment is stupid and wrong. The correct course of action for you is to start a new, hipper message board where you can post all you want about how awful the old one was and how you knew about it when it was still good. Please do this (hipsternews.com is taken).
While the start-up biz may be all about pr, image, and hipness, Hacker-ism is about keeping the truth and contempt for authority. If HN needs to be sanitized for the sake of some software personalities sticking around, then maybe users were mistaken in coming here because the site is named hacker news not hipster scene start-up pr news.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore
you've wrongly (psycho)analyzed me/my viewpoint (i'm upset HN losing it's hip factor), misrepresented my proposal (censorship), then took your own analysis as a fact, and called me/my opinion "stupid" and "wrong" based on that.
of course, you didn't stop there, to add a bit of sarcasm and humor, you went on and checked the domain name that would remedy my non-existing problem. that's why i thanked you for proving my point.
this is a great example of low-quality hate content. it almost is a template, we can write a bot that exactly does what you do.
i'd normally not write back and pass, like many others, but just for this post's sake, i'm keeping this conversation on. also you said my links were pointless, let's put some other links here, quick glance at your comment history:
http://d.pr/CChr http://d.pr/IUYL http://d.pr/Hk9d
just to clarify, despite of low quality content you produce (to be fair, i also saw neutral ones) i'd never ban you, wouldn't try to suppress anything you want to say. i respect your viewpoint as much as you disrespect me and others.
i'd just like this system to put some measures so you express them respectfully. that's all.
Lets be clear. I never made any personal comments, and you didn't really offer an idea except to say that your goal is to "balance negatives and positives" I said any attempts to censor comments to meet your ideal comment is stupid and wrong, and whether or not censorship is what you want, I don't see why someone would disagree with this. If you start removing comments that one person doesn't like, then a forum becomes a simple pr blog.
"despite of low quality content you produce..." "i'd just like this system to put some measures so you express them respectfully..."
in the interests of moving on, i won't comment on these.
HN offers a certain type of feedback for new ideas. When it was a smaller community, it offered a different type. This probably had some advantages when someone needed encouragement. The downside was that feedback was closer to the fiends and family end of the spectrum. Now a shared idea will see a broader range of opinions, and this probably means more people who will see the idea as pointless, trivial, or just plain dumb. The upside is that the idea will see more diverse debugging.
The issue with many "new idea" posts is that there doesn't seem to be a specific purpose behind them. So many are, "here's my site" followed by "yeah, I know the landing page sucks" and "thanks for letting me know that not everyone wants to log in with Facebook."
General requests for feedback illicit general responses.
Sometimes, I read "My great idea" threads and my impulse is to debug it. That means ruthlessly pointing to problems or possible problems - e.g. the person whose "startup idea" is a lifestyle consultancy which doesn't scale well and probably will never attract outside investment.
While one of the things I appreciate about the HN culture is "think about what you would say face to face," there's a certain way in which it doesn't apply - in person, I would know if sandwiching was productive, online, I assume that it isn't.
The reason I assume it isn't is because online comments are not just for the individual who asks the question -- this comment doesn't start "Dear Devrim." This comment is more or less standing on a soapbox in the public square, as are most in an online forum. In a public forum sandwiching adds noise and tends to ignore the context.
I'm sure things were different, more intimate and friendly a few years back, but that's more of an issue with becoming more mainstream. To me it doesn't matter, just ignore the haters and remain constructive, helpful and friendly. Well, I try to, at least!
If nothing else it'd be interesting to see if people tick it and still comment mean spirited things, this way they actually have to acknowledge they are flying in the face of Hacker News every time they comment.
Believe it or not, it is completely possible to disagree and/or be critical of someones idea without being a jerk or an asshole. As we all know, emotion, intention, and connotation are all hard to convey in a text-only medium. Take a bit of extra time to ensure your comments are polite and respectful, and always keep in mind - PERCEPTION IS REALITY.
i enjoyed this article a while back, it touches on the stuff we'd do better even if we are polite and respectful on the surface.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes