Tell HN: Let's Be Civil
Everyone has opinions about consumer electronics. Everyone's entitled to them, even when they're wrong. I owned and liked a Windows Tablet PC at one time! But truly and honestly, are we discussing things that gratify our intellectual curiosity when we attack each other or the authors of the fine articles for their bias? Are we really bringing fresh insights to the table when we complain that the marketplace is capricious and sometimes values things we think are superficial?
As hackers--and I include in this definition those who hack software, hardware, social behaviour, and marketplaces--our mission is first to UNDERSTAND and then second to INFLUENCE. When we read a review, no matter what we personally think of its flagrant bias or the comments of others on the thread, we should aggressively throttle our temptation to wield the flame-hammer. We need to ask ourselves, "What understanding would my comment add?"
The same is true when we see someone else violating these precepts. The downvote (and flag, where available and appropriate) are the right tools for the job. Most of the time, calling someone out for diluting the discourse simply adds to the noise while simultaneously feeding the troll.
(This is one of the reasons I have a personal policy of either responding or downvoting but never both. If it deserves a constructive reply, why is it worth a downvote? If the reply would not be constructive, I downvote and move on.)
If we as a community are unable to throttle the bile effectively, then perhaps we should ask the moderators to do it for us. There's no shame in deciding that non-technical articles about iPads or surfaces or what-have-you are better off in /r/technology.
I know that in a few days or a week these articles will go away as the novelty of newly released products fade. But the reason I am speaking out regardless is that the echoes of this type of discourse last much longer and I fear they will spill over into other threads. I believe that forums like this need a zero-tolerance policy towards the kind of divisive incivility I've read lately.
I'll close by misappropriating an old joke: "Do you know why the flames about consumer electronics are so vicious? Because the stakes are so low."
151 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadThe multiplicity of products that we have to choose between and the lockin we experience once we've made the purchase (we have a contract for the phone and have made significant monetary commitment to the devices in general) mean we have to make a hard decision and then try to feel good about it.
Once we've picked, if we admit that another device is better, then we're saying that we made the wrong choice and that we have to live with a subpar device for another few years. Most of us tend to get defensive about our purchases instead, even when we are trying to be objective.
The truth is that there are trade offs between all of the devices that are related to our priorities, our personalities, and our social circumstances all of which make us feel personally invested in a gadget decision. This makes it hard for us to come from an objective place to talk about some of our favorite topics. Many of us are looking for validation more than information (I've definitely been guilty of this).
The trick, then, might not be to try and be more objective, but to take criticism of the products less personally. Headlines are meant to get clicks, not express thoughtful opinions. The intricacies of the tradeoffs are worth considering, but you won't find them in most tech coverage. Save your hate and try to understand why the competition is valuable to others and what your product could learn from.
* Apple's centrally-planned vision of how software should be managed versus Android's more anarchic vision
* Apple's leveraging of the software/design patent status quo as a business weapon versus the Android ecosystem's more laissez faire attitude towards the exchange of ideas
Whoever eventually wins in the market will set the tone of the software industry.
Not in the general population, but on HN a lot likely do.
>It's fine to say "I don't buy Apple products because their policies are X, Y, Z". It's not fine to tack on "And you're [insert insult] for not realizing/caring and buying anyway".
Of course.
I don't buy Apple products for the very reasons you cite, but there is considerable passionate support and occasional vitriolic ass-hattery for them here on HN.
Too often I think the people on the Android side of the discussion assume that iOS folks just lack an entire collection of values around openness that they personally consider really important. The reality is that the market is big enough for similar values to be catered to differently. I don't like that I can't delete Newstand.app from my iPhone, but just seeing a pre-installed and undeletable "Rogers Anyplace TV Live" icon on a friend's Android phone makes me die a little inside. A lot of folks don't seem to mind so much. There's no point in trying to convince each other which is worse, it seems mostly dispositional.
I think the psyche does a bit of self justification for the purchase which is hard to hold back when someone challenges it. That's just my personal observation anyway...
Hacker News is usually a pretty nice place to hang out, but that comment thread reminded me of the ten minutes hate from 1984.
The Surface one up there is just some guy's blog review. It's not poorly written, but why are we reading randomly selected Surface reviews? There's an entire post right now that is basically a Samsung press release via CNET, describing some (totally unquantified, of course) minor uptick in sales for the latest Android phone. There is literally nothing to talk about there except to proffer essentially baseless flames, praise, or speculation.
I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. "Intellectual curiousity" is not referring to what you have every time a phone comes out which is 20% lighter and 10% longer.
Those threads are not useful in the sense of spawning civil discussions, but they may be useful in the sense that it keeps people heavily engaged on HN. I can imagine someone running HN thinking "Hmm, the site is kind of dead when the front page talks about Haskell but the site explodes when Apple and Microsoft fans wage war."
From the point of view of someone (YC) trying to get as many possible eyeballs to look at their stuff (YC investments), allowing this sort of thing to continue seems like the logical choice. Are the raganwalds of HN going to leave because of flaming Apple threads? I doubt it. So it'll probably continue.
Alright, enough conspiracy for one afternoon. :)
I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers.
Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.
I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.
A "hack" is almost by definition, then, not for profit and not well-funded, because it is on the edge of what's possible and quite often far outside what's useful; good business knows better than to invest in high risk, low-return projects. Compare this with the idea of Y Combinator, which if I understand correctly funds companies with high-risk ideas in the hope of achieving high return-on-investment via runaway successes. But most YC companies I hear about have minimal technical progress associated therewith. Social progress seems more their goal, in the majority of cases.
And please don't let it seem that I'm denigrating either mainstream programming nor funding ugly-ducking companies for social change. Hackers don't pop out of nowhere, and most can agree how important social change is. But I think it would be great to have a place to discuss hacking, and Hacker News definitely attracted many (myself included) via the implicit siren-call of being such a place. Given that it is so-named, we can work to make it live up to that standard, unless there's some other community I'm missing where such things would be more appropriate. If this is still exclusively Startup News: let pg rename it that, and don't waste hackers' headspace and search engine result space.
So it's not surprising I think that people are interested and emotional about these issues. It would be surprising if they weren't. But just because they are appear populist does not mean they aren't rich potential sites of inquiry - it just becomes harder to explore why they are interesting when the debate so easily spins out of control.
You're being extremely gracious by describing Marco as having "touched on...Microsoft's retail strategy" -- what he actually did is insert about ten jokey comments showcasing what he perceives as their incompetence. It was pretty funny, but if you re-read it, I don't think you'll honestly claim that you learned something credible or useful about Microsoft based on his description.
If you want to write a blog post connecting Surface to other components of Microsoft's strategy, and you have some interesting things to say about that strategy or about culture or about whatever, that sounds potentially cool. But these posts are really, really not that.
If there's a insightful article worth reading about X, good, post it. But I think people often actually prefer to have articles that aren't inherently worth to serve as a blank slate for all kinds of (stricly speaking) off-topic debate about a certain product.
In fact, a large number of comments is usually a bad sign, regardless of the article, it's the stories with a few dozen comments that tend to have the most interesting discussions.
Honestly, for me articles like this are really an ersatz susbtitute for actually going to Microsoft stores/using the Surface/getting a closer look at Microsoft corporate culture. Not living in the States and not having much disposable income I take what I can get I suppose. I'd write that blog post but without such experiences and resources I don't think I'm qualified enough for anything other than internet armchair pontification ;)
When I read a great essay by Marco, or Gruber, that is substantive, well written, and speaks to something I truly believe in, I have an instinctive twitch to upvote it. This is particularly true when I recognize that a lot of effort has gone into an essay like Gruber's recent "MacBook Pro Retina Essay", but, I'll even admit to even doing it with marco's silly blog entry about his trip to the Microsoft store in the mall - that really had no place on HN. (And, I say that coming from the position of listening to every one of his podcasts, reading his blog, and as a loyal instapaper and "The Magazine" subscriber)
I (and, I would kindly suggest), others need to learn to control our base urges to do this, or I agree, we'll need to lean on moderators to fix it for us. Save us from ourselves.
Just because we (sometimes strongly) agree with it, we find it interesting, and it's well written, does not mean that it's fodder for HN.
And, we need to learn to write more like grellas, or patio11 when contributing to a thread - put some time, effort, and research into providing information on something that we know about, and can really educate others, with new, or insightful information that people are universally interested in.
Our (my) tendency to feed the echo chamber only brings the level of discourse down, and there are (many) other outlets that would be more appropriate venues for such threads.
But that's not what's this is about. I understand others find what they say to be enlightening and excellent. I understand that there's plenty of people here who enjoy what they write and there are lots of people who highly value their contribution. And I completely admit they'll write something that I find thought provoking and interesting. Something that might challenge my world view. And so I appreciate reading it even if sometimes I think 'stop upvoting these HN celebs just because they spoke'.
What I'm trying to say is that you and the OP shouldn't presume to say what the HN audience wants. The point I'm trying to make is that we all like different things.
What determines what we like is upvotes. That's just the way it works. Some things get upvoted that you don't agree with. Hard luck. We have no better way.
If anything, I think it's important to encourage writers having viewpoints and positions diametrically opposed to mine, but at the very least, a broad assortment of clearly presented information from a diverse community is what's important.
The "universally interested in" part was trying to address the habit we sometimes have of writing from a position that only those, who are of the same political/bias realm will appreciate. I'm not suggesting we drop the Haskell, or financing-startup articles just because not everyone on HN is interested in them.
But if you do write on, say (to take something that I hope nobody is sensitive about), financing startups - don't write something like, "Only complete idiots will accept a cap on convertible notes right now" - recognize there are other perspectives and contribute in a way that brings the level of discourse up, not down.
I do not pretend that I have great insight beyond "be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing." And I have managed to get hell-banned for differentiating this from the "reach for the stars and hit your dreams" snake oil of, since it no longer matters, Paul Graham.
So-called objective reviews are in truth more like the proselytizing words of rabid fundamentalists.
You can hide the discussion but you can't moderate the religious flames of consumerism.
The HN frontpage has its ups and downs and has for a long time. If you don't like the stories, it's not going to improve the situation to be uncivil in the comment threads. It just provokes people to reply in kind. And a fluff story on the frontpage (assuming it is) is not improved by having a flamewar appended to it.
I think a second difficulty is that HN has both the "intellectually gratifying" and "startup news". Unfortunately, almost any technology/market news is related to the latter. I suggest bifurcating the frontpage, into something like fascinating NewScientist/Atlantic/Slate/Feynman/Hamming etc vs. pragmatic technology/market. Though some would qualify for both, it's usually very clear when a story isn't intellectually gratifying. This clarity makes it easier for HNers to upvote/ignore appropriate material. Good fences makes good neighbours.
Yes and no:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory
Human interaction and human civilization exist across multiple layers of abstraction, and different layers have different properties and operate on different principles. (To give what has to be the most vague and least useful answer possible.)
Clearly it takes very little effort to upvote a fluff story to the front page and to keep it there. It takes substantially more effort to pull an interesting story up from the New page. For example, I am routinely disappointed with the Front page content, and yet I am very rarely browse the New page. Moreover, this is not going to change, because I know myself. I am guessing I am not alone. There's lot more people who would be willing to clean up the front page from the fluff than those who'd be willing to patrol New page in a search of fitting submissions. Just give us a chance.
* anything apple related
* anything microsoft related
* anything not related to coding
* anything not related to startups
* ... and so on ...
Take the MS Surface reviews for example (bias disclaimer: I'm a Linux/OS X guy). I personally found the pro- and anti-reviews that made it to the front page both interesting, but I'm guessing you'd class either or both reviews as fluff.
Not because though either class of review was 'right' - but because of what they revealed about the product related to the reviewer's values. In the same way that I can read Roger Ebert one star film review and know that I'm going to love it (or a four star that I'm going to hate). Reading different reviews from people with different perspectives is interesting to me - not fluff.
I, personally, think the surface is going to be a huge success since MS seem to have been bright enough to make a tablet that's not aimed straight at the iPad, but with some strong design values that are going to meet the needs of a certain chunk of the market much better than the iPad does.
That - to me - is an interesting conversation. I've been chatting to folk on these topics elsewhere. But not here since it's filled with the equivalent of "You're a fanboy", "No - you're a fanboy"...
Which is sort of sad.
As I see it the problem is not that 'fluff' gets to the front page. The problem is that the hackernews community is now sufficiently large that there are groups who have very different ideas of what 'fluff' is.
Alternatively, since the comments on HN can be of a value - have a separate section for mainstream tech subjects. Like the Ask page. And call it Fluff :)
And that's a perfectly reasonable litmus test for what you consider fluff/non-fluff.
It doesn't work well for me (for example - I personally like the arstechnica stuff I see here. I don't follow, and don't have the time or interest to follow, most of the arstechncia stuff that gets published. The stuff I see here tends to be the stuff I'm interested in. On the other hand I could quite happily never see a techcrunch or verge post ever again ;-)
I'm sure there are a bunch of HN posters who would disagree with both of us (and a bunch more that would agree).
To misquote Walt Whitman - HN is large. It contains multitudes :-)
If I was going to bet - I'd say that HN is going to end up in one of three places:
1) Things stay pretty much as they are. The admin folk add in new tweaks around post promotion, voting, karma displays, voting on new posts, etc. The community continues to grow. As it does the majority view of what the site "is" will change. This will annoy some folk who preferred the 'old' majority view. Where this ends up - something like slashdot.
2) HN fragments. Tagging / sub-groups / whatever. Some way for folk to focus on the stuff they're interested in and ignore the rest. They'll still be trolling/flames - but it'll be more obvious since folk will need to explicitly search it out rather than having stuff that runs counter to their world view hitting their front page. This ends up more like reddit.
3) YC/PG/whoever decides what HN should be. We acquire moderators with banhammers of doom - possibly recruited/promoted by the HN community. Much more focussed submission guidelines. Lots of self-policing and strong and rapid responses to closing/flagging posts. Associated accusations of bias / censorship.
I suspect we'll get (1) or (2). Especially with us being a rather geekish site - and us geeky folk do love trying to solve social problems with technical solutions ;-)
I'm not saying that allowing downvoting will perfectly cancel this out, but at least it may do so to a certain degree.
Anything belongs to the front page by virtue of getting to it. You can argue that the community is broken because it upvotes stuff you don't want to see, but that's a battle you just can't win.
Basically, you're suggesting that in addition to there being a button for "I find this interesting!", there should be another button for "No, you fools! No!".
I have that button, it's called "flag," and that's exactly what it's for: Posts that are popular but toxic. If a post was unpopular, you wouldn't need to flag it.
I'm not sure I buy that argument. A simple counter-example is duplicate submissions. Yes that story may be front-page news, but that doesn't mean that each submission about it should be. There are probably some other trivial examples too, and personally I think that low-quality news is low-quality regardless of how many people vote for it.
Clearly no one is reading the story, and is just upvoting it because they want to believe that it's something they're interested in.
On HN, some people's connection to their OS or gadget may seem to stem from their love, emotions or their distorted consumer perception. However it may indeed be the sign of a "fierce struggle" among different ecosystems on who will dominate the future. Operating systems and hardware ecosystems are the bases on top of which, many other technologies reside. A lot of people here, have invested time and money in certain technologies. Some of us have even started companies focused on certain technologies. For example, if iPhone5 or iPad Mini or Surface is a success, then an iOS App or some Windows skills may pay back better soon.
In conclusion, the loss of civility may be the result of an intensified struggle in recent years, for returns on investments on different ecosystems.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is possible to click "flag" on them, but I try to only flag things that are blatant; this seems more like naivete.
Notionally, this is a forum for creators, but it seems increasingly pre-occupied with utterly unproductive posturing over whose tastes are 'better'. It's a troubling trend.
Tastes define what we create and how we create it. Tastes inform what we choose to compromise and what we protect in the process of making things.
So as we venture into new worlds – Surface vs. iPad vs. Android vs. Kindle may superficially be consumer products but more crucially they are platforms for building the future for a mass audience – it's natural that we're going to have to spill a lot of thought figuring out what's most important to us.
Will there be disagreement? Yeah. Will it be perfectly civilized? Almost certainly not, given rarity of good manners, social skills and healthy conflict management.
But that's life with the apes.
What I find crucial is that the way this competition plays out will determine who is permitted to create, and what. Open tools encourage clever human beings, while crippled appliances give consumers learned helplessness. This is far more important than how shiny or expensive our gadgets are.
Besides, you're supposed to up-vote comments you don't necessarily agree with so long as they are well argued. That is what a good debate is about.
The problem isn't how things work. The problem is that people are ignoring the guidelines, interpreting them differently, and sometimes the guidelines aren't enforced. Take the downvote for example. There are a few trains of thought on that button. Some truly think its there for comments they disagree with. Others believe (as I do) that they're there for comments that do not add to the discussion. Still others have different interpretations. Some people use it generously and others dont. I've heard people talk about flagging as if it were something we should use liberally. I think flagging should be reserved for the very worst of the worst and should be used sparingly. In almost 3 years here I've only used it once (I know my profile says I've only been here a few months but I had another account hellbanned after over a year because someone used the flag button quite liberally).
Beyond that, the larger problem is that there's been a huge influx of new members and the quality of comments has been diluted partly due to some newer folks wanting to be heard and doing so by being asses in the comments. When you're new it's easy to think the way you fit in here is to automatically disagree with everything and try to be the smartest person in the room.
In the end, the current system would work if only people abided by it and it were enforced more. There's no doubt in my mind that the community has changed and it really has been diluted. I'm not anti-newbie but I still can't deny that it's the newbies that have diluted the quality of discussion here. I think that since HN became hip everyone who flocked here wanted to fit in and frankly I don't think everyone can. I think there's a lot of great examples of the Dunning-Kreuger effect here. HN is known for very smart, best of the best kind of people. Therefor those who come here believe, rightly or wrongly, that they too are HN caliber people. The problem is, not everyone can be. But in this new self-centered world where self-esteem is so important and everyone including the loser gets a medal no one has any kind of realistic picture of themselves anymore and everyone thinks they're the best at everything always and belong everywhere. I lurked for over a year before joining because I felt I wasnt an HN caliber person. Even now I'm not sure if I am but I'm at least confident that I can add a bit to some discussions. I really doubt that everyone who creates an account here has that kind of restraint or is capable of that much self-examination.
Those are pretty strong words. All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately petty--consumer electronics issues.
It's all just opinion. Nobody's said "Person X is ignorant waste of consciousness and they should kill themselves" (which would be uncivil, inappropriate, bilious, and divisive.) They just have opinions about products. Products that in the grand scheme of human achievement really aren't that important.
You're just causing even more drama with this self-righteous post. It's all, like, your opinion, man; take it easy, let the geeks bicker (relatively politely) about fruit versus miniature eiderdown, and save the outrage for things that are truly worth it.
Edit: I'm not going to upvote this parent meta-post, and neither should you, dear reader, for it itself is the one causing drama, not the majority of posts on HN in the past few days.
EDIT: Also, I was thinking of r/politics, where they have a neat rule: Mo self-posts M-F. It would be interesting if we followed the same dictum and allowed all sorts of meta on the week-ends but were strict about content on week-days.
I've been running my own social network for the past five years, and in my experience it's been the meta-posts that are the ones that actually cause the drama.
Person A and person B have a little innocuous spat, but sort it out amongst themselves.
Self-righteous person C decides that person A committed a heinous atrocity and that it's symptomatic of a deeper festering infection in the site as a whole, and they make a meta-post about it to call people out. Next thing you know what was a minor, inconsequential, and ultimately solved issue becomes a site-wide rally-point for false outrage.
It sucks. HN is better than that, and the OP needs to chill before dragging the entire site into a false tempest in a teacup.
Edit: Oops, the OP is you. I wrote this reply thinking you agreed with me. Oh well!
The simple fact of the online world is that people express their true feelings which are always harsher, more negative, more hostile than their offline polite/fake feelings, so the online world is a harsher, more negative place. Some people who live in it perpetually also want to fix it. As soon as they fix it, however, all the users will just flee to a more anarchic site because the human spirit craves freedom and the internet liberates us to express our genuine hostility and negativity without being socially punished.
People love the strong emotions of the Apple vs Android debate. The emotions are the POINT of the socializing. The strong feelings are the PAY OFF, and if you don't let people have their feelings, you'll just have a tumbleweed town.
Raganwald's online utopia will be a dead and boring place. Not even Raganwald himself would go there; there would be nothing to get all self-righteous about. Nothing to complain about on his dramablog.
If Raganwald actually wanted a perfectly sanitized experience, he would go to a forum that provided it. But actually he doesn't. His purpose in life is to find a forum without that sanitization and promote it on there. The promotion itself is a pay off for him: in terms of the feelings he gets from the socialization and in terms of the traffic he gets to his blog.
Don't people enjoy expressing strong emotions about online freedom, startup life, the ethics of various companies, and many other subjects on the front page as well? Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?
Yep.
>Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?
No. Why do you want to Jesus-ify Hacker News? Isn't this a place for Hackers? How many Hackers go through life trying to avoid offending people? Blunt criticism and ranting is part of Hacker culture.
The censors and net-nannies may succeed in shutting down discussion about certain topics, but they aren't going to succeed in their quest to sanitize the internet. As soon as a place becomes sanitized people flee.
You're just a miniature form of the Grand Inquisitor, upset at the sin you see all around you. To save the poor sinners from their sin, you start a crusade. You appeal to the most powerful people--the authorities--to join you in shutting down this sin. For the good of the users.
Why are you so fucking hung up on civility? What is it about you that can't handle a little incivility? The smartest people I know are not civil in private conversation. Their real opinions are full of strong emotions and incivility. They scrub their personality clean in public to avoid being ostracised or punished, but when anonymous and online, they let loose because all humans crave authentic expression.
This authenticity is too raw for you to bear so you make these pathetic pleas for "civility" as if Victorian England was a good place. You want to return to some ridiculous sanitized culture where people sip tea and drop their monocles at the slightest provocation.
This is no way to live. Instead of being a culture crusader, a net nanny, why not examine the roots of your discomfort with incivility? Why can't you handle incivility? This is an area of psychological growth for you. Learning to accept your own negative feelings as well as those of others. Learning to enjoy the negative feelings.
"My son, we all have inside of us two strong dogs to help us hunt, to keep us company, and to protect us. One is warm and loveable and friendly, it helps us love and find friends and enjoy games. The other is mean and vicious, it protects us from enemies and it helps us hunt for meat."
"The two dogs battle for control of our heart, and the one who is winning controls our feelings."
"Which one is stronger, Dad?"
"The one you feed, son."
----------
I'm not feeding you, my friend. I will give both of your comments upvotes for the effort.
You want to live in a traditional society where people are stifled and controlled through social norms that outlaw all kinds of strong emotions and passionate human expression. You want to clamp down on the very stuff of life that most humans find most meaningful.
It's so delicious that you think this kind of parable could ever affect someone like me. To me, you are nothing but a small minded Christian moralist--an old spinster who tours the Salons condemning biscuit-eaters for their impropriety. "How rude! Why, why, you should be ashamed of yourself!!"
You think you aren't feeding the wolves like me, but you are. The drama you create is better food for me than any boring nerd fight like Android vs. Apple and so on.
Entrepreneurs are generally Type A personalities. Do you really think people here buy into your 19th century Victorian sensibilities? Fuck your idea of civil society. You are a rube--an uncultured pseudo-puritan. Your thoughts on culture and society are a fucking joke. In any venue other than the pseudo-intellectual blogosphere, your thoughts on culture would be laughed at.
Our values are so orthogonal that you actually feel morally superior when I attack you. This is how different we are. I insult you; you feel like Jesus for weathering my insults with Christ-like passivity. Pathetic.
This sort of bilious, spittle-flecked juvenile chest-thumping teenaged-courageous-loner noise is precisely why venues like Hacker News, despite the presence and attention of a good many smart people, have been rendered such sterile wastelands.
No matter how much you enjoy the game, it's not getting us anywhere. Your righteous incivility is, ultimately, profoundly _boring_.
All passions are boring to those on the outside. To enjoy the incivility, you need to join in. Now that you've jumped in, you must be having fun.
If HN decides to censor tech fights like Stack Overflow, I won't mind at all. As long as we can engage in meta-drama, my dramatic e-penis will have plenty of material to engage with.
>No.
Sure we can. Your comments have set off emotions in me. Behold: I can still be civil, because doing so is in the guidelines of the forum and I'd like to support the relative oasis of civility that exists here. I don't feel any need to break them because I'm quite able to make my point without doing so. I'm a member of multiple fora (trading, mountain biking) and just don't need to make any of them fit what I think they should be. If they have written or unwritten rules, so what? When I drive in a foreign land, it's just easier to drive on their side of the road than insist that mine is better because it allows more self-expression.
Ever heard of "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"? Avoiding both insults and violence is probably a good strategy, until we really need them.
Civility is completely in the eye of the beholder and I'm pretty sure what Raganwald considers civility would be considered by most Hackers to be a lame net nanny kind of censorship that misses the forest for the trees.
To me, strong opinions and emotions are not uncivil. Even commenting on individual people is not uncivil. I put civility on a similar plane as intellectual honesty and argument in good faith. I don't consider civility to be self-censorship to conform to the stifled emotional norms of Puritan America--where the slightest amount of passion or strong opinion causes all kinds of moral crusaders to condemn you and teach you with their ridiculous religious parables.
Not me. PG. The principles I'm trying to adhere to on this particular forum mirror PG's. He set up the forum and asked that people be "civil". His word. You're the one wants something different to that [1], not Raganwald. And if you now say you support civility but reserve the right to redefine it, you're straying from the dictionary definition:
(Synonyms: civilian - polite - courteous - civic - mannerly)
> I'm pretty sure what Raganwald considers civility would be considered by most Hackers to be a lame net nanny kind of censorship
I don't know anything about Raganwald or his principles. But his post got 650 upvotes. While I'd never claim that proves "most" HN-ers prefer his position, you're making claims about him, the perspectives of "most" HN participants, most hackers, etc...entirely unsupported by proof. And you're redefining words to suit your argument.
[1] "Why are you so fucking hung up on civility? What is it about you that can't handle a little incivility?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709310
It's not that I think this place would be better with less civility, it's mainly that I think this place would be better without self-righteous whiners complaining about incivility and demanding censorship.
In life, I believe there is a time and place for both civility and incivility. I also think different people have different standards of politeness. Overall, I would say hacker news is extremely civil to the point of being a haven for tight ass stifled pedants who contribute nothing aside from nitpicking and out of proportion Wikipedia-style anal retentive rule policing.
There are too many cops and not enough protestors. Everyone wants to be the douchebag who posts "correlation != causation" or "you said a dirty word! How rude!" and no one wants to be a contributor with a PULSE who actually writes something original or interesting or informative.
I have literally written up cited essays for HN and the typical response is some fucking idiot who wants to nitpick without giving an ounce of good faith or original brainpower.
I would much prefer a forum full of passionate hackers with strong opinions who express original ideas in an uncivil way, than a forum full of raganwalds whose purpose in life is to be a Boy Scout and follow all the rules while watching their neighbors like a hawk ready to report them to the Scout Master.
There are so many people on HN who make no original contribution other than policing other members. They get a lot of up votes because there are a lot of people who enjoy being holier-than-thou. But this does not contribute anything intellectual to the forum--I think it drives the most original contribution away. At the very best, it makes this place a fake environment full of passive aggression. At the worst, it chokes off any interesting discussion which is by nature controversial and passionate.
I echo PG when I say that it's a slippery slope. There's no value N for incivility that someone won't take to N+1. Besides, why are you the person to measure how much incivility should be allowed? Just be civil. Not hard.
> self-righteous whiners
> tight ass stifled pedants who contribute nothing
> anal retentive
> douchebag
> some fucking idiot
> Boy Scout
> holier-than-thou
> passive aggression
Is that a little incivility? That's just a bunch of angry attempts at belittling others, based entirely on your perspective and zero facts. We can fill HN up with that, but I'm not sure it would improve the place.
> I would much prefer a forum full of passionate hackers with strong opinions who express original ideas in an uncivil way
1) Doesn't compute. HN is full of passionate people. Raganwald seems to be one, but you reject what he's passionate about. So must people only be passionate about your ideas, or others?
2) You've told me various times how you would prefer this or that. It's not about you.
So, summary:
Your points are all about what type of boy-scout-god-fearin' bad men are restricting your self-expression, and how you'd prefer a forum which was a free-for-all. There are many fora for self-expression and ranting and just sticking it to the man. But rather than posting there, you stick with the one with a stated civility policy and alter it to suit your preferences. I think that's what you accused Raganwald of. You're doing what you despise.
It's okay to follow some rules. These ones are so easy to follow and it doesn't affect my day at all to do so. I'd rather find the real issues in the world and fight those, or break rules that really matter.
Don't assume you know me, my background, my religious beliefs (or lack thereof), why I'm doing something or anything that has no basis in fact. It sounds nice and angry, but all you're doing is arguing against some picture in your head, but diluting your core argument about the facts. Besides, you might find I'm closer to your opinion on most of the issues you post about. Just not this one.
In any case, this is my last post on the issue. Bigger fish to fry.
I'm a long-time user of HN, reporting my experience, and so it is about me, just as much as it is about raganwald's desire for people to be even more civil than they currently are.
P.S. I'm not literally calling anyone Christian. Equating a behaviour to Puritanism is a rhetorical device to illustrate a point. I think you and I may be communicating on completely separate dimensions...
> If you think there is any objective fact to be had here, you're crazy.
FACT: PG asked us to be civil.
FACT: the dictionary defines civil.
FACT: you're not being civil according to that definition. A moral relativism escape attempt doesn't change that.
FACT: Raganwald's post requesting more civility got 650 votes and stayed on the front page for ages. There are many who would like more of that.
FACT: many other websites don't mind how aggressive you are.
FACT: you're resorting to name-calling and generalisations rather than arguing the point.
FACT: you said this:
>> Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?
> No.
Well, I think I can claim as a fact that we can have a debate while I remain significantly more civil than you have. I don't think it would have been a better one if I hadn't.
Perhaps there is some gradation of civility, where you are holier than I am, but the question for HN is not who is the holiest, the question is where the threshold is, and what action to take.
My argument is that censorship is far more objectionable than the problem it supposedly solves.
Let's grant that you're more civil than I am. Does that make you RIGHT? Does that make you BETTER THAN ME? What is your payoff for that? Are you going to Heaven and I'm going to Hell?
pg asks people to be civil, therefore civility is more important than intellectual contribution, civility is more important than quality content? Civility becomes a higher value than the PURPOSE of the forum? No.
Civility is at best a 3rd order value. The primary value of the forum is interesting content, and lame ass Wikipedia editors DO NOT provide that.
I'll take 1 tptacek, who is passionate enough to tell complete idiots to STFU, rather than 100 perfectly civil but dry and worthless unoriginal pedants who quote the Bible and worship rule books.
"NEENER NEENER I'M MORE CIVIL THAN YOU!" Congratu-fucking-lations. That's really not much of an accomplishment is it?
3 binary dimensions:
6 and 8 are acknowledged as non-issues on HN, since they get downvoted and ignored.7 is the most destructive force of all, because trite things get automatic upvotes. So if we must have these "Tell HN" posts, we should direct our attention to people who are civil, technically correct, trite, and miss the forest for the trees.
The greatest enemy of 7 is 2, and so if you outlaw rude people you outlaw 2 causing 7 to proliferate like a catchphrase on reddit.
2 may be somewhat objectionable, but since originality and correctness are higher values than civility for Hackers, their presence should be tolerated. Tptacek is arguably one of the most valuable HNers around and if 2s were suppressed he would no longer be here.
3 and 4 drive discussion and so are basically valuable. While 4 can be obnoxious and you wouldn't want to have a beer with him, at the very least his inaccurate but original sayings do simulate interesting discussion and provoke 1 and 2 to post.
A lot of very tremendous posts were motivated by the horrible statements of a 4. So 4s do have a kind of value.
Anyway, the worst thing this forum could do is encourage 7s and outlawing rude people would basically give the forum over to 7s. All the 1s and 3s would flee--civil people don't fight back against the invading zombie horde.
There's a space-time component to this, so like most logic diagrams it throws a monkey wrench into the works. Suppressing rude comments may actually coerce folks (like me) into trying to be more civil than they might. This can actually breed more 3's from 4s for instance.
For example:
> Let's grant that you're more civil than I am. Does that make you RIGHT? Does that make you BETTER THAN ME? What is your payoff for that? Are you going to Heaven and I'm going to Hell?
Well, no. There's no relationship between civility and being better/worse/heaven/hell/correct/incorrect. Why would you even ask that unless you're casting about for a strawman?
> "NEENER NEENER I'M MORE CIVIL THAN YOU!" Congratu-fucking-lations. That's really not much of an accomplishment is it?
A worthy accomplishment would be a more rational discussion, which might be easier to find if there was less bile to wade through. Are you sure you speak to people in real life like this?
>Why would you even ask that unless you're casting about for a strawman?
It's called making a point. My points fly way over your head. I'm making a point through insinuation, suggestion, and demonstration.
>A worthy accomplishment would be a more rational discussion, which might be easier to find if there was less bile to wade through.
If you wade through the bile you're doing it wrong. The bile is part of the message. You have to drink it.
How does one communicate an abstract intuition to a robotic mind?
You are the type of person who reads Heraclitus and says, "He's contradicting himself!" Or you read Kierkegaard and say, "This is logically offensive!"
My whole point is that there is more to Hacker Culture than dry, trite, known knowns that can be widely agreed on as objectively correct. When you try to make a culture or community fit into some dictionary definition you strangle it.
I was also trying to communicate that civility is not the highest value of Hackers. Who really gives a shit if you're civil? That is very minor compared to whether you are original, interesting, right, or even wrong. Even having wrong comments here is more important than having civil comments. Wrongness is therefore a higher value than civility. An HN without people saying things that are wrong would be a terrible place.
The death of community happens when only the known knowns are allowed to exist. Tolerance for creativity must include tolerance for cultural creativity and novel emotional expression that is often judged heretical or ugly by the mass mind. When the mass mind ceases to tolerate the ugly and works to stamp it out, the mass mind ceases to grow.
There is no excuse for someone who comes to HN and just insults people in a really derivative way. That is not a contribution. These posts get downvoted quickly. But if someone stimulates thought and outrage by skirting the rules and is even able to get upvotes, why should she be censored because she fails to conform to some guy's interpretation of the dictionary?
I don't want a free for all. I want a curated experience that censors unoriginal thought. I want to censor people who are intellectually dishonest, who are trite, who are repetitive, who are pedantic in an unoriginal way. I want to do this because I believe this activity is a higher expression of Hacker Culture than the expressions expressed by reganwald.
The faction in my camp may be a minority. You may still want to burn us like the witches we are for--omg--being uncivil. Afterall, pg said incivility is bad and pg knows everything right?
In conclusion, when I said "congratu-fucking-lations" I was trying to communicate that being civil is not a contribution. It's not a worthwhile accomplishment or anything to be proud of. Getting 600 upvotes by echoing this sentiment is also not an accomplishment and also does not induce civility. In the example of myself, this "Tell HN: Be civil" comment actually induced incivility because I find this kind of trite shit offensive.
The bile is not someone who tells an idiot that he's an idiot.
The bile is the Jehovah's Witness who comes to your door and tries to convince you to be a holier-than-thou douche bag.
After being preached at I feel so dirty that I have to go buy a Bible just so that I can tear it up, light it on fire, then douse the flames with my urine.
Get that creepy moralizing away from me and from HN.
Hail Satan.
The discussion that surfaced the supposed incivility was about consumer electronics. Maybe there's a time and place to cast off our robes, wail at the moon and set fire to the castle, but...iPads? The counterculture is getting naked because of gadgets? I understand that we seek modern proxies for long-gone tribal battles, but I stopped arguing about whose toys were the best when the Amiga didn't take over. I'm still sad about that.
Civility doesn't exist in a hierarchy of which values are most important. It's orthogonal to originality, like choosing to wear shoes. You can do the same job whether you're civil or not. No relationship, so stop trying to link it. You keep bringing up irrelevant issues, creating links where there are none and fighting strawmen, all so you don't have to explain your supposed incapacity to argue a point (or even rile someone up) using less inflammatory language. I understand you think your language is the secret sauce of your message, but you're probably capable of using different language to similar effect.
At some point you'll find the bad people you're wailing at live in your own head, not on HN. You're still making personal appraisals based on an impossibly thin stream of information, and therefore drawing vibrant (but wrong) images of who you think you're talking to. I mean, go for it if it helps you work stuff out, but you're arguing with a mirage.
Since you insist that you're incapable of conducting a discussion without insulting the (imagined) other, all I do by continuing is offering you more opportunity for that. Or as Raganwald said:
"The same is true when we see someone else violating these precepts. The downvote (and flag, where available and appropriate) are the right tools for the job. Most of the time, calling someone out for diluting the discourse simply adds to the noise while simultaneously feeding the troll."
I think PG's stated principles helped build HN. I don't know why you want to dilute them when everywhere-but-HN is already the forum you're pushing for.
The question is whether the forum should censor topics that raise strong feelings about that ball.
Pg said that flat insults without intellectual content (e.g. "you're gay") are not an issue because they quickly get downvoted.
I believe in a curated forum, I just think meta-drama brought up by attention whores is the worst sort of drama--NOT the "uncivil" arguments about various platforms.
From literally the story directly under this one, #2 over all at the moment:
> Its an appeal to the Apple sycophants who troll this web site: "oh no who dares best my beloved Apple?!? I'd better click!"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706953
As I post this, the karma on that comment is currently > 0. Comments like that didn't used to happen "back in the day". Then they happened infrequently but pretty much everybody downvoted them into oblivion. Now they happen as a matter of course and get voted up instead of down.
The level of discourse has unquestionably gone downhill.
Cherry-picking a single--frankly, not really that rude or terrible--comment isn't proving anything.
In either case, the "good old days" never existed. See: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
I get it, though. It feels good to be self-righteous. So let's go nuts, let's have this little drama in this thread and give PG and the mods another headache they don't want or need. As the owner of a social network for over five years, I feel for them.
This is, to put it mildly, uncharitable. If you're only interested in being part of the problem, I don't think we're going to find anything useful to say to each other, and I'll bid you adieu.
But they aren't petty issues. This is the evolution of the computer industry. People are going to have strong opinions. Let me correct that: People in this industry should have very strong opinions. I marvel at the various claims that this is trivial / bike shed / etc, as a massive seismic shift of our entire platform occurs.
This impacts all of us in technology profoundly.
https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/262370665636716545
I think that the reason is the same: when you spend money on one, you buy into a community and an ecosystem. You become a part of a tribe and naturally begin to see the world in an us vs. them paradigm.
It's worth noting that this is an irrational behaviour set, and best avoided if you want to learn anything objective. In typically-emotive arguments like these, you have to make the decision yourself and realise that, whatever you choose, you'll likely justify it to yourself afterwards however you can. Once you start to realise that, you begin to realise how inconsequential "what type of tablet or console you own" is, and the less likely you'll be to fall into that destructive us-vs-them mindset.
This effect is much more pronounced if you actually have income or success riding on one of the platforms. The alternatives become, essentially, a hassle.
In particular:
* yeah, I know you really like [company] and really don't like [competitor], but please don't say mean things about those who disagree with you, and especially don't say mean things about the staff at those companies without very good reason
* it's election season in the US, which means more than the usual number of offhand derogatory comments about the other side's politicians and voters. Please refrain from this.
* I've seen a few shots taken at other peoples' religions. Principled disagreement is OK, but try to resist name-calling.
* There have even been a couple of recent arguments about nationality that have involved some unnecessary name-calling.
* As a final heads up, remember that even deleted posts may be cached by various external services that grabbed them via the API. It's good to think better of something after the fact and take it down as soon as you can, but it's even better to avoid posting nastiness in the first place.
As a community, let's do a better job of controlling our own posts first and foremost, and let's do a better job of downvoting and flagging when others cross the line.
I regularly see long and technically strong articles sink with less than ten votes and zero discussion, while those lambasting Apple yet again get dozens of votes and comments. Add hair-splitting with strong passive-aggressive undertones, and what's left is vacuous and mildly toxic.
So can someone create a 3rd party site that displays HN, but removes/hides these off-topic posts? Then everyone would be happy. There are already some similar implementations (like http://ihackernews.com for a mobile version), so it can't be that technically difficult. It would also be great for users to be able to specifically block certain domains (e.g., I could get rid of all Gruber and Marco blog posts from the list of links I personally see).
Edit: this could also be done with a browser extension, but that wouldn't work on mobile devices (I think)
I'd like to see a /startup or similar, moderated by entrepreneurs to set the tone of what posts or comments aren't welcome.
For that matter, a /front-end would be cool too. HTML/CSS/JavaScript demos posted here grind my gears so much; the comments are all negative and totally not constructive.
Maybe I can help with the understanding part. Here are some things that I've observed, as a hacker, about humans:
1. (most) people like to form groups and then compete with other groups
2. (most) people enjoy feeling superior to other people
These are things that seem to have been true in any part of the world, throughout all of human history.
So what's our plan here? Are we going to turn hackernews into the only collection of humans to ever live that defies these rules? Is there some technical solution that will change fundamental aspects of human nature? Maybe getting rid of the voting arrows will remove all of the meanness and tribal thinking on the planet.
I say all this because I don't understand the impetus for your post. Of course it would be nice if everything everyone said made an insightful contribution. But you know that people aren't like that. No amount of blog posting or commenting is going to change how people interact with each other. It seems like your problem isn't with the hacker news community, but with the nature of human socialization.
This looks like a clear case of selection bias. It's hard to do good as a hacker if you isolate yourself in an ivy tower of ycombinator hackers and geniuses. Making things does take some understanding of the average person and how they behave. If you truly think that hackernews is negative when compared with just about anywhere else, then you might be out of touch.
I don't know if downvote articles is an options.. maybe I just don't have enough Karma.
Don't get me wrong, I was honored - but it's off topic.
Performance, cost, usability, etc. are all factored into the system I use, the phone, tablet, etc. are all purchased based on these factors. If you do not like a particular product just do not buy it and if for some reason someone asks for your opinion on a product you can give it without being fanatical about it, it is just a product.
These threads remind me of reading newspaper articles that discuss how uncivil our current political discourse is compared to the far more civil past. And you can read essentially the same article from a 1880's/1950's/2012 newspaper archive.
> Everyone has opinions about consumer electronics. Everyone's entitled to them, even when they're wrong. I owned and liked a Windows Tablet PC at one time!
This was also telling, as it was itself a pretty clear insult, going so far as to call an opinion wrong, buried in a plea for people to be more careful with their arguments.
(In fact, I flagged this "Tell HN"--not that I imagine it will matter--as I believe that it is actually worse than having the threads of people arguing with each other.)
I'm very ok with people telling me I'm wrong. Sometimes they're right about that, sometimes they're, how shall we put this, "mistaken" about my being wrong. But that doesn't mean they're insulting me. I could only be insulted if I have tied the idea of infallibility to my self-worth, if being found to be wrong is some kind of social shame.
If I had that idea, I'd vigorously dispute anyone arguing with me, like I'm doing right now :-)
*
Ok, I've had my little joke. In all seriousness, I did own a Tablet PC, and I liked it, even if many people told me that I had overpaid for an underpowered laptop with a flakey pen interface and a lack of decent software. Was I wrong? maybe, maybe not. But I certainly am not intending to insult anyone by suggesting that their worth is somehow connected to whether I agree or disagree with them on the subject of Tablet PCs.
However, that's not the kind of statement you made. To demonstrate this with a concrete contextualized example, instead of writing this response, I could have instead said the following: "well, people are entitled to their misunderstandings about discourse; I mean, I actually used to have the same wrong opinion you currently do, so none of us are beyond reproach".
Of course, that statement would add nothing: by your own criteria (We need to ask ourselves, "What understanding would my comment add?") I would have made a comment whose sole purpose is to throw in a bit of rhetoric for which the only realistic goals would be 1) to play towards audience members who agree with me and 2) to fluster you by belittling your opinion in a highly flippant manner.
In the case of your comment, it was even weirder, hence the response to the person pointing out "irony": you seriously took an article you posted about how people were making pointless comments over something you claimed wasn't important and used that as an opportunity to make an equally pointless comment about the exact same topic.
This, in one fell swoop, both demonstrated that you actually felt someone can be "wrong" on this specific topic (which is exactly what the people in these flame wars believe and is why they bother to spend so much time arguing with each other instead of just saying "that is your opinion, I have mine; opinions are awesome!"), while at the same time making it clear that you felt that a specific one of the two parties you were arguing about was on that "wrong" side.
I will then go so far as to say: how much more "ironic" can one man get?
(Note: I am pretty certain I have not participated in a single iPad Mini or Surface discussion; looking through my history, the last comment I made on a similar overall topic was in regards to the iPhone 5's larger screen almost a month ago, and I was commenting on a specific sub-argument, taking no overall stance on the high-level war people like to wage. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4609243 I say this to disclaim quickly that I am not "in the middle of one of these arguments" and thereby emotionally flustered at being called out by your overall article topic.)
In that spirit, I will say, "Nice move!"
Surely an opinion, a wholly subjective point of view, cannot by it's very definition be wrong. Being insulted (or not) is also a fundamentally subjective experience. Anything can be insulting or non-insulting to a given person. In my opinion, it is hurtful to tell someone that their being offended is in some way wrong since it disregards how a person legitimately feels. I'm not making any statement on how a situation like that should be handled, merely that an offended person is indeed offended and that acknowledging the fact is the best way to move forward.