Why are there an increasing number of outright unhinged high karma users on HN?
And some of these leave comments so bizarre, that I can’t find any charitable explanation.
Other than perhaps they may be skipping reading every other word or something… and then respond to an imaginary version of the parent.
Uncharitably, they could be semi-random keyboard bashing, deranged bashing, emotional tantrums, and so on. Or LLM written… except the style doesnt match.
Of course this has always been somewhat prevalent for low karma users, but it’s now creeping up higher and higher.
For example, I had a recent bizarre encounter.
I had double checked the first 10 pages of google results, in regards to a claim that I implied prior in the comment chain, mentioning that it seemed supportive of the claim.
Maybe the novelty of someone doing that, and not just randomly opining, triggered something.
Realistically, it didn’t take more than 5 minutes of effort, but still… it would have been 1 to 5 minutes of genuine effort.
A bit later, a bizarre reply came making the accusation that I had put in “no effort”, and so on.
Which might have made sense in a high effort reply… except it was a hastily written short reply… that obviously took under a minute of genuine effort.
Accusing me of “no effort”, asking me to put in more effort than them, and then themselves putting in “no effort”… created a frankly nonsensical reply.
After pointing it out, that if they spent “no effort” too, I would have already put in more, or equal, effort by definition… there was no response from anyone.
Of course my comments were flagged and theirs was upvoted…
Has anyone else encountered similar or thought about this issue spreading upwards?
8 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadHeck, it's possible your not even speaking to anyone at all.
I agree your comments shouldn't have been flagged but unfortunately that sort of thing happens all the time around here. When people disagree with you and downvotes aren't enough they'll just start flagging. I don't think that's a "high karma" thing, people will start to do that as soon as they're able, which doesn't take much karma.
And, I mean, only one of the people who replied to you even has more karma than you do. So really you're just complaining about one person and conflating that into some vast systemic issue with "high karma users."
Get over it and move on. I'll get absolutely shat on by people here sometimes and have forgotten about it entirely after an hour. Nothing that happens here is worth getting triggered for over a week.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329843
There are more posters, though, whose approach makes no sense. They post strong opinions, but they can't or won't defend them, instead attacking anyone who disagrees (or else just stridently repeating the claim). Those I at least can understand. They are zealots, or they are shills.
But the posts that just don't make sense... are they bots? Are they mentally not all there? They sure aren't thinking like I do, and not just because they have different opinions.
All done with good intention.
Unhinged is basically the default state for comments on any forum, and it's worse on many platforms like YouTube.
No one reads the article, they just see a topic, or maybe even infer one, and talk about whatever they want to talk about. There's no social clues in an online post, so it builds up from there.
It’s still somewhat bone chilling to see on HN, and to see upvotes on that kind of verbal diarrhea.
Since it has a negative rub on effect on Y Combinator, so presumably they actually expend some effort to shut down the most deranged accounts.
If this is what we see… users looking like semi-random parrots… I shudder to think of those that were so deranged they in fact got mod attention.