I liked this article, though I think it missed the best part of Hacker News. To me, Hacker News can feel like walking through Dumbledore's office -- magical and mind-bending collections of incredible devices, ideas, and oddities.
Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a self-taught technologist, HN has exposed me to SICP, functional programming, and just yesterday someone posted a book about Data Structures and Algorithms that I started reading. Dang was quoted as describing HN as a "hall of mirrors" or "fractal tree."
The author's focus on the controversial political parts of HN seems to me like going to a music festival and commenting on the food trucks. Yes, it's part of the experience, but that's not why people go and not what makes it magical.
Communicating the beauty of unfamiliar technical topics to a lay reader is much harder than politics, but the New Yorker has done well at that elsewhere (I like the Sanjay and Jeff profile). Moderation is an interesting topic in its own right, though, especially in the age of the IRA and meme-warfare.
Stumbling down the root domain of the above link leads you to the collected archive of _why_the_lucky_stiff, a hacker artist who created technical documentation as if it were a work of literature, animating and writing songs about ruby in a unique aesop meets kaftka meets neutral milk hotel style, and who then suddenly disappeared and deleted his whole internet persona, transmitting a 96-page oblique missive years later as individual PCL files. https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
Several posts this past week from natashenka's Project Zero blog led me to her passion project of being the world's leading expert in hacking tamagutchis, which read as part instructional and part love letter to digital pets http://natashenka.ca/
Even though I'm ostensibly in the same industry as retail brokerages, I've never understood their business models as well as I did when I read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551
Not to keep going, but just to have a less lame example than a couple introductory textbooks -- I didn't mean to imply HN as a surrogate class syllabus
I think that the Dumbledore's Office analogy is perfect for my use of HN. Frankly, it is the ONLY reason I use HN as I find the discourse (mostly) elitist and exclusive (tiringly).
Agreed on the fractal tree. My favorite part is clicking on the comments of an article whose subject I have some experience in, and finding new areas of it I didn't know about before. I can't count how many rabbit holes I've fallen down following links to downloads, videos, and code repositories.
In defense of the article, what you are talking about is a different story more "finding the Internet and programming" that isn't really unique to Hacker News. It can surely be used that way, and people likely do, but you can also find those things by searching for "top programming books" (or hanging around twitter, quora, medium or other sites). They did sort of talk about that with the early motivations for Hacker News. And you could absolutely go to a music festival and write about the food trucks, the people and the atmosphere that if that is what unique about that festival. I think they did a good job in that regard. People don't obsessively read Hacker News to help newcomers, they do so because it is all in all a technical tabloid.
I don't see HN as an intro course to programming, but more of like that older kid on the block who you notice is listening to bob dylan, and then you try again, you start to get past that nasally voice, really listening to the lyrics this time, and now you're turned on to a whole world of good music.
Sure. I should clarify that I didn't mean "lmgtfy". There are five to ten books that covers things most programmers won't learn by practicing and therefor will uncover most of the mystery experienced by self-taught programmers. There is no need to listening really hard to the lyrics when you can learn how to play. You just need to go and read material that actually covers how to design programs, rather than are about "learning programming". And you will literally find those books about algorithms, design patterns, workflow, refactoring and whatever else by searching for "top programming books". Or in discussion on most platforms. I don't think it is as esoteric as you think.
But I think while it legitimately criticizes parts of the Hacker News and Silicon Valley culture of missing humanism and ethics (it quoted "they’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, [...] Society [...] is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. [...] Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see."), it also ignored the fact that Hacker News is not only a Silicon Valley backyard (although often is, but the matter of fact is:), it does attack unethical practices in technology as well, sometimes contrarian.
For example, just now, I saw a submission called "Western Academia Helps Build China’s Automated Racism", one comment says,
* There are almost no ethical uses for facial recognition. It is a technology for criminals.
* Is that racist? This algorithm seems to be specifically built to detect non-ethnic Chinese faces to further discrimination.
Also, yesterday's submission of "Can ads on a page read my password?", the top comment harshly criticized targeted ads:
* I really wish awareness of this reached a wider audience, third party advertising is a terrible blight on the web that has been allowed to grow and fester - it supplies no value and compromises both browser security and our peace of mind - being bombarded by these things constantly is training most of us to ignore a lot more and focus on short focused bursts of information...
If the article can add just a single example, it could make the story be more balanced, without affecting the overall theme and tone of the article.
This comment is a very measured critique of the article but one need not be so kind. I imagine you may not be doing it our of mere politeness, I get the sense some comments are bending over backwards as a means to not play into the perspective in this article. I won't be so kind: the author imputed every bias they have about a community they know nothing about and played on stereotypes from the beginning and didn't even shy away from saying it:
> Picturing the moderators responsible for steering conversation on Hacker News, I imagined a team of men who proudly self-identify as neoliberals and are active in the effective-altruism movement. (I assumed they’d be white men; it never occurred to me that women, or people of color, could be behind the site.) Meeting them, I feared, would be like participating in a live-action comment thread about the merits of Amazon Web Services or whether women should be referred to as “females.” “Debate us!” I imagined them saying, in unison, from their Aeron chairs.
Imagine wanting to write a piece about any group or any community and having such coarse ideas of who they are and what they believe before you interview them. Do journalists not care about things like biases, cognitive or otherwise and how they can color your opinion of the subject you write about? The sheer lack of self-awareness is part and parcel of the larger problem both people on the right and the left have with the news media in general.
I'm a leftist personally, I tire of the neoliberal bent towards this place too but I have some sense of context and at least try to be aware of how my own worldview can affect the way I understand others. It's always disheartening to read articles, even if they are opinion from authors that really don't even try, even a little--especially when organs like the media, just like tech companies, have a large amount of power and ability to shape public opinion. You have to be looking for toxic and overly reactionary opinions to find them; they do flare up but are generally downvoted/flagged, and given this experience I have, this article really serves as a great example of the Gell-Mann effect as others have pointed out.
Altogether, there are some interesting bits, I had no idea of the personal life stories around dang and sctb, but it was rather painful to wade through the constant recitals of tech bro stereotypes.
It is a pretty common way to setup these stories, to play into stereotypes to disarm the reader (basically acknowledging their fears) and open them up to something else. It just isn't written for this audience or from its perspective.
To be clear, I'm aware of the device your talking about. They did that for sure for dang and sctb's character to highlight how they in particular buck the stereotype but throughout the piece the author makes it clear their focus was essentially on the fringe of comments that occur on this site and how they fit into a larger narrative about silicon valley culture. I provided the quote because it is specific evidence the author approached the writing with this perspective towards the site, and should one be totally surprised it is the dominant narrative throughout?
This is not quite related to your reply, but I will say it's rather ironic that the author had this expectation of the mods in particular because in my mind they are often the ones rushing to defense of civility and often chide people making comments of the disposition that the author expected them to have. Of course, that might be because I use this site and see dang or sctb's replies to dead comments and they don't, but approaching subjects you intend to learn about in good faith instead of tired stereotypes would be best.
The author is certainly bringing her own expectations about HN's common biases and attitudes into play, but some of those biases and attitudes are on slightly ironic display in this discussion, aren't they? For instance, there's a clear subtext -- sometimes open text -- of "this author knows nothing about the HN culture!", basically dismissing the opening where she mentions how she learned about Hacker News originally from her coworkers at the tech startup she'd moved to San Francisco to join. The bias of "I expected the moderators to be a couple of middle-aged white guys" doesn't come from her lack of knowledge of this industry and the HN crowd, it comes from her immersion in it. Also, the moderators are in fact a couple of middle-aged white guys.
It's true that HN readers are not the intended audience for this -- she's writing for the large set of people who have little to no idea what Hacker News is. But the story she's telling in the article is not "here's how cool HN is," nor is it "here's how terrible HN is." It's a story of how HN reflects the tech culture in Silicon Valley and beyond, how politics and our current culture war intersect with the tech sector whether or not we like it, how declaring a space to be non-political has become an implicitly political statement. And I think in that light, it's a pretty good article.
(And dang, I think getting a third moderator in who's non-white and/or non-male might not be a bad thing -- regardless of their level of balding.)
One thing that surprises me is that HN is in fact, full of humanities. The non-technical topics are just as rich and interesting as the purely technical ones. To paint the opposite as this article did makes me think that the world really just wants nerds to be exactly as their prejudices imagined.
> I provided the quote because it is specific evidence the author approached the writing with this perspective towards the site, and should one be totally surprised it is the dominant narrative throughout?
At least partly that is about being topical for their audience. What I am trying to point out is that just because it is written from a different perspective or for a different audience doesn't mean that it is wrong. You and I might dislike things about Hacker News, but by being here we have accepted those things. But when they write about Hacker News, they don't have to fit into the Hacker News narrative like we do. They don't have to avoid calling out what they see as bad or find what we see as good.
That certain topics can't be discussed because they disappear from view is a defining characteristic of Hacker News. But on Hacker News it has always been justified by it not being moderation. "It was flagged by users" is the common explanation. But for someone coming from the outside, that isn't blinded by internal politics, it doesn't really matter as the result is the same. The same is true of other dogmas or faux pas. For their perspective to be damaging it has to go beyond valuing different things.
The other reason I have a bit of a hard time seeing it as judgemental is because they provided a lot of space for other perspectives (and even link to discussions). And those perspective seems consistent with the different positions. The article for example does not only address your perspective on the moderation, but conclude with it. They specifically and at length talk about the style of moderation and mention things like dead comments. You might even say it is the entire premise of the article.
> That certain topics can't be discussed because they disappear from view is a defining characteristic of Hacker News
What topics are those? When I hear claims like this, it usually turns out to be a topic that gets plenty of discussion on HN—just not as much as someone feels it should. It never feels like one's favorite topic gets discussed enough (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for why), but that's not "it can't be discussed".
> But on Hacker News it has always been justified by it not being moderation.
We answer questions about moderation all day. When asked what happened to a submission, we say what happened. If users flagged it we say users flagged it. If we moderated it we say we moderated it. How do you get from that to something sinister?
> "It was flagged by users" is the common explanation.
I do not mind particularly if someone writes something from a different perspective, and I don't think I would have minded if that were so. The problem I have is that different perspective appears to be due to negativity bias, to be more explicit than my first comment. I say that because the bad bits (like sexist, racist comments) you point out are given more emphasis whereas in reality they are a fringe of the comments that occur and are, as I said, generally dead, meaning they aren't at all representative. That said, I don't know how their audience being different (New Yorker readers?) plays into that, you should seek to best inform your audience whoever they are, not potentially mislead them with a biased sample of a community.
Finally, I agree with your last sentences. sctb and dang are painted in the best possible light throughout apart from the paragraph of the author's expectations. I perhaps was much too mild with my praise at the end of my comment; I did find those parts important and interesting; I don't think I've ever heard of a moderator invoking actual philosophy in their methods of dealing with users. I still believe even if that was the conclusion of the article (the gallant mods fighting the hordes of tech bro sexists), the premise is still flawed because of what I've addressed above, the sexists, racists, etc are a minority contingent, just like there are in most of the popular forums on the internet.
That's a nice way to put it. I'd have said it was a way of coloring the audiences' initial impression of the information with the journalist's own racist and sexist views.
Edit: And, I'd agree that it is a common practice in journalism these days.
Yes, it's an interesting article, but I was also disapointed that I'd never been emailed by Gackle and Bell. Then I remembered that I hadn't set an email address on my profile.
HN is filled with Silicon valley nonsense, tropes, and hot garbage. But the things you describe are why I keep coming back. There's always something new to learn.
Honestly it is a bit weird how you seemingly jumped the thread to address my other comment. My point is still the same whether it is about programming or programming culture. This material is mostly produced elsewhere and present in all programming outlets. What makes HN different is to a large extent what they focus on in the article, including the mix of programming and mainstream news. Most other outlets don't allow this, especially not as liberally. It is easy to equate HN with programming culture, but I just don't think it is really how things are. Hacker News also has a specific different culture. Of course one might argue that allowing more popular content makes programming culture more accessible, and exposes more people to it. I just object to the slight dismissal of the article, because that is the topic at hand. But now below the fold.
Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you!
Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
This. I've been put in the corner by dang more than once, and I like to think that it made me a more considerate commenter-on-the-internet. Maybe even a more considerate person. Thanks!
Also, I think that it's pretty special that the vast majority of the comments on this article is people disagreeing about what HN's prevalent opinion is. It's easy to have all kinds of opinions when you don't moderate (eg 8chan), but it's hard to moderate a forum and at the same time not let it become a monoculture.
I've seen comments claiming that HN is a neoliberal / libertarian cesspool, and I've seen comments claiming that anything mildly non-PC gets downvoted into oblivion. If both the far left and the far right feel like HN represents the "other side's" opinion, then maybe there's a pretty decent middle ground being struck.
I wouldn’t call it strict at all. He’s actually way more liberal about stuff than most over-bearing Reddit mods who think it’s their job to be editors of their own private newspaper rather than helping only when there’s no other option.
This is why dang is so good at what he does as it draws a difficult balance.
I know it's anecdotal and people live their own experience, but in my own experience dang is the only moderator I can recall having a conversation with where it WAS a conversation and not some authoritarian declaration. He even seems to go out of his way in comments to explain his thoughts and I have seen him change his mind and admit things as well. I wasn't aware he was Canadian but it funnily feeds the positive stereotype of politeness in our northern neighbors. Most people in positions of power online seem to be little Joffrey types with take it or leave it attitudes regardless of how you speak to them.
Also add me to the people who didn't know it was "Dan G" for the longest time and loved "dang" as a name.
I'm of the opinion that it is best to err on the side of strictness. Once you make a reasonable exception, you open a precedent, and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
There should be some fuzziness about decisions otherwise you encourage gaming to see what can just get past censors. It sounds unreasonable but it works well in practice.
> and some people are very good at digging up and pointing out precedent.
As one of the people who loves being that guy in another community: They're not only very good at digging up and pointing out precedents, they likely have systematic archives of everything that remotely relates to the decisions they wish to see made.
The guidelines of the site I think are the ultimate precedent. If Dang dont get ya the rest of the community likely will. HN is somewhat self-moderating after all. I have seen users point out to abuses of the community guidelines.
I feel like sometimes users with negative Karma like crazy become even more obvious to mods. Sidenote: I still yearn to see what HN looks like to mods and what not. Not to cheat the system but to understand the system more (I love knowing these sorts of hidden details).
I don't think you realize what you're advocating for. There's protection from the hate that lives on the internet, and then there's grooming a narrative. What you're asking for is the latter, not the former.
no, you just don't fall into the cracks that dang dislikes. I've seen him go after people who aren't causing problems because he doesn't like what they're saying. I've seen it multiple times actually.
His go to is to call it conspiracy regardless of what's actually being said.
When I get something wrong, I'm happy to admit it and correct it. At the same time, people make all sorts of claims about horrid things we supposedly did, and most of those leave out important information.
Either way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds.
you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution".
You are now telling me I should be citing a source.
If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster.
I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubstantive if there's a claim against you personally?
As for allowing others to make up their mind, that would be what the poster in the other thread was presumably trying to do, and you shut him down. And that's really the point.
A comment consisting of nothing but "got any sources for that?" is certainly "rather unsubstantive". But that is not why I replied to it. Had that been the only thing wrong with the comment, I wouldn't have. It was the following:
> Edit: lol, downvotes for asking for sources? "Hacker" "news" is just full of gems!
... that caused me to reply as a moderator, because that breaks more than one of the site guidelines, as well as being lame. This is routine moderation.
Both the original commenter and now you have given a distorted version of what happened there, as anyone who looks at the original thread can easily see. If that's what you have to resort to in order to come up with examples of moderator abuse on HN, we must be doing pretty well. Better than I'd have expected, in fact, given that we've posted 38,000 of these and no one bats a hundred.
also, since I forgot to address it in my other response.
asking for sources is not unsubstantive, not in the least. It's one of the most substantive things you can do, both as someone providing information, and as someone trying to evaluate the information being provided.
The fact that you've come to feel that asking for sources is less important than not making others feel uncomfortable goes a long way towards why I don't view HN as a place for decent discourse.
and now you've chosen to be unfair. I don't have access to the original comment, something you know, yet you accuse me of distorting facts. You've also lumped me in with the other poster as if we're the same person or the same group.
The only thing we have in common is not really liking your work as a moderator, and the way it's stifled discourse on HN. You have to go to other places for that, I mostly use HN as a news source.
A comment like "got any sources for that?" without adding additional context is low effort and inching towards trolling.
Another difference is while the parent post of that person's comment it would be nice to include sources, it is about a general topic people can attempt to look for public sources themselves. Your comment you are accusing a forum user (dang) of something and there is no reasonable way to look for sources backing up your opinion/claim.
no, asking for sources is legitimate, it's a crazy world you live in where being asked to give a source for information is low value and/or low effort.
> Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet
Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.
When I first started commenting, I remember being shocked (and annoyed) at how downvoted I got for making the kind of reply-snark that gets tolerated (if not upvoted) on Reddit – and that tone-setting is certainly a function of the community.
But that was almost a decade ago. The mindset of the tech community has gotten far more political (not a bad thing, but a natural consequence of "software eating the world"), and it's really hard to imagine that HN would have turned out like it is today through self-policing alone.
Even if we assume HN were to collectively agree on taking a hard stance against anything political in nature (which still seems to be the case sometimes, given that the mods have to occasionally step in and manually de-flag and protect threads), that would've likely turned off a number of current HN users who see HN as a great place to discuss tech's greater implications and role in society.
I agree and want to put /. as an example. In the 2000's I used to visit /. as much as I visit hn now. At that time there were plenty of great comments and sometimes even people like John Carmack posted there. Sure there was GNAA spam and similar, but the mod system took care of that.
Nowadays the mod system remains but the community has moved on and although the stories are good, there is no intellectual discussion.
A similar thing happened to OSNews. Another news aggregator I used to visit a lot.
what's happening here is reddit-style comments have been slowly but steadily creeping in. I dont blame the mods directly, but indirectly they should have just capped membership once the tone lost its tech edge and comments began to drift to "me too!/relevant username/orange man bad/etc" about 30-40% (by my estimation) of HN comments are what reddit comments were a few years ago. The only way to fix that is to throttle membership.
Why do opinions like yours always seem to come from accounts less than a year old?
Unless you're presenting yourself and your own comment history as an example of the problem... in which case, the opportunity is always there to try a bit harder.
If you continue to break the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you again. Could you please not do that? Using HN as intended is not hard if you want to.
It isn't, because unless you've been lurking for years or have an alt account, you're just being an elitist poser. People have been complaining about HN "turning into Reddit" for so long that it used to be listed in the guidelines as a common, semi-noob delusion.
>Why do so many of your comments in your post history denigrate women and minorities?
Point them out to me, please. I'm usually defending women and minorities here, and often getting downvoted for the effort.
The moderators help determine the community. Insufficient moderation changes the community: the most obnoxious voices drive away reasonable ones. New users who prefer that mode of discourse stay; users who want "reasonable discussion" are discouraged and go elsewhere.
It's easy when a community is small. The more prominent the community gets, the more it tempts people who enjoy stirring things up.
In the end I'm not sure if any moderation scheme can prevent that, to be honest. There will always be people who consider it a challenge to see what they can get away with, either by trying to stay just under the moderators' radar or by returning every time they're banned. Provocation makes people defensive, and then their own replies turn harsh, contributing to a negative perception of the community.
I do hope that this community avoids it as long as possible. I've discovered it only recently and am enjoying it. But past experience suggests that it, too, will one day degrade.
No, it really does make a difference. I've got a close friend who's been involved in many discussion forums, both as user and mod. His experience is mods are the critical link that prevent the community from descending to ugly chaos.
The community helps... but someone needs to be doing some policing to limit the effect of the bad actors or the community starts to get pissed off/wander off/degrade into pettiness.
I highly doubt "2 moderators" would be able to do anything if half of the community was composed of trolls. The fact that trolls are very few in the first place, and not welcome by other members who flag them and downvote them to hell, make it possible for it to work even with a low level of moderation.
> Making trolling less visible / viable practice is the work of moderators.
Downvoting, flagging works even when the mods are not around. I am pretty sure that a comment flagged too many times is greyed out and almost invisible (and that happens without mods).
Again, if we are to believe there are only 2 full time moderators on HN for the amount of comments going every single minute, it's virtually impossible to rely on mods alone for proper discussions: simple maths.
I've been waiting for an excuse to compliment the mods here, without it being off-topic. They do a great job! Of course, it also helps that the community here is more reasonable than most.
I don't see the moderation here as particularly strict nor as the original source of all the goodness.
I think having the right set of rules for the site's discussion (maintaining of which is a moderator job) and having a generally "good" population as an initial condition were the keys to setting the mods up for success. The mods' job then becomes to maintain the community's high level of discourse.
I see a lot of comments which violate the site guidelines in a fairly minor way. To me, strict moderation would involve curtailing those (to the site's detriment in general, a la Reddit, Wikipedia, or stackoverflow). Instead, I think we have strict guidelines and fairly tolerant moderation thereof. (I also find it interesting and telling that I felt normal to say "we have" in the previous sentence, rather than "news.yc has".)
PS: This is not meant to take anything away from what the mods do. It's critically important and they do a good job from my viewpoint. I think I got my hand slapped once in a decade (and I don't even now recall what it was, but I do recall that I agreed that I deserved it and it was handled reasonably).
I strongly agree. Although, to quibble, I think calling it strict moderation is selling it short. In addition to having coherent standards, dang is thoughtful, fair, and tolerant. I say this having been on the wrong end of quite a few warnings. If this forum is ruled with an iron fist, it sure has a thick layer of velvet around it. All moderation is subjective, but dang does a great job of staying intellectually honest and true to the site's mission. I very much get the old school hacker vibe.
I've been here since 2013 and I noticed a massive improvement in the submitted articles and comments once dang became a moderator. Thank you dang and sctb.
≥What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with individual users. That, case by case by case, seems to move the needle. But it’s very slow.”
I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN.
Often I kill my comment before I actually click "Reply", especially if I know my comment will be too divisive, or if it doesn't add to the quality of previous comments.
Sometimes I upvote a comment because it helped me question/ change a personal dogmatic view.
> I think the guidelines are a great way of encouraging us all to be more thoughtful to others comments, and have noticed a difference in the way I might comment HN.
The guidelines are somewhat of a joke, and are only followed (even by mods) when it is convenient to do so.
For example, I've been repremanded in the past by our supreme leader dang for posting comments like "do you have a source for that?", because he assumed it was too hostile while he completely ignored his own 'hacker' 'news' guideline of 'assume good faith' (I was literally asking someone to source the information/argument they posted here.. but hey good job on completely derailing that discussion dang!)
"do you have a source for that?", especially when phrased that way, is a statement made in bad faith, because it indicates that you believe that there's a chance the statement is unsourced (as opposed to "can you please cite this?").
I find it very difficult to believe that is a direct quotation from dang. Not only that, your parent called dang "supreme leader" (i.e. dictator, guilty of atrocities). This is clearly absurd and hyperbolic verbiage. Extremely "colorful" language is modern rhetoric of the worst kind.
> Ok, but "got any sources for that?" is a rather unsubstantive contribution, and then going on tilt about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines outright. Would you mind raising the signal/noise ratio of what you post here?
It seems the attempt to correct a low "signal / noise ratio", in this instance, seems to be back firing.
The claim is lopsided. @dang implies how the original comment wasn't all that great... but wasn't a real problem, & it wasn't until the comment was edited to include the downvotes that @dang intervened. That the commenter re-raised the issue again here as the reason for @dang intervening in the first place seems to be incorrect, as I read it.
It wasn't accurate. They mentioned the lesser part of why I moderated the comment and omitted the greater part, which is what most people do when telling a story about how we suppressed them unfairly. That's presumably why such stories never come with links, which would allow readers to make up their own minds about what happened.
> That's presumably why such stories never come with links
No, I didn't include a link because I was posting from my phone, and "hacker" "news" doesn't include a sane way to search through thread history for specific comments. I'm glad someone else went through the trouble.
But hey, you're free to continue to not assume good faith, right?
I said most people and presumably as a way of not jumping to that conclusion about you. The pattern in general is very consistent. But I can see how it would be annoying to read that, if your preference really was to provide a link.
(In your HN settings, you'll see there's the ability to see deleted posts and shadowbanned users, and if you turn that on you'll see that most posts have a load a crazy people and trolls posting on them that the mods have cleaned up.)
Definitely the members IMO; a moderator can snipe out the occasional troll, but if all members are being pricks there's nothing that can be done about that. What you need is to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, etc. You need the community to call one another out and keep one another accountable. And you need to nip any broken windows in the bud - Reddit's comment threads often spiral out of control and into a spammy mess of memes and references for example, simply because that's part of their culture. It's harmless enough on Reddit, but if that happened on HN the comments section would diminish greatly in value.
One of the other forums I frequent would be chock full of pricks by HN standards. They are known for being jerks on other forums that cover the same interest. It's still a very good community as long as you don't take everything personally.
I don't know what you mean by "suspicious." I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts. The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet".
> I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts.
In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it?
Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course.
> The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable discussion forums, mailing lists, etc. And the more gated and the more obscure they are, the more reasonable (and insular) they are.
> I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it
I'm glad your favorite community has sustained itself for 20 years, but with this statement you remove it so far from the category HN belongs to that it's incommensurable.
It's great that there's room for lots of different internet communities to thrive with different strategies. I've always felt there's room for many more—there are lots of opportunities for communities to start with different initial conditions and grow into qualitatively different things. I wish people would start them. But let's not pretend that they all have the same problems. HN's category is that of the large, public, anonymous internet forum, and all its hard problems stem from that category.
Reddit is actually pretty great. It's easy enough to evade the more-less-desireable parts of it. I can assure you some of the best textually-based content the last X years have happened there.
I agree. Unfortunately, I have the impression it is already going in the downwards trajectory. The new redesign contains all the red flags. When "old.reddit.com" stops working, I suspect it's over for me.
What you're saying is 100% true. I personally dislike HN moderation because it stifles discussion in a big way.
A perfect example is the other poster who basically got called to task by dang for asking for sources to a claim. Dang characterized it as "unsubstantive" and lowering the signal to noise ratio.
For myself, a reasonable discussion is one which it's expected to be asked to cite sources. A community in which not doing so gets you called out.
Discourse on HN is too touchy feely, people are generally afraid to challenge others in a straightforward manner, so they end up using a lot of words to do so. It's like being in that meeting where the manager is using flowery language to extol the virtues of the company, when in reality everyone is there for reasons that don't involve the company itself.
I just kind of tolerate it, but in no way, shape, or form, do I view the discourse on HN as generally being honest or useful.
Overall it is a lot better. The topics, timeline, moderation, structure and even comments. And a think some people might enjoy that.
But it also sort of highlights the greater problem which is that most people who frequent these forums these days just aren't that interesting, or interested. Or it is at least hard for those who are to show that and get something out of it.
Plenty of folks consider HN to have devolved into complete and utter dogshit; there aren’t many memes but there is a pretty heavy whiff of the Californian ideology, and given the choice I’ll usually take the memes.
This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia.
If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all nice and civil.
Political issues are obviously divisive and it's perfectly fine to keep stuff like the El Paso massacre of the front page. But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Yes, articles about, for example, discriminatory ML do often make it to the front page. But in my impression, that topic (as well as employment discrimination, culture-wars-adjacent scandals in tech academia etc) are far more likely to be quickly flagged into oblivion than similarly political takes that just happen to be in line with HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-<x>).
The article impressively articulates what toll divisiveness takes on the moderators: Even if I read the same ugly comments, I am unlikely to experience the sharpness of emotion that apparently comes with considering the community one's baby, and making it's failures one's own. When such divisiveness is then reflected in the "real world" of mass media, the pressure only increases.
But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
The political discussions that make their way into HN are very US-centric and that excludes me and countless others who actively participate here. A lot of such discussions are not real enough to me - they are problems of a much more privileged world. If we were to have truly political discussions, we'll need to include all the other countries of the world, which none of us would want. There are other places where political conversations are dime a dozen, but no other place like HN for technology, and things that "gratify one's intellectual curiosity".
I do think it is an underappreciated point, but also arguably why politics should be part of discussions. Not having to talk politics is really something that is earned. It is when you have a solid enough foundation to your field or profession that you feel secure enough in to not have to address it. In computing or software, we don't really have that. So people run out of vocabulary rather quickly, ending up in arguments like nationalism or free speech because there often isn't an intermediate layer of something like regulation or duty that you can be discussed by everyone. That is ultimately more a factor of the "everything goes" attitude, because if "everything goes" everything is also relevant to the discussion.
Hear, hear. The job of HN is not to discuss every topic worth discussing. It is to discuss those topics (intelligently) which few (if any) other places on the internet have discussion of by an informed group.
That's like saying because we can't fix everything, we should fix nothing.
There's no need to include everything. HN is selective. It's in English. The reason it can't have posts about the responsibility of SV towards the tech and social impact they make is because that would pierce the veil of fake narrative that supports SVs continued unexamined influence.
The reality is the mods are not the tip of the spear. There are others mods above them who intervene to set policy and crush off plan posts. A truth this place can never acknowledge.
... the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
What kind of power do you think we have? We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
I understood this to mean the power of appreciating the societal consequences of technology, and the responsibility of educating others about those consequences, both positive and negative.
Not much more than anyone else. The few people with power in the world are already known. The parent comment highlights the flaw of moral superiority common in the tech/HN crowd where people tend to feel far more important than they are.
In actuality we're no different than the billions of others on the planet and no amount of Silicon Valley startup experience is going to change that.
Not having power, or having less power than before, makes the discourse even more important.
> We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook.
The idea that people should stay off Facebook is part of that narrative. That is how the industry can claim that they are changing the world, but at the same time aren't to answer for any of the changes.
> Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
Social influence isn't so much what is said and done in isolation, but what is and isn't accepted. Things like what you see as a problem, why it is a problem and how it should be addressed influences what happens next.
Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)
Could you clarify why you thought this? What evidence do you have that supports this? The big thread shows that the top comment agrees that 8chan should be left alone. [0] and the comment chain shows that there seems to be something like a significant minority against 8chan, but it doesn’t appear to be a prevailing majority.
It’s a persistent Misreading of Internet forums as a mode of discourse, both in how people consume them and how people participate in them, that we tend to regard their discussion threads as a mechanism for determining group consensus on a topic. Cloudflare is dropping 8chan? Let’s get together and decide whether we collectively think that is a good thing or a bad thing. Once we’ve established that fact, we can move on and refer back to that decision in future discussions, like a mathematical lemma.
If you instead think of a forum thread as an airing of opinions - a chance to find out what is the range of perspectives on the topic that exist in the community, and be exposed to nuances you wouldn’t have thought of on your own, the exercise takes on a different tone. People who came to that thread thinking that it’s obviously a good thing are exposed to arguments that disagree, and vice versa; maybe some people are persuaded to shift their viewpoint, or maybe not, but everybody learns that a topic that they might have assumed was uncontroversial is actually one on which reasonable people might disagree.
It can be jarring for the nerd-inclined to accept that just because they have arrived at their opinions through, obviously, clear rational analysis of facts, that does not mean that everybody else, when presented with the same facts, will necessarily reach the same opinion. The illusion that you can read an HN thread and say ‘well, the pro arguments seemed more coherent and got more upvotes than the anti ones, so presumably the community consensus is pro’ ignores the fact that the anti arguments were also made by members of the HN community, and we’re not bound by collective decision making. You are allowed to read the thread and adjust your own priors and come to your own conclusions, having hopefully been exposed to some perspectives you might otherwise have missed.
Yes, I agree with what you're saying. But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that. I presume they do have evidence and conclusions and I'd like to know about it.
I think that people tend to perceive HN as overwhelmingly believing whatever the opposite of their opinion is any time there is a significant debate on something. Unless there is overwhelming support for our own position, we feel that we are in a hostile environment.
It's interesting how one or two dissenting views amongst a majority neutral or even supportive results in "This place is <insert bias> now!" I wonder why absolute agreement is required for some people to not feel attacked or marginalized.
Part of helping to work against this is to challenge and ask for genuine evidence with an open heart. I don't want to assume that that is what the poster is believing, but it also clashes with my understanding of reality.
My assessment of that thread is the same as it always is when a thread gets a huge number of comments: sentiment fits a roughly normal distribution, with the mean position being something approximating "this is a really difficult question and either course of action has significant risks and pitfalls", and every step away from the mean point of view placing increasing importance on one particular aspect and decreasing importance on the other aspects.
If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be a huge number of comments, as we would quickly find consensus and move on to the next topic.
If you look at the top three root comments on this thread:
- The first one [1] points out that different standards are applied between 8chan vs Facebook/Twitter/etc, and disagrees with Cloudlfare's decision on free speech grounds. But then many people disagree and debate this position.
- The second one [2] asks a neutral question about Cloudflare's exposure to legal liability for content on its platform if it is making decisions about what content is allowable or not. Then people discuss that question.
- The third one [3] acknowledges the complexity of the topic, devoting each of the first two paragraphs to what the writer considers to be almost-equally meritorious but opposing points of view, then concludes that on balance the Cloudflare decision is right. But then many people disagree and debate that position.
To properly answer your challenge, one would have to examine all 1400+ comments and classify them by their level of support for/against the Cloudflare decision, which is somewhere between impractical and impossible.
But from my scanning through the comments, I don't see any "prevailing" or "overwhelming" position emerge, and I see many of the commenters wrestling with the inherently vexed nature of the issue.
Sorry, I’m not challenging that requires a thorough breakdown. The challenge is the low bar of whether or not a topic has an overwhelming majority of opinion. Which you agree the evidence doesn’t support on a fairly casual glance and analysis of top voted comments and their responses.
To be clear, my contention is that we should expect there to be no overwhelming or prevailing opinion, and that a quick look at the top-voted root comments and their subthreads seems to support this expectation.
For what it's worth, I think we're taking this discussion a bit too seriously, as the person you were initially replying to was being at least a little humorous and self-deprecating.
The parent comment they replied to made an assertion of the form HN's prevailing view on blah is X, and they replied to the effect of that's funny, my perception was that the prevailing view was opposite-of-X, which is a neat example of the hostile-media effect, and I think the commenter was aware of that.
It's interesting though, that it was the counter-point that you saw the need to challenge, not the original assertion :)
Do you assert that the prevailing or overwhelming opinion was in favour of one particular position? Can you provide evidence for that?
I'm very conscious that we could go around in circles on this :)
If they are of the view that there was no clearly prevailing position on that topic, then we're in consensus and we're all done with the discussion :)
>> But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that.
My read on it is that the person wasn't making an assertion of fact on this, they were making a wry observation that their perception of a prevailing view was the opposite of their parent commenter's perception of a prevailing view, thus demonstrating the hostile media effect in action.
The current top comment. IIRC it was fluctuating wildly while it was on the front page. After it's gone, comments can get reshuffled, because some people might keep replying/reading/up&downvoting (arguably those with more of a "vested interest" - likely those that disagree with the original article)
I'd approach it from a different point of view (Cloudflare can choose with whom it does business), but still got the same general idea. Interestingly enough, some of the highest-voted posts aren't always the "prevailing opinion" - some times. Lots of comments get ranked highly because others recognize they are cogent and support them. They may disagree, and so comment, but might still vote in favor if the argument is well-reasoned. I do this personally, when I can.
Hacker News doesn't simply arrange comments by the number of upvotes they receive, it also considers the karma of the commenters and the freshness of the comments. Also, when submissions aged and comments settled, the current top comment would always get a lot of upvotes due to its position, and lock them "in place" by the strong positive feedback.
So I doubt if reading the top comments is a very objective method for evaluating controversial discussion (it has a strong correlation, but maybe not the best). Often, I see very heated discussion and competing comments moving up and down until nobody is interested in spending more energy in the debate.
P.S: Invasive profiling and tracking can be a very effective (and possibly, the only) method to uncover insights on the dynamics of online forums like Hacker News. If we track users' every move, it could make great contribution to sociology and psychology researches, and may even help answering unsolved questions in order to building a better community for everyone. Unfortunately, it's too dangerous and unethical to use, I won't support it, but I'm always curious to know the results.
Interestingly, I originally believed HN is pure-upvote based, then I learned it from other HN comments that says karma affects ranking and I believed it.
So I'd say it's just an unsubstantiated rumor/misinformation getting circulated in the comment section from time to time, combined with the impression of HN having a "magic algorithm", so many believed it without any fact-checking. Also, the quick-moving nature of HN comments somehow created a confirmation bias that makes the idea appeared to be true.
I would have believed you, since I feel often the same names are highly upvoted. Though this can have natural causes. Like them writing better comments. Or just popularity based on name recognition. Such feedback loops naturally existing without being explicitly implemented by HN sounds highly plausible.
Is looking at what the top comment says a good way of gauging consensus? I read that thread and walked away with the impression that the majority view was that "deplatforming" 8chan was mostly OK. This because most of the on-topic comments seemed to hold that viewpoint.
I learnt of the news about 8chan from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055 — which was on the HN’s first page before it was replaced by the slightly longer thread you linked to. The top comment in that thread is decidedly against the chans.
There’s also been a lot of mentioning of Popper and his paradox of intolerance in these threads. A post [1] in the thread you referred to (it also was among the top ones when that thread appeared on the front page), for example, began by saying that "Popper taught us that we can't be tolerant towards intolerants" ("taught us" implying that this statement has grown to become general wisdom).
If HN’s prevailing sentiment has since turned in favor of 8chan, I am very happy to hear that.
You'll probably find with some digging that the "prevailing" attitude depends on time of day, changes completely from similar submissions from one day to the next, and might start out one way in a story only to wildly shift after a certain amount of time or comments.
This is likely for any of the following (non-exhaustive) reasons:
-Different prevailing opinions of people in different parts of the country/world combines with common participation times.
-How likely the title is to attract a specific ideology (or both).
-How long or dense the article is combined with when it hits the front page, as it may get passed around some subgroups informally prior to that point.
-The lag time between early comments and quick agreements and the group of comments that come later in response to those comments with deeper thinking of the topic and/or substantive facts or anecdotes that crystalize opinions on the subject.
Just think, how many times have you read comments about how "all the comments here seem negative, but..." only to count only 3-4 negative comments out of almost a hundred by the time you're reading them? That's because the nature of the discussion changed over time or as people decided it was worth posting that positive comment they hadn't thought worthwhile. It's fairly common.
2019 is the year when reality caught up with the Internet in a way that it hasn't since before social media. Internet culture was never really about unequivocally accepting things, but about thinking for yourself. The need to rationalize the Internet only happened once the Internet started to mean money. Which resulted in many holding opinions that are more the idea of an idea, rather than the idea itself. That will usually mean, at least perceived, "flip-flopping" once something is challenged. And that is to some extent what is happening now.
I've seen both opinions, and many more nuanced variants thereof, argued in a well-reasoned, persuasive manner here on HN.
Adding my voice to the "good riddance" side of the aisle: thanks to what freedom of speech, association, etc. actually mean in the legal / constitutional context, said twats are guaranteed a space for communication - the real world! They can stand on a corner or picket their local City Hall and spout all the hateful nonsense they want.
(They can't, however, verbally assault bus drivers / police officers, or yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or directly incite violence, or disturb the peace at all hours of the night, or needlessly interrupt judicial / civil proceedings, or...point being: even in the US, the exercise of free speech comes with limits and responsibilities.)
Like publicans of yore banning rowdy drunks from the premises (which itself came with political / legal overtones; see https://www.amazon.ca/America-Walks-into-Bar-Speakeasies/dp/...), many owners of online spaces are deciding - as is well within their rights as owners of a private space - to ban users and groups who disproportionately degrade the experience for all others.
(This is my general surface-level opinion, without getting into discussions like https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/rnhzlo around the amplification of extreme voices by short-sighted metrics optimization, or debates on whether providing space for hateful voices effectively denies free speech to the targets of their hate, or explorations of the tradeoffs different open, democratic societies have made around hate speech.)
Private entities can put restrictions on their private space, but doing so implies that they no longer provide the same freedom of speech guaranteed to citizens on public spaces, so they are indeed restricting the freedom of speech.
...and now we've touched on a fundamental philosophical question: is freedom of speech a natural right or a legal right?
There's also potentially an assumption here that free speech is overall reduced through restrictions on it. As a thought experiment: suppose that, within a society of _n_ people, some small _k_ of them are "louditarians": they believe that part of the right to free speech is the inalienable right to speak as "loudly" as possible (for whatever value of "loud" matters over various media) so that no one else can effectively speak. This raises a few difficult questions:
1) To what degree the free speech rights of louditarians and non-louditarians mutually exclusive?
2) If you were a non-louditarian in this society, what would you do?
3) If you had control over this society, would you let the louditarians speak? Would you limit their speaking rights?
My general position here:
1) Almost entirely: when louditarians speak, they prevent the effective exercise of free speech rights by non-louditarians; non-louditarians can only meaningfully have free speech if louditarians are carefully managed.
2) As a non-louditarian, I'd advocate for limits on louditarianism (as best I'm able; this may first require the creation of non-louditarian-only spaces where I can be heard). In the absence of those limits, I'd probably feel like I was being effectively silenced by louditarians.
3) This is the difficult one, and I lean towards "yes - reluctantly, warily, and with limitations". Some examples: maybe louditarians can only speak at certain times (see: nighttime "disturbing the peace"). Maybe the practice of louditarianism is banned from certain spaces, like offices and legislative chambers (see: contempt of court, noise bylaws). My reasoning is utilitarian: I'd rather _n - k_ non-louditarians be able to speak, even if that means curtailing the rights of _k_ louditarians.
In other words: I strongly believe that, by imposing limitations on louditarians, I'm increasing the overall freedom of speech in this hypothetical society. (Not to mention the quality of life, mental health, and vitality of public discourse.)
My secondary reasoning is that louditarians seem to think that speech is a right without responsibilities - in effect, they believe that their right to free speech is more important than that of non-louditarians. IMHO, this violates the social contract of functioning modern societies, and for what? So an obnoxious fringe group can be really, really loud?
Yes may be for vocal speech, but for platforms build around written forms of speech like most online forums, how does that analogy hold since then the right of one to say a thing does not restrict another body's right to say a different thing at the same time.
Generally freedom of speech issues arise largely for written word, than the spoken word.
This metaphor might be saved if you consider amount of (limited) public attention to be analogy to amplitude of sound. You can softly type in your niche forum all you want, but nobody will hear you if there is somebody else screaming into the twitter megaphone nearby.
Ah - the goal is not necessarily the choice / freedom of readers, but that of other writers who might be drowned out, intimidated, or otherwise coerced into silence.
When this happens across a large and popular enough cross-section of media, though, it could easily start to have a noticeable effect on readers.
Pardon me for stating a related opinion here - I tend to like to let my thoughts on these things churn around for a few days before expressing opinions rather than scream immediately about the obvious side.
Something that bothers me about this whole trend of "deplatform everyone whose opinion I don't like" - once some person or group is near-universally deplatformed, they become sort of a boogeyman. You can attribute any position you want to them, and they have no way to confirm or deny that they believe that. You can accuse anybody of secretly agreeing with them or being one of them, and there's no good way to refute it. You can claim that they're secretly everywhere and all-present, and there's no data to confirm or deny that. It feels kind of like a 1984 2-minutes-hate thing where you're expected to scream outrage at something that you can't prove even exists in a meaningful way.
If we expand this thought, we get that even the most outrageously extreme opinions should be allowed to exist and operate openly. If only so that there is a real source that anybody can go to in order to see what they really do and do not believe, in their own words. So they can have an authoritative way to be for or against a person or thing or policy. So anybody can create a estimate of how big and influential they really are, based on objective data.
Going further, certain people in power like to have a voiceless boogeyman that they can use to scare everybody with. What better way to get everyone running around in fear, and getting them to get off of their butts and pull that voting lever for your side, or else those scary boogeymen might get them?
Note that this could apply equally well to a number of different things that have been treated this way over the years, including communism, nazi-ism, Islamic terrorism, white supremacy, etc.
Do I seriously believe this and want to go with it? I'm not completely sure right now. I'd like to let it churn around some more and see if anything else comes out.
>(...) once some person or group is near-universally deplatformed, they become sort of a boogeyman. You can attribute any position you want to them, and they have no way to confirm or deny that they believe that.
Except that hasn't happened, and doesn't happen. No person or group which has been deplatformed is incapable of communicating publicly, and most, if not all, have simply moved to the dark web.
>You can claim that they're secretly everywhere and all-present, and there's no data to confirm or deny that.
Plenty of data exists. Deplatforming doesn't remove all data about a person or group from the entire web in perpetuity, that's not how the web works. Remember "once it's on the web, it's there forever?"
Hell, 8chan is already back online.
> It feels kind of like a 1984 2-minutes-hate thing where you're expected to scream outrage at something that you can't prove even exists in a meaningful way.
You're ascribing an all-consuming and existential power to deplatforming that it doesn't have.
>What better way to get everyone running around in fear, and getting them to get off of their butts and pull that voting lever for your side, or else those scary boogeymen might get them?
But isn't this argument trying to get everyone running around in fear of platforms that remove extremist content, or else the slippery slope of censorship will eventually get them? Why is it that we're not supposed to fear the unchecked spread of hate speech or the ability of extremist groups to organize online, but we're only supposed to fear anyone who wants to stand in their way?
Consider the ulterior motive when the false dichotomy we're presented with in these discussions is always "let the nazis say whatever they like, on all platforms, without restriction, in perpetuity throughout the universe, or else suffer the boot of Orwellian fascism stomping on your heads forever."
Where do you see this? I checked their Twitter and normal URL, and they sure seem to be currently down, and no indication that they've been up since the last set of deplatformings.
Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point. No thanks on debating with that.
There was an HN post only yesterday about the community moving to the dark web[0,1]. Being "back online" doesn't necessarily mean returning to the same URL and host.
>Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point.
And I get the feeling you were being intentionally hyperbolic in order to make a weak and poorly supported point seem stronger than it was, by appealing to fear and cynicism rather than data.
You're probably right that further discussion wouldn't be productive, though.
That wasn't my attitude at all, it was that it was mixed for the most part. You had to just scroll down a bit, which I do admit takes time and a while.
People are subject to various sampling biases, recentism, and other such biases and give can give them a non-representative sample of any forum. I will admit that HN has become more political since 2013 or 2014 when I joined, but still, compared to any other subreddit or forum it is still mostly better.
>Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats.
Those threads wouldn't have passed the thousand comment mark if HN had anything close to a prevailing attitude on the matter. As with many contentious issues, people tend to believe HN is unilaterally biased against them, sometimes to the point of that bias being enforced by the moderators.
>Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.
8Chan and its contingent of neo-nazis were free to communicate as they wished until the site started to become a cultural nexus for racially motivated mass shootings in the US. I don't think deplatforming them was unwarranted. They have the right to their views, but not the right to force any establishment to host those views, even when people start dying over them.
Also, there are still plenty of places on the internet for such people to congregate and communicate. They can start a private Discord server and post manifestos from the race war there if they want.
Yes, and the reality is also that, if you run a company, you sometimes have to do what you have to do. If popular opinion turns on some policy or employee, you may have to make a tough decision whether or not it's something that you would necessarily do in the absence of potential business consequences.
It's easy to second-guess or criticize such actions from the outside, but sometimes you just have to be pragmatic.
Shouldn't they do a bit of research instead? Like, research whether the people attacking your company/employee/policy are actually customers who'd have an impact on your business if you ignored them? The problem with a lot of social media controversies is that no one actually asks whether the people complaining are actually representative of either the majority of the population or the userbase for the affected service or company. In a lot of cases, I suspect if they did ask that, they'd realise that a few people getting annoyed online can be safely ignored and that doing so may earn you more not less business. Or not change a thing.
Well, it's certainly going to cause many people to discount your opinion because they presume you have an racist agenda. It looks like a username consciously chosen to create offense while being plausibly deniable. Please be cautious of causing harm to a community for sake of social commentary. Needlessly creating offense is a negative, but maybe you can figure out how to use the dissonance to turn it into a net positive.
I chose it because it was first initial - last name, although I did have a tall German speaking friend who would always say "Nicht lang, aber ganz kurz" every time he'd see me. It took me a while to figure out what he meant. So depending on what you are into, maybe.
A good test to see if a topic make sense to discuss on HN is if people are willing to calmly discuss the merits of it.
The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who does not share the same perspective is not welcome in the discussion and the environment from that confrontation produce the opposite of thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Political discussion does not need to end like that and many topics which does not have the above property do pop up in HN.
That might have few false-positives (being wrong when we say "this is good for HN"), but the false negatives would be huge. There's plenty on topic that still devolves into flame wars. Off the top of my head, these seem clearly on topic but discussion devolves: Vim vs Emacs. Javascript vs anything. Static vs dynamic types. Apple's keyboards. OpenAI.
I don't think Hacker News is diverse enough for most political conversations to be useful. There's biases just because we're heavily skewed towards engineers, but there's subtler problems too. For example, how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective.
Hacker News cannot solve all the world's problems. Not even all the problems related to technology. It's ok to focus on the things we can do effectively. HN isn't the only forum to discuss important issues.
> how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective.
I can't say I know what that is, but are you sure about this? The HN community is overwhelmingly not in California, and comments about California seem to me to skew to the critical and negative.
I'm not sure, but I would eat my hat if it's not the single largest voting block. The influence is not about praise or criticism, but what is easily understandable or what resonates with lived experience.
There's a lot of different people on HN. I don't mean to say we're all the same. It's just that voting is a low-pass filter.
I was going to say it's for sure not the single largest voting block (but don't eat your hat! that can't be good for you). But I suppose it depends on how you define "block".
Inverting the question, do you think it would be possible to do accurate geographic clustering based solely on HN voting patterns (ignoring time of vote)? I'm doubtful. I think the problem with calling California the "single largest voting block" is that it's so far from homogenous. While California probably has a slightly different ratio of clusters than other states/countries, I suspect the clusters themselves are essentially non-geographic. It would likely be the biggest fiasco in the history of HN, but it would be wonderful to see what patterns could be pulled out of the private voting data if you were to make it available to researchers.
Totally agree, my only wish is the mods would 100% stop editing the original link titles. They should respect the original authors title for starters, and the new title isn’t always better. Whether or not the title is click bait-y, well leave they to the community to decide (aka if the article has merit etc)
It’s also confusing if you've already clicked on it and checked it out - suddenly there is another similar interesting story - oh wait nope it’s the one I already checked out.
> Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia.
Indeed, I will happily fan-boy for the New Yorker here, they usually succeed in capturing the nuances of topics I happen to be familiar with.
Gell-Mann seems more applicable to mass market news outlets; whereas NYer writers will often spend months -> years researching a subject.
> But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess.
Absolutely true. The failure of mods (and even pg?) to recognize this is the single disheartening and cynical thing about HN.
PG gets it half right in his advice to "keep your identity small" when he observes that people cannot argue rationally about something that touches on their identity.
But the other half (which PG and the mods get spectacularly wrong) is that what we think of as "political" beliefs, characterized by groupthink and lack of scrutiny/falsifiability, are typically held about every topic other than an individual's area of expertise.
A mature HN reader skilled in technology, is least likely to undergo an emotional/identity-driven flight of fancy about political issues pertaining to technology. An immature HN reader will either be naively apolitical ("Oh, I just build AI tech, it isn't my concern that it's being used to round up refugees for execution") or will turn off the technical insight in favor of loyalty to some political group (repeating talking points, etc.)
Of any community I've been a part of, HN offers the best hope for grounded, rational discussion of important political topics surrounding technology.
Just as someone who stands by and does not try to stop a lynching is guilty of doing nothing, the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference, which is that controversial or troubling aspects/implications of technology or tech firms simply be ignored.
With the advent of Palantir (which has had lots of stage time at Startup School), defense technology became cool. Google under Schmidt became a major lobbying force and defense contractor. Facebook is not far behind, etc. HN mods are constantly surrounded by stories of "successful" firms in the defense contractor space, and just as it is viewed as cynical to be dismissive of the worth of "another startup doing social picture sharing", it is similarly viewed as cynical to question the good citizenship and motives of a firm in the defense/surveillance space.
HN (and HN mods) are a product of the surrounding culture. As a share of GDP, surveillance and defense spending has never been higher during peacetime. In other words, it's a bull market and HN is ultimately a beneficiary of the growth of surveillance and defense tech. Hence its interests are overwhelmingly right wing when it comes to suppressing criticism and threats of that tech.
There are other politically relevant areas for discussion besides the ones I've focused on in this comment. I chose them simply because I think they are top of mind for a lot of people even though the difficult philosophical and political issues relating to them are under active suppression by HN mods.
Nobody's "keeping the topics sterile". Threads about "the ugly sides of technology" are common on Hacker News. Of the topics you mention, surveillance is frequently and massively discussed; as for Palantir, https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story....
You have focused on the stories being allowed on HN. My issue is with the aggressive throttling and shadow banning of users who post polite comments in support of unpopular* views (rather than just letting the upvote/downvote system do its job).
I'm sure being a mod on HN is difficult, but by punishing users with throttling without explanation is not only rude, it creates the wrong incentive, turning HN into a game of avoiding the throttle bully rather than just participating in discussions with an open heart and mind.
Please add features to make moderation decisions more transparent to the victim and also to the rest of the HN community, so that we can all have more trust in what is going on.
* by unpopular I do not mean abhorrent, racist, or other such content, I mean views that do not fit into the normal left vs right political spectrum or which may require more than one comment to articulate to someone who lacks the required background.
Oh, I didn't realize (and if you said it, sorry I missed it) that you were talking about comments rather than submissions. We rate-limit accounts when they have a history of posting too many unsubstantive comments too quickly, and/or getting involved in flamewars. I know it's annoying and a crude tool, but it's one of few ways we have to address that problem in software. If I knew a less rude way to do it, I'd love to replace it. The overwhelming majority of these cases, though, are ones in which accounts really were abusing the site.
We're happy to remove rate-limiting if people email us and give us reason to believe that they won't do those things in the future. Moreover, we take the penalty off accounts when we notice that they've been contributing solidly to HN for a while, as opposed to whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio. Not that we catch every case of that.
Late to comment here, but wanted to throw in something I haven’t seen in the article or scanning the comments.
I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do.
However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity to spread misinformation into legitimate channels like HN in order to further their particular narratives.
Being patient and polite is one method to deal with misinformation, but a skilled actor is adept at spreading the misinformation while being equally polite and dragging out discussions to the point of attrition.
Unfortunately the Tibetan monastery falls apart when a bad actor like China decides to intentionally take advantage of these polite rules of discourse through subtle manipulation via misinformation, institutionalism, and other means to influence/protect a status quo with false narratives.
It is unfortunate that the HN rules value politeness, tolerance, and patience above eradicating misinformation and ignorance. Bad actors will intentionally take advantage of Tibetan and westernized rules to their own benefit.
We should not restrain ourselves in discourse with one hand tied behind our back when we encounter parties that spread misinformation and perpetuate more ignorance. Identifying individuals that are being less than honest in a firm, direct, and fair manner is more constructive than allowing the charade to continue. Sometimes those comments are flagged as inflammatory or offending the individual spreading bad information because their poorly informed ideas are under attack (rightfully so).
We can’t protect ignorance. All we can do is act with good intentions correspondingly exchanging information. When that like correspondence is repeatedly abused to ignore facts or spread misinformation, we must act instead of wait for good intentions to reveal themselves (a bad actor has no intentions of changing) and meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people have read and latched onto their misguided theories.
If the individual is being above the board, the facts will come to light and the situation is usually self-resolving. If the individual cannot defend their position, that is a good indication the HN community is perhaps better without that individual.
You may say that we should strive to create a culture of politeness and respect. I agree in so far as we must then come to terms with the fact that culturally, deception and dishonesty are also taken as being impolite and disrespectful—which presents a bit of a conundrum if we are paying close attention to our virtues.
Random downvotes without comments say you can’t think of a good response or reason to support your opinions.
There are a number of problems with this, but the main one is that people's perceptions of dishonesty, disingenuousness, and manipulation in others are terribly exaggerated. Odds are that the other person simply disagrees with you—and if their view seems obviously outrageous, wrong, or stupid, this is because people are much more divided than we realize. Disingenuousness exists, but the assumption of disingenuousness in others is nearly always wrong and comes out of a failure to understand how different someone else's experience is.
Users are much too quick to reach for explanations like "you must be a foreign agent" when even the public record of the other user's comments—let alone the private data we look at—show that to be trivially unlikely. Foreign agents exist, of course, but foreign agents as an explanatory device for things one finds provocative online is, to a first approximation, a fiction. Same for astroturfing, shills, and the other things users accuse each other of in arguments.
That doesn't mean ignoring the possibility of manipulation—it just means that we should look for evidence. I can tell you that when we look for evidence, we basically never find it. Even if we're being fooled by clever manipulation in some cases, it's painfully clear that in the overwhelming majority, there's no there there. What there is, is people reaching for 'disingenuousness' as a simple explanation for what they find painful and offensive.
That assumption blocks any solution. There's no way to resolve pain and offense without recognizing the experiences of the other side.
You mention China. I can tell you that all the flamewars I've seen about China since they started blazing in the last year or so have been examples of what I've said here.
China was chosen as the example “agent” in this case because they are a nation that is emblematic of manipulation (in currency, IP theft, free markets, etc.). China was also chosen for the historical imagery, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee while capturing a peacefully sovereign Tibetan territory in 1959 and killing 87,000 directly in the conflict and 430,000 dead in the ensuing occupation.
That is to say that China was chosen for reasons beyond the literally obvious example of state agents. I know from experience state actors are rare, as well as being rare to detect. My rub is that latching onto China or Russia state agents as the only concerning actors that spread misinformation is not accurate. Somewhat more common are paid or unpaid social media shills/trolls that have many generalized accounts to forcefully influence topics.
But in my experience misinformation is spread most by those with vested interests, deeply gross misunderstandings of the world, strong attachment to personal biases they only believe and never bother to confirm or disprove empirically, reductionist and oversimplifications and un-nuanced tidbits learned from an introductory course of some topic, and so on.
These individuals overwhelmingly choose to ignore facts presented to them and espouse their incorrect views (perhaps hiding behind politeness or qualifications or an institutional authority). The view that such an individual will eventually with enough patience, see truth... is rather intractable and untenable.
I’m afraid you have latched onto but one example, possibly missing its purpose of imagery in the comment and neglecting to consider the other examples of bad information and bad actors which are actually fairly common that spread damaging tropes (that while inaccurate, continue to circulate nonetheless).
You've made this so general that it applies to literally everyone in every contentious argument. We all have vested interests, deep misunderstandings, strong attachments, personal biases, oversimplifications, and everything else you mention. So in that sense, yes: there's falsehood and misinformation all over the place. But I don't think seeing others as the problem is going to get us very far; seeing others as the problem largely is the problem.
That really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, I’m afraid. It seems to offer a form of cover and protection for views that are known the be problematic and continue to spread. Partisanship and hyper-focus on views corresponding your identify are bad, we should not provide cover for it and partisan views not supported by facts via polite discourse. We should not allow these poorly supported views to spread. It seems HN has no actual stance or response that directly addresses this issue. Some of HN’s guidelines provide shelter for enabling unsupported views. Choosing to the focus the light inwards on yourself doesn’t really solve or address this issue in the modern age of misinformation, and the Tibetan analogy was chosen to illustrate the dangers by turning inward too much and ignoring the dangers. Does that make sense? I think I’m being fairly direct and specific here.
Of course people post "unsupported views". We don't ban users for being wrong—who would be left if we did?—and we don't have a truth machine.
When people argue like this, in my experience, what they mostly want is for us to ban the views they disagree with. We can't do that. Running a complex community like HN is nowhere near that simple.
I agree that is not a good reason to ban everyone that is simply mistaken. But I have seen users flag one another for absolutely no reason other than they dislike their views being colored as incorrect, or dishonest when the behavior is repeated again and again. That is rather absurd and provides shelter for ignorance. I’m sure those people are very intelligent in their actual area of expertise, but their immaturity shows through in other areas and it’s rather toxic to witness a mod stepping in to say their pride has higher priority than letting someone directly confront their ignorance with facts and truth. Yes this is the internet, we all have better things we could do with our time than debate with strangers. However this also one of the most intellectual and influential havens for discussing tech and nearly anything else found to be interesting.
Modern times have also brought on about a host of new issues where technology can be both beneficial and a detriment to society. The rapid spread of misinformation is a major technological and social issue. How are we going to navigate the new era that is becoming more complex, conflicts are increasing, and people are becoming more partisan and incorrectly reinforced because technology and modern life makes it very easy to filter out the inconvenient facts that they need not be confronted with?
My point is we should not be assisting the enablement of misinformation. Being a hotbed for powerful people and powerful ideas, there is a certain amount of responsibility that needs to be accepted in preventing the spread of misinformation. Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.
Alternatively, those that don’t like an atmosphere where less than well informed views are actually challenged may very well choose to leave on their own accord, and they will no longer be spreading misinformation here. Bans are probably not needed at all really, we just shouldn’t be enabling.
> Rules of discourse that prevent resolutions is something I believe is harmful rather than helpful at HN, and enables the spread of misinformation.
Very well put. This is my biggest concern as well. HN mods prevent resolution by punishing participants in back and forth discussion for being part of a “flame war”. It is an incredibly coarse and un-nuanced view of debate.
I think each account should show its history of being rate limited, and the mod who initiates it should cite specific comments that were used as evidence of wrongdoing, as well as describe the nature of the wrongdoing.
The mechanism itself isn't necessarily a problem, it's the arbitrariness of it and the lack of accountability. Most people have some degree of accountability in their job. I think HN mods are an exception.
> whatever they did earlier
It would be impossible to audit whether this is being done judiciously or fairly without a page listing all such moderations, their context, etc.
> whatever they did earlier to reduce signal/noise ratio
I'd argue that moderation itself reduces the s/n ratio. If I notice a pattern where one user continually posts low quality comments, I'll be inclined to ignore or downvote that user. If the user got throttled, then it removes my ability to notice the pattern.
Similarly, if stories are re-titled (a common abuse of moderation) I may not realize I've already read the discussion or the linked content and read/click it again.
Worse yet, re-titling submissions often removes any clue about what made the submission interesting. Ironically the moderation practice of titling the HN submission with the article title introduces more click-baity titles into HN than would exist due to submitters' tactics.
No offense is intended by my feedback. I do think the moderators have a few pretty glaring blind spots and I am hoping that my feedback is well received.
> Most people have some degree of accountability in their job. I think HN mods are an exception.
I might have thought that too before working with a community this large, but the degree to which we're accountable is much more intense than anything I've experienced in a job before. When every misstep is met with instant outrage and hard pushback, you learn to adapt to feedback quickly.
People think we control HN, and to some extent we do, but we are controlled by HN to an even greater extent. This is maybe the most important thing for understanding how HN works. HN consists of a big system (the community) and a little system (the moderators) and the two interact via reciprocal feedback.
There's a third system too (the software), but I left it out for simplicity.
A mature HN reader skilled in technology, is least likely to undergo an emotional/identity-driven flight of fancy about political issues pertaining to technology
Heh, except for anything programming language related, what the best web framework to use is, whether end-to-end encryption actually works or is just security theatre, etc.
There are lots of technical topics that people attach their identity to and would look indistinguishable from politics to outsiders. And it's the same in any industry. Look at some of the debates in the educational world.
I think pg's "keep your identity small" essay is one of the most insightful and influential (on me) essays I've ever read, and believe it or not (probably some who review my comments history won't) but I try to practice it in daily life. But it argued to choose what you care about carefully, rather than incorporate nothing into your identity at all. It also didn't argue that people can't debate those issues rationally, if I recall correctly, just that it's harder to do so.
the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference
Come now. I'm one of those naughty troublemakers who has sometimes felt that the mods here enforce a particular line of thinking (e.g. Damore is awful and so controversial he can't be talked about, wtf) but you can't possibly claim HN bans politics when maybe 20-30% of the stories discussed here are political in nature.
Emotionally heated technical discussions are perfectly fine though since they are so inconsequential; at the end of the day no one is going to be ostracized or violently attacked someone over their shit choice of spaces over tabs.
> but you can't possibly claim HN bans politics when maybe 20-30% of the stories discussed here are political in nature.
Well, many of the most crucial stories have been nipped in the bud when speculation is flying every which way. I'd argue that the brief moment of uncomfortable uncertainty, when speculation is flying, is actually the most valuable point for analysis in the trajectory of any issue... before those with the power to influence have had a chance to frame the issue the way they see fit, not letting it go to waste to further their goals, etc.
HN mods find this kind of unmoored analysis very discomfiting, and they act with a nearly instinctual zeal to put a stop to it. Political discussion is fine as long as it is in the shadow of a conceptual framework that is considered authoritative. This is by definition a highly conservative, top down, anti-intellectual view. That mods view comments that contradict it as "flame wars" (rude acts) illustrates that they are anchored in an archaic manners culture that worships hierarchy and authority. FWIW we all know there are HN users who can send a message to a mod and get a user shadow banned no questions asked.
Since there are so few mods it is totally plausible that their own psychological quirks and desire to fit in would have a significant impact on their moderation patterns.
> except for anything programming language related, what the best web framework to use is...
I don't think this disagrees with my point, since most often the thing that is being objected to has not been used extensively by the objector. Bike shedding is less a form of political discussion than it is a result of tech culture that seeks authoritative absolutes in a world that only offers relative trade-offs. The worst offenders I've worked with are the sort who really wish there were a religious leader who would declare that programmers who use Mongodb are going to hell :), and they are not people I want on my team.
For moderation, the only fair system is one where all moderation decisions are backed up by a public note explaining what happened and why, both for story promotion, burial, and penal decisions about users such as shadow bans.
Surely being a mod is challenging. I'd expect that combining the challenging roles of judge, jury, and executioner into one would exact an emotional toll.
> FWIW we all know there are HN users who can send a message to a mod and get a user shadow banned no questions asked.
That's false. It's remarkable how something false turns into something "we all know". How you can imagine HN is run that way, let alone declaim about it publicly, is beyond me.
Anyone can "send a message to a mod" (just email hn@ycombinator.com). No one can "get a user banned". All anyone can get us to do is take a look at what they're concerned about—and that we do for everyone.
Your psychological analysis of us as discomfited anti-intellectual authoritarians (with quirks) is remarkable too, as it suggests that you have a mind reader. If you had a mind reader, though, you'd have known how false the above smear was, so the odds are that your voyage into the depths of our unconscious is imaginary as well.
I fully agree and I think you're making a much more nuanced argument now.
I think HN's moderation has problems with certain topics that have mysteriously become high-voltage in certain social circles, like Damore/men's rights/etc. But crucially, no worse than other general purpose discussion sites and mostly it's still better. You can show dead, view flagged stories etc. The problem is comments that trigger Valley liberals tend to be criticised by the mods on the grounds that other people would respond badly to them, which is annoying, because it's actually those who respond badly that should be given a finger-wag, you'd imagine.
But still that's a far cry from banning politics, which HN doesn't do, and it doesn't even ban discussions on those hot topics, they're just much more likely to be flagged by users. I read HN with showdead turned on and by starting at the (oddly hidden) /active URL, which shows flagged stories, so I have a pretty good sense of how much stuff gets flagged and why. It's a mix of things and not entirely easy to predict. It's not politically biased in exclusively one direction either. To some extent what gets whacked seems to depend on what time it gets posted, ditto for comments. Try criticising the EU on any HN thread during the European daytime and lots of outraged Europhiles will vote you down to -2. Then when the Americans wake up and the "EUropeans" go to bed, the same post will get positively re-rated. It's clearly a matter of voter identity and not the wording of the posts themselves that are the issue.
I used to love Slashdot's style of user-driven moderation. It did require people to pick adjectives to justify their mod decisions, and then the meta-mod process helped weed out abusers. It's a pity it never caught on outside that site. HN's approach is very different, and some days I think it's worse, other days I think it's better. I'm not sure Slashdot had to deal with the same kind of political problems we have today though. Perhaps the closest was open source vs Microsoft, or something like that. I don't recall the same kind of extremist social positions that burn so much bandwidth on all discussion platforms (that don't ban them).
> As a share of GDP, surveillance and defense spending has never been higher during peacetime. In other words, it's a bull market and HN is ultimately a beneficiary of the growth of surveillance and defense tech. Hence its interests are overwhelmingly right wing when it comes to suppressing criticism and threats of that tech.
I've seen plenty of criticism of the defense industry here.
> But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility.
Which is exactly how we end up with endless articles and 'discussions' of boeing 737s on 'hacker' 'news' by people who think they are pilots and aircraft designers (hint: they are none of those). I would bet the vast majority of people on 'hacker' 'news' are not responsible for any of this, they just like to beat these topics into the ground, uncorrecting each other along the way.
I really dislike this gatekeeping. Threads on aviation in particular seem to draw people with a phenomenal amount of knowledge. Even if they're not professional pilots/plane designers, just very well-read amateurs, why is their information less valuable? Encountering people with insane amounts of niche knowledge is one of my favourite aspects of this site.
It's interesting to compare HN with attempts which claimed they were striving to create an inclusive space but which failed.
I'd encountered one such newly-launched site, heralded as "a kinder, gentler Reddit" in 2016. Not only did the site itself collapse and fail a year later, but it failed, in the extreme, to live up to its promise, in part through the user community (always a confounding factor) but also through exceedingly poor moderation both by volunteer user mods and the site's paid staff and management.
I'll note: I was largely in agreement with the site's stated principles and politics, and still found myself very much on the dark side of it. Contrast with HN where I consider myself frequently contrarian and yet reasonably well tolerated.
In writing on the experience I called out the contrast with HN specifically. In part:
The really striking thing for me is that a bastion of one representation of what Internet critics, erm, criticise, HN, is proving much more effective at accomplishing and embodying the goals which Imzy, a "kinder, gentler" place, has set out to achieve.
... with a longer discussion of the things that seem to work particularly well. See:
I disagree with dang and sctb on occaision. I am disappointed that there are topics that HN doesn't seem able to discuss (and have called these out). I've been admonished a few times.
But on balance, the site works, and rewards time spent on it. And credit must go to dang and sctb.
I disagree with dang and sctb on occaision. I am disappointed that there are topics that HN doesn't seem able to discuss (and have called these out). I've been admonished a few times.
But on balance, the site works, and rewards time spent on it. And credit must go to dang and sctb.
Thanks, guys.
Same here. I believe I have been throttled unjustifiably on a couple of occasions, but so what. They responded quickly to my pleas for help and I also learned stuff. I feel very grateful to have this site as part of my life.
I've been enjoying the "Against the Rules" podcast [1] hosted by Michael Lewis [2]. It's related to moderation so I'll post it here.
The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing.
Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potentially dry topic. (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar's Poker, etc.)
I've been on a bit of a Michael Lewis binge myself recently, just finishing his book "The Undoing Project" - would definitely recommend if you're even tangentially interested in human psychology. It's a great introduction into why we make errors on a cognitive level and is a great follow-up to some of the concepts discussed in Moneyball.
AtR is a really good podcast, I agree. Lewis is great at writing/ presenting in an engaging manner. Listening to the podcasts felt to me like listening to short audio books of his. Who knows if moderation in the way he analyses it will rebound again in the future, one can only hope...
> N-gate, a satirical Web site with the slogan “We can’t both be right” (a NAND gate is a kind of logic gate that only outputs “false” if all of its inputs read “true”), offers a weekly summary of Hacker News discussions, dubbed “webshit weekly.”
I always find these critics a little funny. It's like the classic Beatles joke about record burners: They're still buying the record. If you're writing weekly newsletter about how Hacker News sucks, you're still reading Hacker News every week.
Seems like every internet community has some form of built in hatred of itself as a gestalt. Redditors bemoan how much the "hivemind" sucks. There's endless Facebook posts about how Facebook is so terrible.
> these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail
I don't think this individual understands how diverse this community is. I was a teacher when I started reading HN, and now work in the charitable sector (albeit tech centered).
I know musicians, educators, academic scientists and historians that read and participate here. We're not all founding or working for startups.
One thing the article got wrong is that the Hacker News community is not limited to Silicon Valley.
For instance, the person who has the highest karma is in Brazil. Very few of the people I have met on Hacker News are in the Valley and San Francisco, but I have met people from North Carolina, Philadelphia, Portugal, India, Singapore, ...
If you're interested in both technology and business and you've had enough of the self-promoters promoting self promotion that dominate LinkedIn and other social media places, Hacker News is a refuge.
What is missing from Hacker News is a handful of sensationalist topics that dominate the mass media but lead to discussions that never go anywhere and never terminate.
That's what they are designed to do. Neither the democrats or republicans want the situation with guns or abortion to change dramatically because it would disturb an ecosystem where they can count on a large proportion of the population to vote for them automatically, thus they can get elected while promising less.
What both sides have in common is they look at a place like HN and think that their side is being discriminated against because they are special snowflakes who really have something to say that matters about fake controversies and they don't seem to be satisfied posting to the 99.99% of forums that are choked with that stuff.
The real difference between HN and the social media giants is the business model. I believe Y Combinator runs HN to extend it's reputation, attract startups to join Y Combinator and otherwise participate in it's ecosystem. To do that it has to have quality.
Facebook, Google and other companies based on advertising pretty much have to be merchants of outrage because that is what people click on.
>One thing the article got wrong is that the Hacker News community is not limited to Silicon Valley.
I thought the article was pretty clear that Hacker News user base is predominantly North America and Europe, not just the valley?
I don't have any data to back this up, but based on the sources that are posted and gain traction in the community, I suspect majority NA & Europe is accurate. But that's just an observation based on my personal experiences that different regions of the world view information sources differently in terms of reputation and trust.
Has HN or anyone else ever tried to aggregate stats on content sources or user location data?
For one thing, all content on HN is English, which is well-known to people in NA and Europe.
Japan is famous for its indigenous forums; Japanese people seem to sneak some English words into every anime theme song, but they do awful on the TOEFL.
When you look at South America and Africa I think that educated people are often good at English but even though there are a lot of people in those zones, the size of the "startup sector" or even the "modern sector" is small compared to NA/Europe. (e.g. look at GDP as a proxy)
Thanks to Dan and Scott for their moderation, and whilst the article highlights some of negative aspects of discussion on HN, I for one keep coming here because it's still on average the most reasoned and thought provoking part of the internet I'm aware of - so, thanks to you all for your positive contributions :)
Has anyone ever seen an online community (with more than a handful of users) that focuses on more than cute puppy pictures and that is not described as "toxic" by "critics"? I'd say that HN does a great job at avoiding that. The article is titled "moderating hacker news" but fails to describe just how good a job the moderators and owners are doing. The moderators for moderation, and the owners for (as I perceive it) giving the moderators the freedom to try things that are best for the community (such as the politics-free experiment).
Metafilter certainly comes to mind. Though I believe it's well below HN in scale.
On Reddit, there are several immensely moderated subs with persistent high quality, and millions of subscribers, notably /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians (though also numerous others).
Smaller subreddits are relatively easy to maintain at quality, though sustaining engagement is hard (much of the Reddit dynamic actively works against this). Keeping large subs sane is exceptionally difficult. Getting "defaulted" (being added to the list of default-subscribed subreddits) was long seen as the kiss of death for smaller, quality, subreddits.
The "rationalist community" are pretty obviously a cult. They live in group houses, use logic to convince their partners to be polyamorous, have a religious obsession with superintelligence, stuff like that.
Although I can't find the story I know I read a woman's experiences with sexual abuse and Yudkowsky's BDSM habits there sometime in the last year. Actually I believe she posted it then committed suicide; people on LW responded by complaining this was an unfair way to start an argument.
Depends on who you mean by "they", no? I'm pretty sure the people who do any of those things are a small minority of Less Wrong regulars. (But there are indeed "rationalists" who live in group houses, are polyamorous, are obsessed with the threat and promise of superintelligent AI, etc. Not that any of those things seems to me to imply being a cult in any useful sense.)
I read LW pretty regularly (FWIW, I don't live in a group house, am monogamously married, and expect superintelligent AI to arrive slowly and be less exciting than many LW types hope or fear) and don't remember seeing anything there that matches what you describe -- though of course maybe it was deleted or something.
But there is this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s93F5JmhCxKDxWukD/rememberin... concerning someone who committed suicide and (though this isn't mentioned there) left a suicide note describing her experiences of sexual abuse in the rationalist / Effective Altruist community. Nothing to do with Eliezer Yudkowsky in there, though, so far as I can see.
There is a comment in that thread that could very uncharitably be said to match your description. It's a response to someone saying "she complained about such-and-such failings in the rationalist community; let's change for her" (the failings in question aren't, or at least don't appear to be from the description in the thread, about sexual abuse), and the reply is concerned that spreading the message "if you complain about things and kill yourself then that's an effective way to get the things addressed" is dangerous because it might encourage people to kill themselves. Which might be wrong, but is pretty different from complaining that committing suicide "is an unfair way to start an argument".
Anyway, this is all a bit of a digression. As to whether Less Wrong is a counterexample to the claim that every online community with active moderation gets described as "toxic": no, it certainly isn't, and plenty of people have called it toxic. For what it's worth, I think it's a distinctly less toxic place than it was (say) three or four years ago. (The website was rebuilt from scratch and a new team of moderators installed, and both of those made it much more feasible to deal with the small but vigorous group of neoreactionary loons who had been making things unpleasant there for everyone else.) And for sure it's much less kooky than the real-world Bay Area rationalist community is alleged to be.
I don't like singling out bad stories about one person on a larger website that is part of a larger philosophy. And more generally, you seem to think very badly of those people that try to improve the world in their way. That's more than can be said about the vast majority of other communities.
This is probably a hammer and nail thing, but having just heard a podcast about disinformation campaigns (https://samharris.org/podcasts/145-information-war/), your comment shares some traits. The podcast discusses that one of the main things "they" (those behind disinformation campaigns) do is putting groups up against each other in various ways, highlighting the differences rather than the similarities. Regardless of whether you're actively trying to do that (I would assume not, you're probably unaware of the effect this type of comment has), this is exactly the type of comment that creates an us vs them environment and highlights the very, very worst stories of what you perceive to be the other side. It's one of the least constructive things you can do online.
On SA the mods were the toxic people. Do you remember Helldump? It was a forum dedicated to stalking random users and getting them banned by proving they weren't cool enough in real life to get to hang out on SA.
I think one reason for this is that to be a mod, you needed to have tons of free time and be friends with the admins already.
Are you implying that this article was trying to be bias-free? The author spent entire paragraphs just cherry-picking "toxic" things that have been said on HN to make discussion here look bad.
> Gackle is drawn to healing workshops; Bell, to Indian philosophy. They seem, at times, to be applying old, humanist techniques to a culture obsessed with the future.
I wouldn't have guessed that. What's next though is even more interesting:
> “Something that’s deeply interesting, I think, to both of us,” Gackle said, “is the way in which one can arrive at a nonviolent reaction to somebody by having greater awareness of the—” He paused. “I’ll say violence in oneself. By which I mean the kind of agitation and activation that is causing people, including ourselves, to react in a kind of fight-or-flight way that leads to misunderstanding, conflict, and, ultimately, Internet flame wars. This seemingly trivial stuff, about people getting mad at other people on the Internet, is actually tied to this much deeper and more fascinating process of what goes on between people and what goes on in oneself.”
Essentially, the task of Dan and Scott is akin to the task of a (good) teacher. A communication teacher, perhaps?
I was taught a metaphysical law (a psychological heuristic, if you prefer) called "the Mirror Principle" (it has other names), to wit: When someone has some behaviour or quality that irritates or upsets you, you will often find that you have that behaviour or quality yourself but are unaware of it. Becoming aware of it helps to "move your energy" on the underlying issue or tension.
If the author is reading this, I would really enjoy hearing what the story pitch process for this was like. Even if it punches above its weight in terms of "mindshare", HN is still niche as far as tech subjects go. And, in terms of online communities, boring as hell compared to Reddit, 4/8chans, and even Usenet. The angle of focusing on the two human mods – particularly in the context of contemporary online content being associated with algorithmic moderation – is a good one, but still seems niche for the New Yorker. OTOH, it would definitely be a more obviously attractive pitch to Ars Technica or WIRED.
She has written several posts about Silicon Valley culture before, both for the New Yorker and other publications—I learned about her work back in 2016, on N+1. I recommend reading it, it was quite fun and depressing at the same time: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
Amidst all the ambient craziness of our ever-changing world, I raise a glass to Hacker News, the team who moderate it and to all who wish to make it a community driven by erudite discussions :)
I'll drink to that. There's a constant tension in my life between time devoted to reading books vs. time perusing HN stories and comments. It's hard to reach a good balance.
>Then my eyes moved down the thread, where a third user had left a new comment. It read: “King Canute was supposed to stop the tide, you couch alluder.”
It seems to me that comment is a joke. Playfully nitpicking word choice while putting in a bit of banter. But the article seems to be taking the comment as a serious argument/insult.
I can tell you as a person who has been spanked by dang a few times that there truly are people who can be ignorant in the other direction.
I have written a number of replies that to me were simply neutral questions but which felt like an attack, from what I can tell, because they were harshly downvoted and I was even throttled by the mods.
I have to assume that’s on me and I have largely stopped asking for clarification because I seem to do it without sufficient empathy or something.
dang did reply thoughtfully to my inquiries about what I had done and that actually made me feel worse! I know those two are busy doing way more important things and I hate making their day worse.
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness.
I recently started contributing on another online community, a Slack, and I've found the rhetorical habits I've unwittingly cultivated creating a weird sort of mood. Nothing I'm saying is wrong, but HN has managed to make me somewhat oblivious to tone.
It's exactly as she describes, 'reckless'. I dare to go places that will rile people up. The silence that met my initial posts was deafening.
I initially wanted to retreat back to my familiar communities, Quora, HN. But I've never backed down from this kind of challenge before and I'm not about to now. I'm slowly managing to discover better 'hygiene' so I can fit better into this particular community of wonderful people.
But I wouldn't give back my participation in HN for anything. More than any other place I've ever found, HN makes me feel like I belong.
I may be misinterpreting what you're saying, but just in case: the critique isn't about "style", as in being too direct or offensive or anything like that. It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
> It's about the value system, and about how arguments are evaluated.
Sure, that critique is all over the piece, and quite valid. So valid that calling attention to it again feels like beating a dead horse.
It was the 'performative erudition' part I wanted to share my experience with. HN has changed the way that I communicate and think, in ways that I couldn't put a finger on until I started reading the article. It's changed how I come across at work, how I interact with my friends and family.
> Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Why do people insist on things being pretty? Obviously they're overcompensating for deficiencies in some other area. I'll stop now before you start thinking I'm serious.
I have to say I love the meta-nature of this comment. Truly. I feel that the comment in the article about "performative erudition" does point to something -- something that I certainly do on HN!! -- that you are also doing in this comment while you say that the sentence in the article is about something else. You are not wrong about your point (HN sure does love its superficial legalism and uber-rationality) but the way you've said it is exactly the HN style!
Very interesting article :-) I had no idea that the community is this large and that there are only two moderators.
The article could have explained the other part of the moderation better - the user moderation provided by up and down votes. Bad comments are not only flagged but also tend to be pushed further down the page towards oblivion, while better comments tend to be lifted up towards the top of the page.
Anyways, King Canute: He was Danish, not Swedish :-)
I’ve always thought HN is so relatively pleasant because of the investment it puts into quality moderation. But reading this profile really underscored how different things would be had two other people, of different temperaments and perspectives on life, been selected as mods. I imagined the mods to stereotypically be, at oldest, late-20s techies in SV. But it makes sense in retrospect one is in his mid-30s, and one is old enough to have 2 children of his own.
Heck, raising kids might even have helped Dan get better at moderating. Both in terms of doing it and handling the mental burden. Seems like there's some overlap in skills like trying to understand them, giving guidance, having patience about the process, etc.
I have seen dang's tailored-to-individual responses to provocative comments on HN, and in my view they are THE gold standard method of diffusing these difficult sorts of discussions, both in real life and on the internet.
That type of moderation is rare and it is the thing that sets HN apart from other forums.
I gotta say, I appreciate the moderation on Hacker News. I've appreciated several messages back and forth with dang and sctb, about moderation, my behavior, even UI. From my experience, it's the best moderated sites on the internet. Kudos moderating team!
Just last night I went down a rabbit hole reading about perspectives on climate change. I googled "hacker news for environmentalism", looking for a forum similar to this but with a less direct focus on software tech. This led back to an ask HN thread asking what users were doing to help combat climate change. This in turn led me to a comment that mentioned the "Deep Adaptation" paper by Jem Bendell which was something of an epiphany in that it's an almost perfect exposition on the existential dread that has come to be a low-level hum in my everyday life. It was also comforting to know that someone had codified my attitude about this dread being not a hindrance but rather a good thing.
Anyway, it just goes to show that while I wish this forum had more of a focus on these issues, the discussion here is almost always a great source of thoughtful perspectives and a place to come express oneself honestly and openly. So thanks for that, HN.
> “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work.“
Software might be eating the world, I don't think people will eat software anytime soon.
It's a good reminder that we can't solve all problems by just throwing some code at it. Unfortunately ...
The profile was exciting to read. Similar to devouring "making of" bonus material that used to be bundled with dvds.
Made me think: I'd like to read/hear more from dang & sctb and how they look at things.
Have you ever thought about something like a podcast or blog or something like a microblog or commented bookmark feed?
edit: completely forgot: thank you so much for pouring your hearts and souls into this community.
like another commenter already noted: hn is one of the few remaining well moderated corners of the web. feels a bit like all the other elves already left middle earth. it is wonderful to have you.
Completely agree. It’s also stunningly impressive to me that the parent company pays the salaries of two full-time, severely overqualified moderators for site I can use for free.
Related: My daughter's second grade teacher was Mrs. Emily Chewning, of Scottish extraction. She told me that when the first parent-teacher conferences happened, a number of parents were surprised at her appearance: kids always referred to her as "Miss Chew" and from the sound of the name, parents assumed she was Chinese.
Joking aside, if there were to be forum awards, Hacker News would top it all the time.
Best moderated, high level, most interesting discussion forum award goes to ...
I admit that when I joined Hacker News, I viewed it to some extent as an anthropology experiment, since discussions I encountered reflected some of the issues cited in the article, specifically that some discussions seemed to reflect a myopia that suggested participants were likely rarely exposed to people outside their bubble, and often a lack of respect for views that were outside that paradigm. However, I've seen discussions become more tempered, and a great influence from Dan and Scott as moderators (thank you!). At this point, I do read and contribute to Hacker News in lieu of most other social media, though sometimes I still read comments that feel arrogant or dismissive of outside views, especially when topics that are cultural enter the picture. My general approach is to just ignore them and move on to more productive discussions, and sometimes to feel like it might be time for a break for me, though I'm not sure there are any online communities I think do a much better job of having civil discourse.
I loved this article and just want to thank Dan and Scott for all that they do. I appreciate how moderating a forum like HN leads to deep introspection about what triggers us. "This seemingly trivial stuff, about people getting mad at other people on the Internet, is actually tied to this much deeper and more fascinating process of what goes on between people and what goes on in oneself."
It's too easy to judge quickly (i.e. never reading but criticizing an article based on its title) and misunderstand strangers on the Internet. I admire the extreme patience that our HN mods have in helping us to judge less quickly and respond more thoughtfully to one another here. It's no doubt a challenging, emotionally taxing, and never-ending job, but y'all are doing it and doing it well. Thank you.
Big thanks to dang and sctb. You’re doing an impossible job, and doing it as well as two humans can. As others have said, this makes HN the best forum left on the Internet.
I want you to know your efforts aren’t wasted or invisible to me. I am very appreciative of the tough work you both do.
"Gackle replied. “We can’t stop that any more than King Canute”—the ancient Swedish king who demonstrated the limits of his power by trying, in an ironic spirit, to command the sea—“could stop the waves.""
Canute was King of England, Denmark and Norway. He was not Swedish. I think that The Newyorker is trolling Hacker News by dropping this quote in.
FWIW, I find that the political discussions here are still a lot better than in most other places on the internet and sometimes I find them quite valuable.
For example, I have a pretty solid attitude against genetically enhanced food and where I live, there are quite some people who think likewise (central Europe). But through HN I learned, that there are other places in the world, where such food can significantly improve the lives of many humans and where educated people can't understand how on earth you can possibly be against using such technology.
I find such insights very valuable because it shows me how limited and filtered ones real-live perception can be.
The attitude against genetically enhanced food is purposely promoted in Europe. You could say the attitude is not organic. :-)
It serves as a non-tariff trade barrier against the USA. Promoting this attitude serves the European agricultural producers, particularly the seed suppliers. European consumers of course pay higher prices.
Although being - sometimes wildly - at odds with many of the leanings, assumptions, and perceived biases underlying the generality of HN, and often not sharing editorial viewpoints as expressed by dang and sctb, I am consistently in awe and absolutely drooling fanboy adulation over the quality of the moderation and everything else which keep - miraculously - this site running, healthy, useful, and mostly spam-free. From over here in a very different set of values and mind: Thank you for all that.
As for the article: King Canute was a Danish and for a while English king. Never Swedish.
I liked the article's info on the background of the moderators.
It was informative if anything.
And made me feel that they are more human than I thought :-).
However, I disagree with these nuance-avoiding characterization of participation and discussion.
Eg, the article makes participants in Boeing crash discussion, seem inhumane and devoid of 'outrage' that the authors of the article were expecting.
On the other hand, the article is not analytical enough (or purposefully avoiding) mentioning the potential causes, that make moderation of a technical forum difficult.
As I had noted somewhere else in my posts, this forum allows a disproportionaly high number of one-sided article submissions.
It is those type of submissions, by often high-karma users
that continue to create selective-outrage, counter-selective-outrage arguments, and overall high stress, low technical information content discussions.
I'm relatively new (this year) to HN, but it has quickly become my favorite site for news (and tech news). While part of the reason for this is the clean, non-commercialized interface, the primary reason I frequent this site is the expert commentary on posts.
[Forgive if I've missed this in the deservedly KM-long thread; I didn't find any in a couple of rushed `grep`s.]
On the "sheer quantity of it is so overwhelming":
Not that I didn't already guess the workload would be staggering, given the gargantuan flow of comments and submissions ... still, I find the above somewhat disquieting—for the long-term health of both the moderators.
I realize that some long-time members of this community assist dang & sctb in helping moderate. Regardless, I hope they can have a slightly larger "official" team to spread the unstoppable stream of workload. Not merely for the sake of quantity, but to have fewer occurrences of having your psychological buttons get stress-tested. (I'm sure they know this, and consider this topic from time-to-time, as mentioned in the article.)
- - -
Also happy to have learnt some background and interests of the human moderators.
Strange that the article seems to hinge mostly on moderation, rather than any of the other things that make HN a great resource.
To me the great difference of HN over anything else has been the expectation on commentors to write something thoughtfull and well argued, and it's discouragement of frivolous commentary.
The mainstream media seems hungup on the concept of moderation when discussing online communities, and I think the moderation framework is only a minor part of what make these communities work.
> I think the moderation framework is only a minor part of what make these communities work.
With all due respect, it feels to me that you have never had the experience of running an online community at scale. I believe the moderation for this site is the only thing that keeps it from deteriorating into complete chaos and toxicity.
I am also amazed that the two moderators have managed to hang on for so long. It seems to me like the archetypal burnout job.
Skipping from thread to thread felt a bit like arriving at a party where half the room was sipping non-alcoholic shrubs and the other half had spent the afternoon tailgating in a stadium parking lot.
>The most ideologically motivated or extreme posts and comments on Hacker News—an interview piece from Quillette titled “Understanding Victimhood Culture”; a link to a video of James Damore and Jordan Peterson in conversation; one user telling another that all Jewish people should relocate to Israel—tend to get flagged by the community or the site’s anti-abuse systems, many of which Bell and Gackle have written themselves...
>When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue.
These are features, not bugs, and testaments to the quality moderation. All over the internet these topics are discussed, ad nauseam, and they're some of the most divisive issues in modern day discourse. Even the author can't seem to represent her political opponents fairly.
Without removing these topics, these ideological wars will irrevocably divide the community, sending one segment away in deep frustration. If we'd like to unify society, it's far more important to have spaces which don't immediately polarize along these lines.
dang and sctb possess admirable patience and persistence but I've always enjoyed dang's posts when he participates in a conversation. I wonder if his time spent serving as a moderator somewhat robs hn of an especially thoughtful poster. Thanks guys.
dang does submit articles with some regularity. They're suprisingly rarely voted up, though as a reading queue are themselves very highly recommended by me.
>For decades, the phrase “Eternal September” has been used to describe the tipping point for a message board or online community—the inclusion, or invasion, of new users who dramatically change the existing subculture.
"They are hopeful that, as Hacker News continues to grow, it will become, simultaneously, more diverse, more interesting, and more humane, while remaining in some fundamental sense a single community with a common goal."
Right on. Greatly value this melting pot of diverse views and links that often lead to serendipitous discovery, clever ideas, and considered thought. What I originally hoped the internet would turn out to be.
So in case no one's said it in awhile, thank you to Paul Graham for starting and sustaining this outlet for reckless thought experiments, and to Scott and Daniel for their devoted management to herding all us feral cats. Keep up the good work!
Now back to the lab to continue coding my dueling libertarian Markov bots...
As the article goes "The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.", let's see what we can do here.
The latest HN comment dump I could find with a quick search was from May 2018 [1].
There were 237,646 comments in total that month, made by 36,358 unique users. 75% of users posted 5 or fewer comments, with a median of 2. The most prolific user wrote 798 comments, dang managed 6th place with 425 comments.
Even if the numbers doubled since then, there is no need to moderate millions of users, as only (well) tens of thousands of them are actively participating.
Millions of readers, the amount of active commenters is much lower.
In addition, HN doesn't get much of the "classic" troll crowd (no matter if 4chan/8chan/outright real Nazis/gamergate) or Trump supporters - from the occasional politics thread aside, there's nothing much of interest for them here, and so the biggest blocks of trolls simply stay away.
Partly due to a virtuous circle; the community downvotes the more obvious ones into invisibility, and persistent trolls get banned, and the discussions are curated to select less fertile topics, and the controversy-ometer pushes flamewars off the front page.
The moderators here are very good at doing work upfront to save themselves work later, by making the site infertile ground for troublemakers.
I do. The direct call-out of a specific group of people for their position on the political spectrum is pretty much directly against what (I think) we're trying to do here. It's unnecessary, too. Could have just left it at "classic troll crowd".
Eh. I read it less as "general people that happen to support the current administration" and more as "posters on t_d," which is a very different thing in my mind, and yea, does point to users that are inherently trollish/toxic.
He's lumping Trump supporters together with Neo Nazis. Also hitting on all "inflammatory" topics at once. If someone on the "other side" would do that, the comment would be dead in seconds and the poster be punished by dang.
> On any given day, its top links might include a Medium post about technical hiring
Isn't it quite ironic to see the article suggesting that HN top link might include Medium post. I've usually read not-so-positive feedback about Medium posts. Isn't it the case?
Medium has good content behind an increasingly infuriating presentation. Mechanically it's the opposite of HN, but for various reasons (reach, possibility of reimbursment) people do write some quality content there.
A publication's "editorial voice", ranging from grammar and typography, to selection and discussion philosophy, are significant. There's a reason we see things as "New York Times" or "Fox News" or "Mad Magazine" or "Cosmo" or "The Economist" or "Soldier of Fortune" in voice or tone.
This is harder to pin down with blogs and social media, though distinctions can emerge, whether through self-selection, path-dependency, gross scale, algorithms, or some combination of the set.
Prejudice can be misused, but its advantage (to the judger) is that it makes judgement cheaper by reducing the set of what needs to be considered, at least for an initial judgement.
That's characteristic of any domain in which there's an information overload, or in which distinctions are subtle and difficult to identify initially. And argument, by the way, for dealing with copious information less by enhanced processing and more by expedited (and cheap!) discarding heuristics.
When you're looking at a page of 30 links, the signaling value of a domain is useful. Medium is a low-barrier place to publish, and has discovery built in, so it ends up attracting a lot of bad writing and promotional material. That, combined with the degraded reading experience, is why I am happy to judge a book by its cover in this case.
Since anyone can write for medium, and anyone with an HN account can post medium links here, there are huge amounts of medium content. So we see a lot of that 90%, as well as the 10% that's useful.
I'm surprised that the quality of HN hasn't fallen as drastically with user growth as much as other sites such as reddit. Thanks to the moderators for keeping HN great.
Thank you @dang and @sctb!! Loved learning more about you and reading about your passion for the community, it really comes through in the quotes. Keep up the great work.
I think that the censorship of viciousness rather than content is a reasonable compromise. I have engaged in a wide range of political and ethical debates on hn, and the few times the mods have shown interest has only been if I am beefing too hard with someone. The exercise of power is not to be superior, but to give the forum a sense of shape so that people can relate to it more readily. I think given the scale of the site they are doing good work.
Very nice that dang and sctb were involved in such a timely and solid startup idea! If they were luckier, they could have been bought by Google sheets, which acquired XL2Web, DocVerse, Quickoffice in their improvements 2006-2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sheets
The "Show HN: This upvotes itself" came to mind. :)
But regarding the article: I don't think HN is getting worse. But why it might look like it is is that it has become a very very busy site - which makes it seem hectic and thus might appear "worse".
Does anyone here have a forum they like more than HN? Don't tell me 'it depends for what'. Just your overall go-to place on the internet to find content and read discussions about it.
> “Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail[...]”
A money quote for me, but it's not inclusive of the angry bystander programmers raging about externalities and corruption, and the employees trying to figure out a way that they can ethically stay employed when their boss (and probably their company's business model) is this. HN is all three.
Less so with time, though, it was once a more equal mix.
Really surprising to see that comment, which, full disclosure, I agree with, get flag-killed. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it get a few downvotes. But rarely have I ever seen a thorough, well-sourced, and civil comment actually be flag-killed. If anything, the shallow replies to his comment are the type of things that typically seem to get downvoted (though not necessarily flagged either).
I think this is a side effect of self-moderation. By making everyone in the community (over a certain threshold of participation) a mini-mod you turn rules enforcement into a popularity contest. Valid, interesting, yet unpopular points get suppressed. Rules violations that are popular get ignored, and sometimes even lauded.
There is no reason, based on the HN guidelines, that the referenced post should have been downvoted, let alone flagged. Whoever did so abused their power to make such decisions.
There's a counterbalancing option to downvotes and flags - you can "vouch" comments. Enough people using it[0] can make the software unkill a comment provisionally, though doing this puts your own reputation and vouching rights at stake, since according to [0], vouched comments are eventually reviewed manually.
--
[0] - Not sure what's the power of a vouch relative to a flag or a downvote, but my impression is that it's stronger.
Yes, and I use both when I feel it's appropriate. However, it's still fundamentally a popularity contest rather than guidelines enforcement. If enough people simply don't like what a post has to say it will stay grey/dead.
I'm coming to the opinion that downvoting should not grey out posts, or that there should be some number of downvotes (greater than 1) required before it starts. It should be harder to suppress constructive, on-topic posts just because a bunch of people don't like the point.
Yet, it happens all the time. For this example, the most likely explanation is the down-voters read the first two words and wrongly concluded that the remaining 1000 were going to be a racist rant. Within milliseconds they made the decision to downvote and move on.
This "drive by down-voting" happens regularly here. I've had comments downvoted within seconds of posting--clearly the voters could not have had time to read the entire text. They see a few key words that trigger them, hit the arrow, and move on to the next job. Unfortunately, there's no way in JavaScript to tell whether someone's actually read the thing they're down-voting, so we get these knee-jerk keyword-based brigades.
To test this, sometimes I'll write something where the first sentence is provocative, but the rest is (I hope) a solid, nuanced argument. Usually it's at -1 or -2 within a minute, and then over the next few hours slowly crawls back up to +2 or +3 as people actually read it.
>To test this, sometimes I'll write something where the first sentence is provocative, but the rest is (I hope) a solid, nuanced argument. Usually it's at -1 or -2 within a minute, and then over the next few hours slowly crawls back up to +2 or +3 as people actually read it.
I cannot but confirm this behaviour.
Also I noticed that (my guess is that there is some form of subliminal self-defense reflex by some categories) there are a few themes (not political, not social) that seem to attract downvotes.
I agree with what you said, but my presumption has been that the HN status quo would generally be receptive to the argument that u/paulmd made, or at least, not offended/angered enough to flag it. Especially it being so well-written, and in response to someone whose argument was entirely speculative or based on emotional appeal, and who didn't bother using basic capitalization or punctuation.
It's even more surprising since HN had the "vouch" feature since before Dec. 2016 [0]. My best guess is that people might have reflexively downvoted/flagged upon seeing the opening sentence of "Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account".
Might have been bad timing, too. I don't know how many people vouch for comments; I do so when appropriate, but every now and then I discover comments I would have vouched for had I seen the thread when it was live.
Recently I've started going through the greyed/flagged comments at the bottom of every post - you would be surprised how often there are reasonable, well thought out comments downvoted or flagged because it hit a nerve with enough HN users.
It happens all the time. Constantly and consistently. If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged. It's always been this way.
>The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
You cannot discuss things in an actual academic manner on this forum. It is a tech enthusiast forum that happens to have a lot of money surrounding it.
It's a very interesting take to put a face on people who we only know for short acronyms and interaction which usually happen when things are not going smooth.
It's easy to think moderation might be too active (or not active enough) though it's not us sitting on their seats.
(Though I agree with the critique that the site is "too orange" and I'm all too happy to use the available customization option)
Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob.
I support Hacker News moderating itself however it chooses. However, if we are looking at it as a moderation model for large, open, non-editorial platforms (Youtube, Facebook) -- which I believe should all be covered under public accommodation law -- it clearly fails. And even if when we are looking at ostensibly neutral, publicly-orientated sites like newspaper comment boards, it fails.
Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.
So while this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News, and perhaps should become the model for small private sites, we should not try to scale it internet-size companies. Platform companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!) need a different set of rules geared towards protecting individual rights and freedoms instead of protecting a community.
I agree with everything you say. But… This site is moderated by two people and has 5 million guests. When you look at it from that perspective, I think the only conclusion you can come to is that they are doing a remarkably good job.
I say this as a person who feels that his political opinions have been treated with disrespect by the site’s community and its moderators. I fervently believe that the moderators are doing their best to be impartial. And I also see people on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me who have the exact same complaints. When I look at it that way, I realize I literally can’t ask for more from the mods.
As far as your making the distinction with platform companies and back bone companies, I think you have it completely right. I detest racist shit on the Internet, but ultimately no good can come from driving it underground. I think it’s much better for us to be able to see and come in time. Plus, my political affiliation, which is the same as Abraham Lincoln‘s, is considered by many of the powers that be to be inherently racist.
When the platform companies start trying to decide who’s wrong and who’s right, they are forced to use extra-constitutional means. Not good.
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.
As far as I'm aware, dang and sctb are fairly reasonable if you email them, and you can see what they're doing by just clicking on their account history.
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.
I'm not sure I'd agree with this. An appeal is as easy as sending them an email. In my experience they're more than willing to hear you out.
You said we weren't willing to hear you out, but that seems unlikely to me. People sometimes come to HN with stories of how badly we've mistreated them, but rarely provide links or enough information to let readers make up their own minds. Mostly these stories leave out important details about how the account had behaved and how we interacted with them. But we do make mistakes—moderation is guesswork, and we guess wrong sometimes. If there's a chance of that, I'd like to know what we did so we can correct it.
We only use shadowbanning when accounts are new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. It's possible we got it wrong in your case, but again, we can't correct mistakes if people won't tell us about them.
> We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN.
That's a complete contradiction of the explanation you gave at the time. And yes, I asked what had happened when I noticed the account was shadowbanned, and your response was
----------
Hacker News <hn@ycombinator.com>
Aug 31, 2018, 10:43 PM
to me
Politlcal/ideological flaming; unsubstantive comments; addressing others aggressively. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17358383. That's unacceptable and bannable in its own right—and you did a lot of other things along those lines.
You can turn this around by doing the opposite: (1) become less inflammatory, not more, when posting about a divisive subject; (2) make sure your comments are thoughtful; (3) be extra respectful.
Daniel
-------
(I especially liked that the example comment was from three months earlier. Why didn't I immediately think that far back??@!)
Of course, despite my multiple followup questions, you never bothered to reply again. I'm sure that now you will find the motivation to give an extensive public explanation complete with links of exactly how you really meant that I was "new and spamming or trolling" or "serially creating accounts to abuse HN". It would never work to, say, reply to comments that were 'unacceptable and bannable in it's own right' to say that. Or to follow your previous public explanations of moderation policy, such as
I've taken a look, and this was a case of what I said: we shadowban accounts when they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling. In your case, the account was new and had repeatedly broken the site guidelines (using HN for political battle and being aggressive to other users). That's evidence of trolling, which is one of the situations where we shadowban. I mentioned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17358383 by email because that post was what tipped the scales.
I can see why you are angry that we shadowbanned you, because that account went on to make other comments that were fine for HN. Indeed, quite a few were vouched for by other users. That's evidence of not trolling, and that sort of account is not the kind we shadowban—it's the kind where we post moderation replies, and tell people if we ban them. But those later comments didn't exist yet when I shadowbanned you.
Here's the information you need if you want to understand why we do things this way. HN gets tons of new accounts that break the site guidelines and in fact are created for that purpose, which is what I mean by trolling. We can't reply to them all, ask them to follow the guidelines and patiently explain where they're going wrong. If we tried, we'd do nothing else all day—or rather would go mad before getting there. Many of these users know perfectly well what the site guidelines are and have no desire to use HN as intended. If we poured moderation resources there, not only would it not work, it would make things worse, and meanwhile those resources would be unavailable for the rest of the site. For accounts like that, we use shadowbanning, and for the most part that approach works well. But it doesn't work in every case.
When a user emails us about such an account, we have to guess whether they're asking questions in good faith and really want to use the site as intended, or whether there's little hope of convincing them to do so. We don't always guess right. It looks like I guessed wrong in your case. The thing is, though, that when I sent you that detailed explanation of what was wrong with your comments and why we'd banned you, you didn't respond with any indication that you'd received the information and wanted to do something with it. Instead you responded aggressively. I get that you were angry that you had been shadowbanned and didn't know it. But that type of response is correlated with users who go on to be abusers of the site and are not people we can convince to do otherwise, no matter how many replies we give them.
All of this is pattern matching and guesswork. Your original comments and your emails matched patterns that are associated with abuse of the site. With hindsight I see that the pattern matching got it wrong, because your new account has gone on to be (mostly) an ok contributor to HN. (I say 'mostly' because, looking through its history, I still see unsubstantive comments and occasionally worse, but not bannably worse.) But I don't see what I could have done differently in any way that would scale. Our resources are meagre; we're constantly in triage. Patient explanation takes a lot of time and energy—it has taken me an hour to write this so far, and there are many more users demanding explanations than I have hours. Had your emails indicated openness to information or willingness to change, I probably would have replied further. But there are many users who fire multiple angry emails on each reply they get, and we've learned that they are not a good investment, when hundreds of other things and people are clamoring for attention and explanation.
Actually, I do think there is one thing we can do differently that is helpful in such situations: get better at handling anger. There are many users whose every interaction with us is angry and only angry. Often it feels like the intensity of their anger exceeds any of the provocations they're complaining about on HN, even if they're correct on those details. It's as if they're really angry about something else—something more important—but they turn that energy instead onto the extraneous outlet of HN and its moderators, maybe just because it's less important and so in a way safer. I find it difficult to be on the receiving end of this anger. At any moment, there are multiple people doing it. They don't know about each other, so they experience our interactions as individual and demand individual attention, while we experience it as a constant bombardment. It's possible to grow in capacity to handle this—it just requires a lot of personal work. You emailed us a year ago, and I've probably gotten better at this in the last year, so maybe the pattern-matching works a bit better now.
Oh cry me a river. "I couldn't be stuffed making more than a token effort, and here's all the excuses for why I shouldn't have to. We had no way of knowing anything about you! There were only five comments on that account, and it had existed for such a short time, that I couldn't even read the very first couple of comments that said this is the continuation of an existing account! All trolls look like that!"
And wow, give the pop psychology a rest. "I just don't understand why condescendingly shitting on people makes them angry so I've decided they are probably taking out their childhood issues on me." Yea, it couldn't possibly be actually aimed at you.
If you'd just banned me at the time I probably wouldn't be so angry still. The experience of discovering that you had been invisibly fucking with me, probably for months, was absolutely infuriating, and seeing you flat out deny that you pull that shit as a way to manage actual users is unacceptable.
I completely agree, although I like moderation here since it is actually very accepting and I might just have another definition for it than the author of the article.
Another example where moderation works well is stackexchange. I think a Q&A sites needs strict moderation to be able to stay on topic.
I think what Google is doing right now is reprehensible for example. Ghosting content because it is controversial and therefore coincidentally bad for advertising leaves a very bad taste.
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.
What you are asking for would take significantly more resources. I appreciate what you are saying, but all I ask is that a site be consistent. If it is consistently moderated, I as a user can vote with my feet (or my clicks in this case) if I approve or disapprove of the job that is being done.
Very much this. I have been rightfully corrected by dang before, and it made me reflect and adjust my general approach to commenting online. I have also been very wrongfully dealt with a few times too though, and it made me very hesitant to comment further. I am thankful for a moderated space (there are other areas for unmoderated space, but those are under attack these days) and they do a good job most of the time, which is good enough for me.
The backbone companies thing is the more important point you make imho, and is why discussion about what the modern public square really is and how the level of corporate dominance of media and the abuse of third-party doctrine allows the silencing of dissent. So a private company can censor whoever they want right?.. but how far does that go? First it starts with cloudflare, and then eventually it goes down to the ISP level... and that seems like a very dangerous slippery slope to me.
>Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.
Yep. After eight years on the site I finally had a comment removed, and my response to dang to discuss it was completely ignored. Made me feel dumb for even trying.
Ah, you must be talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509. I don't remember that post, and it's possible I didn't see it. I try to read all the replies, but miss a few, especially when they are posted later. If you want to be sure we see something, the only way is to email hn@ycombinator.com.
It's also possible that I saw it and was too exhausted to look back through all the flagged comments in the thread, identify which ones were explaining how AMP works, and see if they had been flagged correctly. That takes a ton of energy, which is not always available when the rest of the site is clamoring for attention and in varying degrees of onfireness. One thing you can do to increase the odds of getting a specific response is to include specific links to the post(s) you're worried about—that makes it an order of magnitude easier. I certainly appreciate your intention to defend fellow users who are being mistreated.
But I think if I had seen your comment I would have replied at least to say that I believe you that your intention wasn't to downvote-bait.
"Those who do not move do not notice their chains."
In other words: People who think HN moderation is all fine and dandy only believe so because they've never had the audacity to post an unpopular fact or opinion.
> While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob.
Isn't every community -barring a few wild west's- like that? One Usenet, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up in people's kill file. On IRC, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up on people's ignore or would get kicked off the channel or klined off the server. Except for the kick and kline the effect of a kill file or ignore is akin to a global shadow ban.
The solution to the problem you mentioned is that unpopular opinions with merit will find their way to become eventually popular enough that they're adopted. Whereas unpopular opinions without merit eventually end up existing on the cesspits of the Internet. Because somewhere on the Internet, any person can spout their unpopular opinion. The question is, who reads it? Is it so much different from a shadow ban?
I don't mind this sort of moderation on community sites like Hacker News.
Still, as the error keeps coming up, I will repeat myself (I apologize to people trying to read the whole thread, but this is the main point): For the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), we need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
What about market competition? Won't that work out for the reasonable content? Won't a platform like Tor always allow all content (reasonable and unreasonable) to at least stay available as it is censorship-resistant?
Individuals putting someone on their personal ignore list is different from a moderator deciding to put someone on everybody's ignore list though.
Your solution is a bit lacking, I believe. "If it's not popular, it has no merit, because if it had merit it would be popular". There's also no telling whether some unpopular opinion you'd consider without merit today will become popular tomorrow (and, if history teaches us anything, we've been generally bad at predicting which will become popular, which will remain popular and which will fall out of favor), so it's somewhat silly to make hard judgements.
Of course there are going to be posts which don't get upvoted enough. Everyone who frequently posts here has witnessed that some good posts don't get many upvotes, whilst other ones which you find less good do get them. The amount of upvotes does not tell us how good your post is; all it does is determine for the reader the order of the posts as it isn't chronological. Why? Because nobody has come up with a better solution.
My reasoning (solution) is a rule of thumb, not a law. Every group of people has a blind spot. There is no perfect solution; however I believe the solution as presented is the one with the least casualties. If you know a better one, I'm all ears.
I don't like about the popularity vote-moderation that it tends to become a dictatorship of the majority: if you're outside of the accepted canon, you'll get thrown out. It's effective for creating an a fairly consistent echo chamber, but I don't believe it comes with few casualties. You won't see the casualties, because they are censored.
I'm fine with using a system like that for starters but ultimately let benevolent dictators overrule majority decisions. My biggest problem with your previous post was the implication that whatever isn't popular doesn't have merit. The relation between the two is weak, that's what I wanted to express.
> I don't like about the popularity vote-moderation that it tends to become a dictatorship of the majority: if you're outside of the accepted canon, you'll get thrown out. It's effective for creating an a fairly consistent echo chamber, but I don't believe it comes with few casualties. You won't see the casualties, because they are censored.
First of all, I'm someone who at times reads a lot of the discussions, and I see each and every casualty by default because I browse with showdead on. I also see it as part of being a good netizen to help with moderation (and doing vouch or flag is part of that), especially for non-commercial endeavors (which, this place, arguably is or is not depending on your viewpoint; for me it is more akin to .org as its not the purely commercial wing of YC). Heck, I even sometimes check out shadowbanned user's posts. I'm weird like that.
Censorship, in my eyes, can only be enacted by a government. There must be some less powerful word which fits the bill.
Every community [website] has its echo chamber because every group of people contains such.
Now that I put what you wrote into a -IMO- more accurate context which I felt was necessary, I'm left to ask you: What is your proposed alternative?
> I'm fine with using a system like that for starters but ultimately let benevolent dictators overrule majority decisions.
We got 2 who can.
I've been on websites where less intelligent people become benevolent dictator. People who don't see their blind spot. More moderators isn't necessarily better. Also, ask yourself: was a website with a lot of moderators such as K5 or Slashdot or Digg or Reddit necessarily better? Are websites with no moderation whatsoever better?
I actually have quite a bunch of "radical" viewpoints myself; and I do not feel like I cannot express myself here. Yes, at times I get upvoted or downvoted where I feel surprised. Both ways. In case of the latter I always try to reflect what I could've done better. In fact, in every conflict I have I try to reflect what my part in the conflict is.
> Censorship, in my eyes, can only be enacted by a government.
Why do you say that? I would think that it could be enacted by any group powerful enough to suppress speech in some way.
It was the Church that made the Index librorum prohibitorum. And that was in an era where it was especially week compared to the absolute governments of the time.
Good example. I read up on it, and on reflection my view on the common definition of censorship was too narrow. Not sure about the legal one, still, but it'd differ per jurisdiction. I guess the reasoning was that, in the end, only a government can enforce it.
The problem is that dang decides for the whole community, which is predatory towards minority opinions, and we're not talking about being predatory towards Nazis, more like people who express their positive opinions about Linux desktop when folks generally agree it's not great (or vice versa).
Dang doesn't allow dissent in the comments, he actively tries to reduce it, and it's a net negative for this community.
" it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob."
I have experience with that given I got my early karma countering many popular people here with downvote mobs. I had no idea I was doing that, either. Never seen their names before. Just saw some mis-information that I'd correct. Dan hints in the article exactly what worked for me: just delivering the information in a logical way with sources that invited people, often engineers, to work out what was true for themselves. The folks with mobs used rhetoric and argument from authority. I used evidence. Eventually, most of the grey comments went dark again with some folks in the mob going grey. They mobbed less often, too. I was also told about a pattern where some hot-heads read threads earlier with some calmer folks (maybe older or more experienced) coming in later. Happened with most of mine, too.
So, you can't stop the fact that they'll show up. You can diminish their power by simply remaining civil and informative with evidence backing up your claims. Also, I try to use links that maintain the same qualities. If it's a political topic, it won't help to link to a site that's 100% biased in a specific direction. Biased or rhetorical sources likewise get dismissed. Fortunately, most of my arguments were technical. Many good sources for that.
I'll also add that it helps to remember the mobs on these sites represent cliques on these sites, not people in general. Most people I've met aren't much like folks on HN, esp the aggressive ones. It helps to remind myself that what's going on in these online forums might just be representative of their culture, attachments, traditions, etc. I don't internalize it. Still introspect about it since there are many times where I can learn something or improve myself. Doing this is a tough skill to develop. I think it's a necessity on the Internet given how much negativity is there, even waves of it at once. It will still tax you but a lot less than before.
"Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights."
We had more of that on Lobsters. That was part of the founder's experiment with the site. It was initially really different. Mostly due to our vetting process we did for invites with strict controls on quality and private messages to people. Eventually, did a mass invite bringing in all kinds of people. Many of them aren't doing vetting so much as just telling people about a site they like. The result is the site is now more like Hacker News than it was.
There's differences for sure. I just think a lot of the problems are inherent to bringing in a lot of people from many different places and perspectives onto a tech site with open-ended discussions. They covered a lot of this in the original article, though. I won't repeat it. I just think more rules, even more accountability, won't change it.
If you want the latter, turn on showdead to find most of what they moderate away is garbage. There's some filter bubble on specific political topics that aren't popular here. They're tiny percent of the comments, though. Based on volume, I'd say moderation here is pretty light-handed in general. I mean, if you look at New repeatedly over a day, you'd question how the heck some control-freak moderators could even keep up with it at all. I stopped looking at New more than once a day since I didn't have the time for it.
In the US, that would be title II of the 1964 civil rights act, taking the broad view of it that has developed in case law over the years. I would also support new FCC net neutrality style regulations or even new acts of Congress that strengthened this.
Any changes to include internet services under the Civil Rights act would likely run into a First Amendment challenge fairly quickly, and likely lose. Net neutrality was probably constitutional as long as it applied to physical carriers using public land (for wires) or regulated spectrum. A more likely path would be through Section 508 (the accessibility act). Even that is unlikely with the current partisan makeup of Congress and the US Supreme Court.
I agree that there would be a better chance for this line of reasoning if Manhattan Community Access had gone the other way in the latest SCOTUS term. But it was 5-4, and the decision does leave open some lines of attack.
In particular, Congressional action around this might probably be able to pass judicial review if it were to define broad due process rights around speech censorship for explicitly defined "public forums." The only thing that SCOTUS loves more than the 1st amendment is the 14th.
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.
Exactly. HN takes the tyrannical approach to moderation: We're right and you're wrong. If you disagree, too bad.
The mob is happy to clean up any wrongthink the moderators happen to miss.
> this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News
I think that's a pretty generous statement. The quality of discussions around here has declined substantially over the past few years. In many ways it's even worse than Reddit.
You've just voiced the thing I dislike most about the HN. And I do not fully agree with "Gackle and Bell, by contrast, practice a personal, focussed, and slow approach to moderation". The faceless "we" they love so much does not appear very personal to me.
Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind having my account with 9k+ karma and dating back to 2009 banned for whatever. Despite that I am trying my best to look at the situation objectively and I still do not like it.
It is popular to compare reddit with HN and my take would be like this: reddit is like a part of the Universe where stars are still (maybe moving a bit past this though) born, and there is life and dynamics. HN, otoh, seems to be inching closer and closer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
You're being downvoted because you're hitting on a trope/cliche that's called out in the rules, and while I doubt HN is dying from a user engagement perspective, I do believe the comments are less filled with value than they have been in the past, given how negativity dang sees conflict.
Healthy conflict is good, but I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it.
It's rarely/ever paid off to engage with you on these issues, but if you genuinely do care, I have a 10 year history in which some of my comments have been killed, and in the majority of those comments it's been because of the very existence of disagreement, not because of the nature of how the disagreement was playing out.
It's impossible to say for sure without links, but those comments were probably killed either by user flags or by software, rather than by moderators. We don't typically kill comments outright unless we're banning the account.
As I said, I'm speaking generally. In the absence of links, which you've not provided, I have no idea which posts you're specifically talking about.
Edit: out of curiosity, I looked through your history. All the dead comments back to about 2014 were killed by user flags. Before that, there are a bunch of dead comments but I didn't see signs that moderators had killed them; my guess is that you were banned for a while.
Interesting that almost all the comments on this thread are related to politics whereas the primary value to me of HN are the technical topics and discussions.
There are plenty of other places on the net to argue politics with bots and paid influencers.
Twitter may be full of nazis, but when I am looking at a feed of cute cat pictures I don't see any of them.
That they merely exist shouldn't matter, what matters is giving users the tools they need to look at the content they want to see instead of random crap injected by others. Choose your filter bubble.
for fair and balance as a moderator, I hope they're not too left or too right, though I will not be surprised their political view are already on the left, since it's from Silicon Valley.
also the system should have a way to know who is upvoting all the time or downvoting all the time, those are noises statistically and should be somehow mitigated.
Are the moderators interested in automating their jobs at all? I really don't understand why the site continues to have no means to help people communicate better, other than a couple dudes that manually respond to people over and over all day. From a technologist perspective it seems archaic.
By applying a process to begin identifying the needs for moderation and developing automated solutions. Later, designs can be modified to remove the need for the automation.
Well granted it's not something you can finish in a weekend. A lot of things seem hard because they're difficult to imagine at the beginning. Who in the past would have guessed that in the future we'd all be running around in carriages whose front part literally explodes 25 times per second?
From a general standpoint, we develop automated solutions by following new product development[1]. More specifically, we develop features for users to provide different kinds of feedback, and write functions that combine that feedback with machine learning to perform actions when necessary.
Even more specifically, the entirety of forum interaction is an input/output of information in people's brains, computed along with emotion, heuristics, and whatever knowledge the brain has, and generates output. By collecting meta-information about the input and output (such as crowdsourced content flags like category of information, perceived intent of a comment, training data models on old content, etc) we can make functions that use the metadata to perform actions, such as auto-detaching threads, muting users, delaying reply buttons, providing feedback to commenters, and highlighting or shadowing content. A lot of these are already done (some automated, some not), but I think the big feature is when these are done; find the emotional pain points, provide functions that mitigate them based on metadata.
I loved this article. I'm a software engineer in Chicago and I had stayed away from HN, not knowing that there might be a humanist angle to the site that would be appealing to someone like me.
I liked this article a lot. I'm a swe in Chicago and I had stayed away from HN previously, not knowing that there was a humanist side to the site that would appeal to someone like me.
No, we don't. I used to have client-side software that would highlight specific regexes in comment text, but it stopped working one of the times that we rewrote the client-side Lisp that we used (Parenscript -> Lumen -> Arc) and I haven't gotten around to getting it working again.
There exists a public feed of all comments (just click on 'comments' in top bar), but we don't monitor the site that way. It's too much. We basically read the threads spottily like anyone else, plus rely on moderation lists, such as what has been flagged by users.
I'm not an unconditional HN fan (avid reader of n-gate), but the article is just a silly covert hit piece against the evil nerd morlocks (who of course build the infra that the NewYorker Eloi use to distribute their vapid opinions).
I guess it is a perfect opportunity to thank dang and sctb for their unobtrusive and friendly moderation efforts.
The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.
> both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right"
both and neither. Partisan discussions, or even any kind of bitching at all ... are outright discouraged. I often step out of line in this regard and don't always agree, but I'm also confident that folk on "the other side" face the same kind of treatment. Though frustrating at times, I respect that it keeps things clean and helps cut out a lot of nonsense, of which the Internet has no shortage should I feel the need to go find some.
EDIT - actually upon some reflection I think that I would have to respectfully disagree, and change my opening sentence here to just "neither". Extremes of opinion that are "off topic" are not tolerated, and this is a good thing.
It's always interesting to see a light-grey thread at the bottom of a page that's full of lucid, not-overly-aggressive political discussion.
In one sense it's a shame when thoughtful, evidence-based discussion is discouraged for being off-topic. But I suspect that's ultimately what makes those discussions possible; they're happening between relatively small numbers of discussants, in a space that doesn't draw in people looking for political debates.
Well, if it is off-topic, it doesn't belong at the top. But if it's thoughful, it should still be readable, so I sometimes upvote comments that deserve downvotes because I think it's been downvoted too much. It's fine if it lingers at the bottom, but if it's still thoughtful, it deserves to be readable.
Actual abuse, trolling, etc deserves to be downvoted into unreadability.
I think it over-selects for impassioned discussion, and consequently under-selects for admitting self ignorance.
How often do you hear "I didn't know that, and it's a good point" in political discussion? When hypothetically, there's no reason you should hear it less frequently than in scientific discussions.
One of the great casualties of modern political debate is that citizens mimic professional politicians, in that the sole mode of discourse is argumentative.
When in reality, if I'm faffing about on HN I would much rather learn something than "win."
It's not like dang steps in at the end of every debate to award the winner a gold trophy.
In one sense it's a shame when thoughtful, evidence-
based discussion is discouraged for being off-topic. But
I suspect that's ultimately what makes those discussions
possible;
No.
Thoughtful, evidence-based discussion should never be discouraged or deemed off-topic - no matter how sensitive the topic. ( People reading this, even 10-15 years on, might find the mores of this age whimsical, at best. )
The only reason one might find thoughtful, evidence-based discussion off-putting is to be on the good side of David Geffen in the hopeful attempt that he or she might be might be invited to luxuriate on his super-yacht, one day.
There's never a better reason than that to be economical with the truth.
Not to mention, it always becomes a dumpster fire. It is going to devolve because too much emotional baggage comes in with it, I am guilty of it, and every reader on HN is guilty of it. There are plenty of other outlets to vent ones political frustrations. It just poisons the pool here and is better left out. If someone really needs that outlet, Facebook is just a click away.
It is near impossible for a group to have a rational discussion about politics or religion. So it is better to just avoid the topic on a forum that values, pleasantry and support of one another as core values.
> Thoughtful, evidence-based discussion should never be discouraged or deemed off-topic
I think most people would accept that thoughtful, evidence-based discussion should be discouraged while sitting in the front row at an opera, or in the midst of a professor's lecture.
What I'm describing is similarly an issue of logistics, not content. I'm not making a claim about sensitive topics, and I'm certainly not proposing dishonesty or the suppression of uncomfortable truths. The problem with off-topic content is simply that: it's off topic, and on a forum thread or the top of an HN post it makes on-topic conversation more difficult to conduct. Forked-discussion settings like Tumblr and Twitter are closer to a conference than a lecture, and can sustain popular off-topic discussion with less derailment.
The relevance of politics and sensitive topics is only in my second point, that places like HN which center on non-political topics can create particularly good discussions. I largely agree with you, I'm endorsing the fact that HN doesn't ban politics or sensitive topics; the rules of avoiding flamebait, grandstanding, and excessive derailment help to prevent pointless yelling while preserving good political discussion around the margins.
(As an aside which risks being off-topic: why David Geffen? I've never seen someone use him as their go-to example of sucking up to a billionaire.)
Indeed, that “hovering near zero” voting effect is just-as-often because the folks around here will downvote arguments they agree with, just because they don’t like seeing such things on HN. Which I find lovely, personally.
That's one of my core personal rules before I downvote or upvote -- am I doing this because the comment is objectively good / true / insightful (or the opposites), or because I simply agree with it.
I try and avoid the latter, to the extent humanly possible.
Honestly, in the last few months I often find myself upvoting opinions I disagree with.
It's one thing to downvote something that's factually incorrect, mean-spirited, ect. But downvoting a post that expresses a well-formed, but subjective opinion? I used to just ignore opinions that I disagreed with; and only downvote flames and things that were factually incorrect.
That, IMO, is how I interpret how the “Eternal September” plays out here: When people penalize opinions instead of facts and flames.
Compared to e.g. twitter it may feel this way but there is definitely some discussion going on despite the efforts to keep it to the minimum. And even without directly engaging with "the other side" it is nice to know that they are still here and can provide their perspective on the other matters.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is how the majority of productive political discussions happen - around the edges of other things.
People who show up for political debate generally do so with knives drawn; you hear from the loudest people with the most solidified views, and the stuff that rises to the top is playing to the crowd instead of engaging in extended discussions. But in a rec sports team, a movie club, or a tech forum, people aren't grouped by viewpoint and vitriolic arguments are a distraction from the original cause. So those places seem to breed conversations where people take the time to hear one another and avoid breaking down into pure tribalism.
>So those places seem to breed conversations where people take the time to hear one another and avoid breaking down into pure tribalism.
Another way of looking at it is that in that context, they are interacting as fellow members of their "rec team tribe" rather than as members of competing political tribes. (which they may also be a part of)
It seems like there's probably a mathematical law that one could state about the probability of a substantive discussion occuring, where the result is dominated by the likelihood of a random, uninformed stranger crashing into the thread.
I feel like at less than ~ 3:1 "citizens":stranger ratios, any conversation spirals down. Because someone inevitably takes the bait, responds to stupidity, and there goes the thread.
yes, i think HN balances political discussions well: political discussion, in the philosophical sense of the application of power, is unavoidable in any discussion (it's inherent to communication itself), while partisan discussion (e.g., tribalistic and ideological stances) should be entirely discouraged. leave the labels at the door and let's dive into the ideas, deeper than the platitude-based debate so prevalent otherwise.
I LOVE this paragraph. God-damn nails the problems of HN (and other tech-heavy web communities) like nothing else...
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—
> hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—
> often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate;
> thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as
> emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify
> broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data,
> but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be
> ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might
> once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an
> intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the
> site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they
> talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that
> resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian
> economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of
> Yuval Noah Harari.
That paragraph is a smug, flowery dismissal of the kind of evidence-based discussion that happens on HN.
It's passive aggressively accusing HN commenters of wrongthink and of abusing unreliable tools like "data" and "logic" to counter "humane arguments" (read: emotional arguments).
It basically dismisses the role of data in debate by suggesting that it is malleable or selective--we've all probably encountered this type of weaselly thinking, one that demands proof for an argument and, when provided, attacks the source as biased or the data as flawed. You can argue for pretty much any position when you embrace a brand of anti-intellectualism which believes that all data is fake/flawed and reality is subjective.
If you strip it down, the author is basically saying "I wish these annoying nerds would stop thinking so much and get onboard my bandwagon."
That seems like a huge straw man. What they say is that people use data improperly on Hacker News, which is also my experience. Very frequently things like papers posted as supporting evidence don't really support the posters position. Sometimes they don't say even remotely what the poster thinks. But that takes time to figure it out, at that point it has already fulfilled its purpose and people don't care anymore.
The structure of Hacker News just makes it very favorable to muddy the waters until the story disappears. And I think they correctly call that out in the article.
This is exactly what I've seen here. I've had to read through reports and papers people have cited to see whether or not the paper supported what they were arguing. Or sometimes, people would link to incredibly biased sources whom bury the lede of the stories they cite which in turn only tangentially support what they said.
Isn't that still an improvement over the alternative though?
If the fundamental nature of short-duration comment consumption is antithetical to fact checking, that's certainly a problem.
But it's still superior to uncited points, as it is ultimately verifiable.
In a choice between the two, I'll take the ill (claims appearing more supported than they are) for the good (inculcating a culture of transparent citation).
I'd honestly argue that it can be worse. If someone cites a claim with a bogus citation and no one chooses to challenge it, then that becomes something that's not just an opinion, but something that's viewed to be scientific fact.
For example have you ever been in an argument where you recall reading a paper or statistic, but don't have it on hand? What if that statistic was a false correlation drummed up by a highly politicized thinktank?
This is why it's so important to not leave potentially misleading or outright wrong citations unchallenged. This is sort of how the 'vaccines cause autism' claims can quickly spiral out of control. It requires people to behave earnestly and not mislead with their citations.
> but something that's viewed to be scientific fact.
By who? Do you seriously read an HN comment that states something you didn't already know with a citation you don't bother to click and then just go forward assuming it's scientific fact?
I don't even take publications themselves as scientific facts until they have been reliably reproduced or provide ample evidence.
The difference I'd point to, in aggregate, is the falsifiability of cited claims.
I can make a claim without a citation, or attribute it to "some article I read awhile ago". No one can verify my original claim. Someone may attempt to dig up another citation refuting it, or find a suspect source making my claim, but these are inefficient ways of fact checking. And if I wanted to be a dick, I could claim that wasn't what I was talking about / my original source.
I can also cite my claim. In this case, 99% may accept it at face value, but 1% may fact check my citation and loudly pronounce it doesn't conclude what I said it did. The 99% then gain the benefit of an erroneous report.
The nice thing about having discussions based on fact is that if "the data" is bad, its just another avenue for discussion. That doesn't mean we have to re-hash everything from first principals, and it certainly doesn't mean that compelling rhetoric + poor data might "win", but it sure does help.
People can have a productive discussion on the veracity (origins/malleability are not good reasons to ignore data by themselves in my opinion) of the data, other data can be presented to support or contradict the original point, and in a perfect world perhaps both sides would come away a little more aware of an issue.
> The nice thing about having discussions based on fact...
Certainly that kind of positivist approach is valuable and warranted for much but not all of the subject-matter on HN. If you're discussing technical subject matter, stuff like the inner workings of regular expressions, programming language features, electronic components, sure, it's all about "the facts".
Things are different, however, in discussions about human affairs, political, inter-personal topics, social movements, historical interpretations, art, design, music, aesthetics, business and other topics in the human experience. These discussions DO EXIST on HN. And NO, sorry, pure facts may not be enough or might be incomplete or out-of-reach for that subject-matter.
> Things are different, however, in discussions about human affairs, political, inter-personal topics, social movements, historical interpretations, art, design, music, aesthetics, business and other topics in the human experience. These discussions DO EXIST on HN.
I'll bite.
Data can do a lot to improve discussions about history, politics and business.
I'd also argue that data can improve discussions about seemingly subjective things such as design.
> And NO, sorry, pure facts many not be enough or might be incomplete or out-of-reach for that subject-matter.
In fact I'd say that I'm close to saying those are the only discussions worth having about certain topics.
If I like a design and you don't that brings us nowhere. If either of us can bring some data and say 72% of the testers prefered it strongly, - but colorblind people struggled with it - that is something that might give both of us some value and might lead to better results.
Facts still trump everything in all of those categories. You can certainly talk about how those facts can be explained by people's emotional state, historical context, etc., but that doesn't invalidate facts that might demonstrate something is pretty irrational when you look at actual data.
When someone says they are afraid of flying, you show them facts of how safe commercial flight is compared to driving. You don't just quietly sit by while they try to pass legislation making flying illegal.
Data is the best tool we have. It can be cherry-picked and tainted for sure, but I'd much prefer debates be governed by that instead of whose argument is the most "humane"/morally superior
> prefer debates be governed by [cherry-picked data] instead of whose argument is the most "humane"
To be overly generous, that's a false dichotomy.
There's a time and place for humane arguments and, in the absence of complete "data" (whatever THAT means), that may be all you have. At the end of the day, we're all emotional creatures and this often justifiably dominates considerations of human affairs. Not everything can be boiled down to problems in first order logic.
> There's a time and place for humane arguments and, in the absence of complete "data" (whatever THAT means), that may be all you have.
I'm trying to be charitable here, but it's difficult not to conclude that you're setting up the data as never being sufficient e.g. "whatever THAT means" in order to support humane arguments over data based arguments.
I don't really see it though. The article seems pretty clear on what kind of discussion they think is unproductive. One can argue whether text is data, but it still has structure and meaning. When they say "ill-advised citation" or "logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify" that is what they are arguing.
You own argument seem much more a moral one though. For one it doesn't even say what you said it says. For example:
> accusing HN commenters [...] abusing unreliable tools like "data" and "logic" to counter "humane arguments"
Actually says:
> humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational
It doesn't say that human arguments are countered with data or logic. That statement is never made. It doesn't imply it either. If it was to be read as implied it would still be logic and data used in incorrect ways. So it seems hard to favor data if you don't even look at the text at hand.
Instead you seem to pretty much make a "slippery slope" argument, which if not outright is at least close to a moral argument. That questioning data dismisses the role of data, and that this leads to anti-intellectualism. Therefor we shouldn't question data in this way. That is, they are morally wrong to do it. Instead of the less moral argument that misuse of data is what leads to people questioning it.
You also back this up with all kinds of appeal to emotion from it being "a smug, flowery dismissal" to "basically saying I wish these annoying nerds would stop thinking". I don't see that reading as factual. If anything the article seems to argue that people should start thinking. One could argue that their reasoning for why people isn't thinking is incorrect, but that doesn't change the actual meaning in relation to thinking (that they think people should be thinking more). So again you are not arguing the text, but your moral conclusion from the text.
The more critical reading of your comments would simply be that you don't see the problem with data and therefor you don't understand the article's concerns nor the problems with your own comments. Which is pretty much what the article argues people don't do after observing this very forum.
I have a hard time even reconciling your one sentence in this comment. Because you are essentially saying that you rather have flawed data than a humane or morally superior argument. But that again seems very much in itself like a morally superior argument. It rests on that data is always better than a humane argument. Even when incorrect, and potentially more incorrect, than a humane argument.
I saw parent commenter as making an epistemological argument rather than a moral one.
There are two fundamentally different sources of truth: ethical consensus and physical data.
They are ultimately incompatible, in that only a single option can be your ultimate source of truth. Albeit other(s) can be valued to some degree.
The issue they took, and I would take too, with that portion of the New Yorker article is that it attacks the idea of physical data as a valid, supreme source of truth.
Consequently, the rhetorical paraphrasing of the passage into the comment dismissing nerds seems on point.
Objectively, the humanities has a poor track record of getting pissy and taking cheap shots at science as a viable supreme source of knowledge.
> The issue they took, and I would take too, with that portion of the New Yorker article is that it attacks the idea of physical data as a valid, supreme source of truth.
But I doesn't say that. Throughout the paragraph the emphasis is on the recklessness.
"hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper _recklessness_"
"_Ill-advised_ citations"
"_thought_ experiments"
"logic, applied _narrowly_, is used to _justify_"
"data, but the _origins_, _veracity_, and _malleability_ of those data [...]"
And that is also in line with the conclusion that "message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own" and "can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots". The critique here is essentially that people don't have scientific literacy.
That people on hacker news think they can be rational, dispassionate and authoritative but that their recklessness with citations, logic and data (and their dismissal of other arguments) suggests they can't.
That is the argument.
All of this is questioning the substance of the arguments made, not the substance of such arguments made correctly. The entire point is that they aren't made correctly. You might even read the paragraph as acknowledging that it once worked, when it impressed observers.
> Consequently, the rhetorical paraphrasing of the passage into the comment dismissing nerds seems on point.
You can argue anything you want, but the argument here was made from a basis of facts. If the commentator wants to concede that their argument isn't based on the text itself, then they and you might have a point. But instead the rest of the argument isn't very believable. Which is the logic behind my argument in the first place.
> Objectively, the humanities has a poor track record of getting pissy and taking cheap shots at science as a viable supreme source of knowledge.
Again not relevant to the facts at hand. Especially since again they aren't making those statement. Otherwise we can bring anything into the discussion, from nationality to sat scores.
At what point in the article does it state that well-executed, fact-supported, scientific arguments are a superior (or even valid) form of policy debate?
That isn't relevant either. I never said it did nor does any of my arguments rest on that. You and "cloakandswagger" are making claims that aren't supported by article, which I have addressed, and should back those up to have an argument.
This is exactly why fact based discussions not only don't work, but don't happen on hacker news. Because you can just say something different. And that is how it always is. Someone posts a citation and someone else goes out of their way to debunk it. Then they just say something else. Next time no one bothers. Because the point isn't to have a fact based discussion, but to not be questioned on an already existing view. And that is what the article correctly caught on to.
So you decline to provide evidence that the article positively
> state[s] that well-executed, fact-supported, scientific arguments are a superior (or even valid) form of policy debate
We both agree that the article goes on at length about the recklessness of fact-based arguments on HN.
Furthermore, I point to two direct quotes that I characterize as anti-fact and elevating non-factual or (debatably in the case of the latter) semi-factual methods of discussion to the same level as fact-based discussion.
You decline to provide evidence rebutting those two points, and instead cite the "emphasis" of the surrounding paragraph as a reason those two points should be ignored.
The argument appears to be that we need more emotion and intuition, and less facts and data. It's absurd, and quite scary. I have never made a good decision while in an emotional state, and my father warned me about doing so in my teens; though he was too subtle for me to get the point being made.
Still, I react to extremist rhetoric on HN with vitriol that is often unhelpful. During Obama's admin, I was actively flagging political content, and the extremist stuff was kept at bay. We were also calling out FB and Zynga/ Farmville and their dark patterns, not calling for government action, but personal discipline to stay away.
> ... it [the cited paragraph] attacks the idea of physical data as a valid, supreme source of truth.
No, it does not.
It attacks the idea of using glib, incomplete, or poorly examined "facts" as the basis for a valid argument.
If you want to say that poorly vetted "facts" are a basis for "supreme truth" and, further, that you can only choose that or else some kind of mushy ethical considerations... that's your prerogative, but you're wrong.
] "humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions."
Those two points can't be construed any other way than as anti-intellectual. They were cheap shots, and the author should have known they were a cheap shots.
That those points are somewhat incongruous with the subsequent assertion and surrounding piece doesn't mean they're any less anti-intellectual.
] "The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns."
And indeed, I'd say that prefacing the immediately above (defensible) with the prior claims (indefensible) is the reason this entire comment thread exists.
The author could have made a much stronger argument about poor citation and fact checking, but they instead chose to include what feels like knee-jerk humanities logic horror, substantially muddying their point.
Indeed so, but the scientific process (in the general, Enlightenment sense) is more robust and abuse / fault -tolerant than anything else we've come up with.
Reproducibility crises or statistical hacking news articles are evidence of success. In a less-introspective system, those self-reevaluations didn't even happen!
Viz, the 300+ years it took for a shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric consensus.
From years on this site, I can't imagine why anyone would love that paragraph. It reads entirely to me in a single direction that roughly translates to:
"I find it disagreeable that well thought out, logical and data driven conversations on topics with which I disagree are supported."
If anything, most non-tech people will find it 'juicy'. Someone will read it and say something akin to "good lord!" and then email the article to their friend about the "inhumane" forum they read about.
There's a lot of the author's opinion embedded in that paragraph, and I'm disinclined to agree with it, but ... no wait -- was that paragraph generated by a Markov bot trained to make substanceless attacks on opinions that the author doesn't like?
The person that wrote that paragraph would really hate the comp.* and sci.* newsgroups of the early 1990s, compared to which HN is a bunch of young women at a tea party spending most of their time advocating fashionable social causes and worrying whether they've hurt each others feelings.
It's great, except for that I don't think the last sentence really captures the gestalt. The people into libertarianism have mostly left to go hang out elsewhere, and Tim Ferriss has never been particularly well received.
I've never met Scott but I worked with Dan briefly in the early 2000's and he is a disconcerting combination of brilliance and quiet modesty. It doesn't seem possible that someone as smart and broadly knowledgeable should be so balanced and still. 15 years later he's still one of my most persistent professional memories and I'm glad he's found a cause perfectly suited for his skill set and temperament.
In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right"
Such labels are a part and parcel of in-group/out-group psychology. In 2019, by analogy, we should all be wary when people are starting to probe those "ports." I'm pretty sure that I've been seen as both by different people at different times, though recently on HN I've been spending a lot of energy defending a particular principle. Going way back, I'd been pre-judged as a woo-woo hippy, a yuppie, and all sorts of different things since.
If we take a step back and look at the broader arc of history, what we have to be wary of are narratives which attempt to paint entire groups of people as morally inferior threats. (For a variety of reasons, including world view.) These narratives always precede the great evils of history. These narratives always deserve great skepticism -- we should always "follow the money" and see who benefits from the pushing of the narrative. We should ask who stands to gain power.
> both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right"
I definitely want to give credit to dang and sctb for making it that way. It could have gone differently. In particular, the no-politics argument is basically a fancy way of saying "nothing that challenges the status quo please". [1] I really appreciate them trying to keep the forum in a state where these discussion can at least happen. I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics.
> I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics.
This is still prevalent. The mods are simply resistant to this. I don't even think it's necessarily a bad thing, but HN is hardly exempt from being an echo chamber—it's just one I enjoy, and one that seems to pride itself on being vaguely more open minded (to serious discussion) than the average community.
This user seems to be conflating skepticism with denialism. These two groups would take completely different positions on the issues listed (eg. climate change).
When you say "this user" you're talking about Dr Ichikawa, the professor of philosophy? Who specializes in the very topic you're attempting to correct them on? I can't tell if you're serious or if this is just some sort of Poe's Law attempt to satirize the behavior he's pointing out.
The skeptical movement subscribes to critical thinking, empiricism, and applying the scientific model to find answers. To say that skeptics don't believe in climate change is very untrue.
This is contrasted to denialism which denies claims out of hand. This is not based on scientific data, but gut feeling or motivated reasoning.
Dr. Ichikawa is thus describing denialism in his tweets.
edit: Here is an article on the distinction from one of the strongest figures in the skeptical movement, Steven Novella. It even focuses on the topic of climate change.
You seem to be confusing the skeptical movement, which is indeed a specific group of people, with skepticism, which exists before and outside of that movement.
Perhaps the meaning has changed, but at the very least that is how the word is used today. As an example /r/skeptic is a large community of people that self-identify as skeptics.
Your arrogance continues to astound me. The guy is an actual professor of philsophy talking about his specialty. The word has been used for hundreds of years. Yes, it has a particular meaning in its community. Reddit is not the whole of the world.
You know what. I can accept that there's a separate meaning in philosophy that this professor uses it in that context. Words often have unique meanings in specific fields.
However the colloquial, general meaning is still that of scientific skepticism. That's what comes up when you search skepticism on Wikipedia, reddit, or various definitions. That's also what is reasonably being referred to in a Hacker News post; a community that often subscribes to the same values expressed in skepticism.
Unless you know this professor and can put his words in their appropriate context, then the whole thing reads as decrying an entire movement of scientifically-minded people.
> I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics.
Flagging is frequently used to kill topics still. Climate change articles are still flagged mercilessly, before any discussion starts and without regard for the high-quality of the articles.
dang as a moderator has specifically said that articles about Russia hacking elections are penalized prior to any votes or comments starting (edit: I believe this particular issue is done by the 'moderators' themselves manually or through a filter, not through user-flags. they are not just moderating discussion, they are filtering which topics you see in the first place, on their own).
The discussion here is framed by people who do not want to talk about certain interesting Hacker and Startup related issues, like global climate change or the stability of democracy with technology.
Flags are a common tool used by the community here to shape the discussion before it starts, hiding topics entirely from view that the community would otherwise vote and discuss.
Any topic this widespread is going to produce many copycat and follow-up articles that add no significant new information, as well as many sensationalized articles that don't provide a basis for substantive discussion. Users tend to flag those. If they didn't, climate change wouldn't simply be the most-discussed topic—it would be practically the only topic on HN.
There are also cases of bad flagging, where a particularly substantive article didn't get the discussion it deserved, but these are not nearly as common as people jumping to the conclusion that a topic is being suppressed when they run across a flagged submission. Checking HN search is an easy way to vet that logic (though not as easy as not vetting it). Frequently it turns out that the story has already had significant attention. If, after checking that, you see a particularly substantive article getting flagged, you are welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We sometimes turn off flagging in such cases.
Everybody feels that the topic they consider most important is under-discussed on HN. Actually, every important topic is under-discussed on HN, because frontpage space is the scarcest resource we have: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... There's no way around this on a site that exists for curiosity, because curiosity withers under repetition.
So pretty clearly I have wildly underestimated the amount that flagging is used to suppress stories. Is there some way for me to see which stories are getting flagged and by how much?
On the site proper, I think flagged stories that have lots of comments are still shown in the Active list (follow the link to Lists at the bottom). But easier may be to view outside sites such as http://hnrankings.info (look for sharp drops in position and lines that end before the right side of the graph) or http://hckrnews.com (look for DEAD in the title or a blank in the number of comments).
Thanks. In that case, I'd like to suggest to dang, et al, that HN make flagging behavior and its results more visible. If we have to read tea leaves to find out what's being excluded and have no idea who's excluding it, that seems like a dangerous situation. And one where, as we can see in the thread, it allows people to be pretty paranoid.
Do you have no comment about the censuring you do of topics like Russian election hacking? To me that is the most violating of your duty, that you preemptively reduce conversation on particular topics.
You replied in depth to every part of my post except that part. Please explain why you have filters on conversation topics but pretend to be impartial moderators.
Does HN have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visibility on stories relating to Russia's physical and digital attacks on American democracy?
I focused on climate change because that is the topic that has the most intensity on HN at the moment. This is a matter of triage. It's incredibly costly in time and energy to write detailed answers like this. We can't do that about everything. If we tried, it would peg us at 100% and starve the rest of the site.
No, HN does not "have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visibility on stories relating to Russia's physical and digital attacks on American democracy". Those issues have received tons of discussion on Hacker News, just like climate change has, just not as recently. If you're talking about something I actually said as opposed to simply making things up, I'd like to see a link—whatever I did say, I wouldn't have put it that way.
That doesn't mean we don't have automated penalties, a.k.a. write software to do things on the site. We rely on software because it would be impossible to do this job without it. There's a lot of software; it does a lot of things. One thing it does is downweight classic flamewar topics. That includes nationalistic flamewars (edit: and partisan flamewars), which there were a lot of about Russia in the last couple years, though the storm of that has shifted to China in recent months. If you're alluding to something I actually said, I imagine that's what it related to.
If you're shocked that some submissions are downweighted by HN software, you may need to realize that this site is curated and has never pretended otherwise. Some submissions are even killed by software outright. The downweights I mentioned are mild and have plenty of opportunity to get overridden, whether by software or by moderators; in fact we do that all the time when we see a substantive story being affected by them. That's one reason why all the topics you're complaining about being suppressed have actually received major, regular discussions on Hacker News.
Thanks dang for your thoughtful and detailed replies. I don't know if it will help the user you're replying to, but I've read all your comments here with interest. They help me understand how to be a better commenter.
That is a well researched story on the NYTimes on an underreported topic that is mostly technological in nature. You claim it got a "software penalty" as opposed to being flagged.
I cannot imagine any interpretation other than what I described, that there is an automatic penalty applied to posts that you personally don't like or have personal expectations from outside of the community's voice.
How am I to interpret your comments without assuming that you have software that flags content and penalizes it by topic when you state that the software penalty happened "because this topic is unfortunately more likely to lead nationalistic flamewar"
I do not understand.
Edit: I cannot see these posts without being logged in as me. Have you hidden this particular discussion from public view? Am I shadowbanned? For what purpose?
That thread doesn't say anything like what you claimed it did.
Your account is being affected by software penalties that it incurred earlier in the day when you went for full-out ideological battle in this thread. HN has software filters based on past activity by trolls, and after looking at how they were operating on your comments, I believe they were operating correctly. What you're trying to do on this site is not what we want, not what the guidelines call for, and most importantly, not what the community wants. That's where we take our cues.
I would like to discuss certain intersections of politics and technology, but HN has proven time and time again to be incapable of handling them without turning into a screaming match. Such topics require heavy, active moderation in a community with such conflicting views, and that kind of moderation tends to lead to more screaming matches.
>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
There's plenty of climate change reporting about the web. I just don't care to see HN lists articles that are ultra hot topics. You just get the same comments over and over again.
I feel that a huge amount of people have still a hard time accepting that it's true, especially if doing something about it means changing something so deeply ingrained as their food habits.
On the other hand, major announcements like the latest UN report frontally calling for a diet change are still allowed on HN, so there is some filtering going on - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
Many of the same comments that we read each time is that its not clear that the weather is changing due to human action, or that its not clear if stop eating animal products would help that much, etc. which shows that a lot of people are still misinformed about the topic and in a state of denial.
Because hottest month on record isn't scientifically interesting? Yes, climate change is happening, no, we didn't forget. The article isn't even about any attempts to do something different to fix it.
you may have missed this thought-provoking passage on the intractability of avoiding the political:
> Down the page, another user expressed disdain for the experiment. “The idea that we can carve out a space that exists outside of politics and ideology is delusional,” the user wrote. “Squelching political discussion won’t cause us all to transcend ideology, it’ll just make it impossible to discuss or critique a dominant ideology whenever one shows up in someone’s unstated assumptions.”
> “Of course it’s delusional,” Gackle replied. “And still we have to moderate this site.” Three days later, he announced that Political Detox Week would be coming to an end. They’d learned, among other things, that “it’s impossible to define ‘politics’ with any consensus because that question is itself highly political.”
Don't know sctb, but I have had run-ins with dang on multiple occasions where he asked me to stop arguing when I felt I wasn't being hostile. Nonetheless, it's always in a very moderate tone of doing his job, rather than trying to express power, and I respect that. (Nor am I implying that I didn't take the arguments too far, in some cases I did)
The real proof that they do their job though is that I can still occasionally fine deep insights here that just aren't available in other places.
Same here. Dang has sent me such warnings before and it's always with such politeness that you end up feeling like an uneducated fool. HN has some of the best moderation that I have seen in a while. I have been a moderator for a large website in early 2000's and I can only admire them. This is no easy task.
I was also once called out by dang. He did it so respectingly and understandingly that it made a change for me. This was much better for my reflection about what was wrong about my behaviour than if I had been moderated more heavihandidly. I don't understand the amount of attention and patience that is necessary for it, but it makes a difference.
Looked it up, it means "social justice warrior", defined by Wikipedia as "a pejorative term for an individual who promotes socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism, as well as identity politics".
A funny thing is that "SJW" wasn't at all a pejorative. It is a self-selected name. The early usage was people proudly calling themselves SJWs.
To now say that SJW is a perjorative is weird. Sure, many of the people using the term happen to really dislike SJWs, but how can a self-selected name ever be a perjorative?
I didn't read this comment as tribalistic. At it's most cynical, it's pointing out that HN manages to capture a pretty broad range of perspectives despite people's tribalistic tendencies.
This assumes that's a helpful dichotomy, which implies categorizing people into such groups, which every indication I've seen those labels are overly broad, highly inaccurate, or used whenever convenient to imply some guilt-by-association. To me they only work to be dismissive of people regardless of the merit or quality of their points and splits everything down ideological lines, which naturally pushes people to protect their side with an us vs them view of things.
HN should work towards having thoughtful discussions and providing useful contributions. It shouldn't be about tolerating particular political views or not. That shouldn't be the mod's job.
I interpreted the use of labels as partly poking fun at how trigger happy many people are with applying those labels. Actual alt right and "sjw cesspool" comments get flagged and dead. Me I felt that the comment meant to communicate that divisive issues that elicit these labels (but don't actually warrant them, hence the quotes around both) are permitted on HN and that is something positive.
> HN should work towards having thoughtful discussions and providing useful contributions. It shouldn't be about tolerating particular political views or not. That shouldn't be the mod's job.
I agree and I'm confident the previous commenter would as well. The only piece of nuanced disagreement I have is about the involvement of moderators. I agree that ultimately it's the users that need to do work towards providing useful and thoughtful discussion, but moderators do have a crucial role is fostering and maintaining that kind of culture.
> I interpreted the use of labels as partly poking fun at how trigger happy many people are with applying those labels. Actual alt right and "sjw cesspool" comments get flagged and dead. Me I felt that the comment meant to communicate that divisive issues that elicit these labels (but don't actually warrant them, hence the quotes around both) are permitted on HN and that is something positive.
The idea that anyone would refer to people who champion for social justice as a "cesspool" is so disheartening. Equally disheartening is the idea that people find it a strength of HN that it is a haven for the hateful, illogical and damaging rhetoric of the modern Nazis, or the "alt-right".
Positive discussion is frequently derailed and halted by the "alt-right" presence on HN. Their presence here should not be welcomed, much less seen as a strength of the community.
My complaint about political topics is that the views expressed just aren't very well informed. Comments are typically what smart engineers would write, but there is very rarely any expertise in the topic like there would be in a discussion about compilers.
Well informed in what respect? Who should would be considered well informed? People who study politics professionally, so, journalists?
I think the discussions here tend to be far more well informed than most political discussions, most of which amount to essays by people who don't even want you to be well informed.
This silly New Yorker article is a good case in point. It lists a whole host of complaints about comments here and links to exactly none of them, thus not even letting the reader check if they agree with the journalists assessment. They do of course link to the stories themselves, because those are written by journalistic allies, although the story link would be at the top of any linked HN page.
Literally, in a story about HN discussions, none of the links at the start of the story actually go to them.
I can only assume this is because so many of those discussions contain well argued, well written comments dissecting poor quality political campaigning that's posing as journalism, and Anna Wiener doesn't want her audience to be exposed to that.
And given her attitude I'm not surprised she doesn't want people to see the discussions here. Look at her list of complaints: "ill advised citations", "thought experiments abound", "humane arguments are dismissed as emotional". "Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions".
So this journalist literally rejects logic and thought as a basis for reaching conclusions! I mean, ill advised citations! This is a new concept I've never encountered before. It speaks volumes about the parlous state of the New Yorker that citing sources and using logic is considered bad behaviour. Why should such people be considered better informed than us when it comes to politics?
I agree. The New Yorker or New York Times dances around topics, giving random human interest tidbits or anecdotes and never gets to the heart of any discussion. It's all fluff.
HackerNews comments in general are concise and to the point. Logical, well-reasoned arguments aren't a part of modern politics or journalism so to this writer it seems like some curious fantasy world. Luckily new online
media like Young Turks, Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro have actual discussions instead of sound bites or roundabout intellectualism like the New Yorker. I'd take the recent hour-long Bernie Sanders interview with Joe Rogan over anything on CNN. Corporate media puts a spin on every discussion and it almost always makes things worse.
I would agree with you but think your examples are poor. Rogan generally lets his guests just talk about what they want to talk about without questioning them. Ben Shapiro sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but tends to pick debates with college students. Shapiro is full of platitudes, something which you seem to criticize the New York Times and New Yorker about interestingly. All of the people you mention, besides the Young Turks who I don't know anything about, lack self-awareness of their place in the world and the effect of their words on the general populace. I'd also argue that CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc have the same issues.
Also I'm not advocating for cable news, I think for profit news is generally terrible.
> Rogan generally lets his guests just talk about what they want to talk about without questioning them.
I actually love that: Rogan gives you the rare chance to observe his guests in a somewhat relaxed environment, at least more relaxed than the endless battlefields of Twitter, and slightly less fake than magazine interviews. If anything, I wish he would insert fewer of his own opinion.
I feel that questioning and defending opinions works much better in text form, anyway. I keep looking for good, honest debates on video, but usually it's just people trying to pwn each other with eloquence, with no time for fact-checks.
I'm inclined to agree. People are entitled to their opinions even if they are not well informed. Provided they don't break any rules they should feel free to air them. Those that are better informed have the opportunity to set them straight. One of the reasons I come here is the see the various opinions and arguments.
The "ill advised citations" is a bit weird one :-)
Although I broadly agree with your point, a quick run through Beautiful Soup revealed ten links to HN comments - some of them heavily downvoted. (It's possible that they were added after your comment, though.)
Not unobtrusive but at least, a lot of the time, they leave a comment to let everyone know that they changed what users posted, when they hide posts, etc. The main problem is when they don't (it feels more like the content is being censored or tailored to their views then).
dang, the liberal groupthink thought policeman who silences anyone who doesn’t agree with his liberal social justice agenda. I can’t imagine a worse moderator.
I've had my share of suspicions of "downvote brigades" and the like but from the point of view of an ordinary user they are indistinguishable from uncoordinated users expressing their disapproval so I guess it is best to just assume good faith.
It is actually fascinating to know how much of this type of behaviour is visible to the moderators and how big of a problem it is (and of course they too can't see the full extent of it).
I'm curious why you think "lots" of skilled, wealthy and powerful people frequent HN. I think its lots of people who think they are skilled and wish they were wealthy and/or powerful.
The heavy startup focus of hackernews (like, it's an incubator's news agitator) + lots of successful tech-types, like FAANG employees with 200K+ salaries.
Lots of other commentators I've seen on here are experience pilots, engineers, etc. Maybe not Bill Gates money but certainly on the higher end of the bell-curve when it comes to education and pay.
I don't disagree that there is a lot of aspirational talk on here too -- they wanna get rich -- but again, it's the news site that's part of a startup incubator. What did you expect?
At first I was a little amazed that many negative articles and comments about these companies were being down-voted, just notice the latest article on the status of a pregnant employee at Google, where the discussion's focus was very quickly and conveniently moved from how said employee had been mistreated by Google to how bad it is that Google allows its employees to discuss freely on these topics.
I didn't understand how come these companies have so many fans on this website, but then I realized that some of these users' total comp largely depends on how those companies' shares behave. If I'm not mistaken a FAANG engineer with 10 year of experience has his comp at about 200k in actual salary and the same figure in redeemable shares, so their total comp can approach 4-500k, half of it in shares. As such, it makes perfect sense to downvote everyone that says bad and unpleasant things about your company, because your money actually depends on it. Not sure that there's anything we, the non-FAANG employees, can do about that.
If it matters I've been an user of this website for quite some time, I just wanted to mention that I'm neither powerful nor wealthy.
From the point of view of an ex-Googler who worked there for many years, the frustrating thing about discussions of Google isn't criticism so much as lazy assertions of things people couldn't possibly know. (They are often things I don't know either, because in a 100,000 person company, there's no way to know everything, and since I left my knowledge is out of date.) And if you ask how they know it, it is apparently just conventional "wisdom" in some circles.
I see that in certain other topics as well, such as discussions of the 737 as mentioned in the article.
Along with intellectual curiosity, I think it's important to cultivate intellectual humility, and they go together. A lot of what we think we know just by reading the news isn't all that well-founded, so asserting a strongly-held opinion isn't justified. I'm reminded of a cartoon about collecting questions, rather than answers:
No. A decrease in Google's share price doesn't increase Facebook's share price. These companies are mostly in the same boat of being large tech companies with significant amounts of power. It's in all of the employees' best interest to suppress stories critical of anything that could be generally applicable to that power structure.
What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. I think people just disagree. And by working in a place you get a different perspective than on the outside.
For example, I often downvote uninformed and highly opinionated financial comments because working inside the industry gives me a different perspective. Also there’s a self selection effect: Those who hate Google probably won’t work there.
Moreover, the less popular a company is, the more they are going to have to pay you. For example in finance Goldman almost always pays below the market rate, because they are the best at what they do and everyone wants to work their. So I think employees of FANG actually have an incentive to spread and promote bad news about the company, to an extent (they don’t want to depress the share price, though).
This is actually my sole complaint with HN. I love the community and I understand where the moderators are coming from, but I feel that it's important to point out that the position of "keep politics out of $X" is the purest expression of privilege, and in general is an attitude that embraces the status quo, no matter how horrifying it might be for the unprivileged.
I'm not saying HN should allow ALL political discussion, but when technological issues inevitably and undeniably involve politics, either by influencing or being influenced, it seems a little cowardly that the general attitude of HN is "just don't discuss it" when the it in that case is core to the issue at hand, even if it happens to be political.
I don't see that attitude in HN at all. There are those who wish to see fewer (or none) political discussions, but their wishes don't prevail. Hence the aforementioned "Detox Week", which didn't even last a week.
> I'm not saying HN should allow ALL political discussion, but when technological issues inevitably and undeniably involve politics, either by influencing or being influenced, it seems a little cowardly that the general attitude of HN is "just don't discuss it" when the it in that case is core to the issue at hand, even if it happens to be political.
HN allows (and frequently features) political discussion in those contexts, so while I agree that it would be a problem if your description was accurate, I can't agree that the description is accurate.
Something can be both an expression of privilege and a very good idea.
Example: The advice to get at least 8 hours of sleep at a regular time each night. This reflects:
- the economic privilege of not needing to do irregular shift work
- not having a chronic disease which interrupts sleep
- not being a parent
- having a regular place to sleep at all.
However, it is still a good idea for one’s physical and mental health.
Likewise, a community might reasonably decide that certain political discussions are too acrimonious to have productively. Even if this decision reflects privilege, it might be the only decision under which the community could survive without rupturing.
I feel inclined to agree with your second paragraph, but just don’t know if such discussions are actually productive.
Someone pointed out to me that "this is privilege" conflates two very different ideas. It can mean "this is an unfair advantage which should be taken away", but it can also mean "this is a benefit denied to some people, and it should be shared with everyone".
To take some old settled examples: sovereign immunity was a privilege to be taken away because everyone should be accountable under the law, but voting rights were a privilege to be extended because self-determination is good regardless of race or gender. Sometimes it's obvious what people mean, but sometimes it's very useful to be explicit about what's meant. I think "keep politics out of $X" extends across both categories.
To the extent that a space affects policy on some issue, banning 'politics' effectively empowers the people who benefit from the current state of affairs. As you say, it could still have a payoff worth the cost if some concrete good is being achieved, but I think it is a cost; in an ideal world people would be free to discuss both the current state of affairs and changes they'd like to see. But when spaces are genuinely divorced from any position on an issue, it seems like a privilege to share, to give more people the freedom and resources to at least temporarily step away from problems. Issues are harder to escape or forget for the people who are directly affected, so there is a privilege there, but I don't think the people harassing "rainy day moodboard" Tumblrs to post about Yemen are actually improving anything.
I'm not sure what the perfect balance is, but I appreciate that HN rules try to uphold that distinction. There's significantly more leeway to debate politics when tech engages politics (e.g. government contracts, codes of conduct, privacy), than there is to inject non-tech political discussion simply on the grounds that it's an important topic.
> Someone pointed out to me that "this is privilege" conflates two very different ideas. It can mean "this is an unfair advantage which should be taken away", but it can also mean "this is a benefit denied to some people, and it should be shared with everyone".
You missed a third: “this is a product of a particular pattern of life experience which not everyone shares, and people should be mindful that it is not universal”.
IME, when a particular comment is described as coming from privilege, to the extent there is a “should” point along with the “is” point, the “should” point is about recognizing the different lived experience that the privileged comment disregards, not about resolving the difference in experience by universalizing either the privileged or unprivileged experience.
Well, as I said, it shouldn't be ALWAYS allowed, otherwise you have that sect of people who bring up the politics inherent in anything, and while it's true and important, it's not what HN is about or should be about.
BUT, and this is a big but here, there are a small number of discussions on HN where it can be argued that the politics involved in an issue are more important than the technology. Or, that the technology involved is actively shaping the politics related to it. Or, that the politics of those building the technology are informing the technology. And so on.
And I feel like the attitude here is one mirrored strongly in the tech industry at large, that somehow by not discussing it openly, we avoid the stains and the ugly realities of the situations we're involved in, and I'm sorry but that's just not true. Simply refusing to discuss the political angles of what we all do doesn't mean we're above it or beyond it, we're simply ignoring it, and ignoring politics can have catastrophic consequences.
I think of myself (based on commenting/posting history) as more politically-inclined than the average techie, but I find HN’s mix of tech and politics to be generally good. That might be because I can go elsewhere (e.g. Twitter) to discuss more political things, and thus have an implicit preference for HN to be less political. But I’m interested in what others think would be the ideal mix?
I’m on mobile so I’m only skimming, but if you sorted that day list by upvotes, the 4th most upvoted story would be the one about a new African trade coalition (450+ upvotes). There’s also a 200+ upvoted submission about FBI/ICE having access to state driver license photos. And a bunch of other sub-100 upvoted threads that are political, or aren’t explicitly tech — e.g. forest kindergarten, FCC and robocallers, the Durian King. And this doesn’t account for the tech articles in which politics are prominently discussed, e.g. anything to do with the Boeing 737 MAX.
Seems like a solid mix to me, even as at least a third of the tech-focused submissions don’t interest me (e.g. Lisp and RaptorJIT). There’s enough political content for that day that if I wanted to read only non-tech HN threads, I’d have my fill.
Like 1st day of month are the hiring threads... what about on the 15th we have a very focused political debate - and no other threads are allowed to have it.
I definitely agree that tech lately is so intertwined with politics.
What happens if on the 16th Bloomberg announces that all organizers of the protests at Google have left or been fired?
What happens if on the 17th, during a big ML conference, a prominent computer vision scientist was able to conclusively prove that x% of current facial datasets are majority white male and that this results in y% increase of false positive rates when identifying nonwhites as criminals?
What happens if on the 19th there is a report delivered by a special UN comissioned research group that issues that global warming has destroyed coral reefs in a way such that they will never recover?
What happens if on the 25th it is definitively revealed through a security report that voting machines were actively hacked to detect if the voter was registered female and made them vote for $party?
What happens if on the 1st Reuters publishes a investigative piece that explores how Microsoft has been delivering accurate censorship algorithms to China and the specific people behind it?
What happens if on the 12th a NIH paper is published unveiling definitive brain architecture differences between male, female, and nonbinary brains due to an innovative computer vision collaboration in MIT?
What happens if on the 14th a scientist who happens to be an assigned-female-at-birth nonbinary latin american publishes the definitive proof that P != NP? Also, this researcher takes 'they' pronouns, so commentors can either use "she" or "they" and both are political statements? (Or is it inappropriate to talk about the researcher and their/her work to discover this at all?)
That is to say- in the article, it was discovered that "what is political debate" turned out to itself be a political debate, because some things are obviously political, and other things are political just by existing and referring to it.
Most likely, in all these cases the story would be posted anyway and then some small minority of users who find it offensive would flag-kill it. If the moderators/vouchers disagree, the story and comments might be resurrected. Which is to say, things would work much as they do now.
The difference would be that there would be at least one day per month when unpopular opinions could be voiced without (potentially) being censored. The most important unpopular stories of the previous month would get some discussion, whereas currently they get none.
This is, of course, what the word “privilege” means, both in the sociology context and in everyday language. It’s something good that is only available to certain people or groups.
Wealthy people actually get less sleep than the poor for obvious reasons: their time is more valuable. They also work more hours and have less “free” time for the same reason.
And more importantly, even if the wealthy get less sleep, that's by their choice, not circumstance. A poor person loses sleep because they have 2 jobs and the shifts don't line up. A rich person loses sleep because they've taken on too much to do of their own volition, any amount of which they could abstain from with little consequence.
Your study supports my point and harms yours. From your study:
Lower income and educational attainment was associated with more sleep complaints. Employment was associated with less sleep complaints and unemployment with more.
Rates of sleep complaints in African-American, Hispanic/Latino and Asian/Other groups were similar to Whites. Lower socioeconomic status was associated with higher rates of sleep complaint.
The idea isn't that political discussions are unwelcome, or worthless... Rather, it's that people (and comments) are much more emotional, knee-jerk, irrational, etc. - there is barely any actual discussion going on, it's mostly name-calling, strawman arguments or moral/value discussion that basically amount to "I'm good; you're evil" (e.g. both sides of pro-life vs pro-choice debate).
AFAIK noone has figured out how to have a substantial political discussion, at scale. Until that problem is solved, it makes sense to just tune it out a bit.
If there's one privilege that I will never feel guilty about taking advantage of, it's the ability to listen to and engage in discussions with folks smarter than I am with the overloaded concept of political belief removed.
Imagine how much better the experience of listening and engaging in discussions with those who are qualified as not simply smarter than you, but who have different lived experience, values, and/or models for ordering the Universe?
Your implication seems to be that we don't have that - I disagree. HN is full of folks with different backgrounds. One particular category of topics is moderated - politics. There's massive inclusion of different lived experiences etc. In other forums I've found political discussions to be particularly irrational. The topic is just so fundamentally emotional that folks lose objectivity.
You can't argue with results. The comments on this site are superb. I probably read the comments 3x more than I read the base articles. Take a look at the comments on MSNBC, Fox News, or even the Washington Post. It's shrill emotional blather.
I would agree with this... with caveat. The comments on this site are superb when discussing highly technical topics within the STEM sphere. However, the comments here tend to trail off to not much more insightful than average population for the following:
* "Identity" politics (female-in-tech topics become a hotbed of debate, much of it not insightful)
* Nuances in economics or international affairs
At least IMO unless you can broadly anticipate that it's a subject that most commentors have significant education on, the discussion generally falls to either spitballing or anecdotes, neither of which are more insightful than a general public.
I agree 100% with what you say but have to point out that your last "even" is a small example of how politics creeps in. In short, what often happens is that statements that are highly opinion-based are presented as broadly-agreed-upon facts.
EDIT: to be clear, I don't think you did it intentionally, and it was a minor thing, I just found it amusing to spot it.
EDIT2: to be even clearer, I'm referring to the implied fact that WP commenters are better-informed than the other two groups (on which I don't have a strong opinion).
My intent was to convey that intelligence or brilliance, alone, are not sufficient.
Breadth of experience and background matter. And if sufficiently broad, will cross boundaries of endowment or empowerment, and hence enter into political realms.
>...the position of "keep politics out of $X" is the purest expression of privilege, and in general is an attitude that embraces the status quo, no matter how horrifying it might be for the unprivileged.
Is there evidence that arguing politics over the internet is causing a net improvement in the world? I'm inclined to think political discussions on social media are causing political dysfunction, not fixing it.
There's a time and place for that stuff though, if all of a sudden you start bringing up politics during your local Arduino project meetup you can't be surprised if they stop inviting you.
Hacker News sort of splits between technology and politics so drawing a line is a bit tricky.
Politics, IMHO, are about applied relationship and applied power.
Ignoring the discussion of both relationships and power leads to an anemic understanding of freedom and what it takes to enable it which leaves us unbalanced and brittle as a civil society.
The exercise of this privilege is a systemic, cultural mistake and the tendency of conversations to often devolve into tribalism highlights our lack of sophistication and maturity when it comes to these topics.
You could say the same of knowledge also as it is a power and one applied and accrued by relationship; by what material one reads, by whom and from which source it is linked from and to. Academics of various groups tend to have their own sort of tribalism. I think the mods came to the correct conclusion that politics, although annoying as hell sometimes, is a fabric of society which is nigh impossible to shed when discussing just about anything.
There are other forums* where people can discuss those things (*as in, the word forum, not necessarily “internet forums”). It’s refreshing to have a medium like Hacker News where technology news can be discussed without the polemics endemic to other message boards.
While you might have a point, I don't see many examples where people advocating the political to speak "truth to power". What I see is "be mindful with controversial opinions that could affect corporate sensibilities" and I do believe many people share this point of view.
Who do you think are these unprivileged people you are speaking off anyway and what do you think would hinder them at participation?
>Question: who does a policy of "no political discussion" most favour?
How about people who are sick of the silly ass and mostly irrelevant toxic political bullshit lizard men and their PR firms use to drum up electoral turnout? I'm here for the 1337 h4x0rz, not what some blue haired SRE ops ding dong or buzzcut f35 engineer thinks about Todays Issues as defined on TV.
Anyway, hats off to sctb and dang, who do a great job despite the wanking that is allowed on here.
Not all places need to support discussion of politics. If you want to discuss the intersection of tech and politics you have many options to go to without bringing that stuff here.
Exactly this! HN for me is the safe place. It’s politics free and memes free, if someone wants all that stuff you can easily go to Twitter or any other website.
HN generally bans explicitly political opinion pieces, articles with overt political statements and articles primarily covering current political affairs (e.g. articles about something a US politician said). But even what is or isn't "political" in this sense is again down to the unstated biases of the moderators (e.g. what if the US politician said something about a well-known tech company).
A lot of articles that make the cut tend to be overtly about economics, but those are still extremely political. Universal basic income is political, climate change is political, how companies treat their employees is political, the "sharing economy" is political.
HN isn't free of politics, HN is centrist (with a neo-liberal bias, i.e. anti-regulation, pro-market). And centrism isn't an ideology, it's merely a compromise relative to wherever the current Overton window is.
Saying you don't want to talk about politics riles people up because in order to think of something you talk about as "non-political" requires you to be considerably aloof and far removed from the real-world impacts.
And for completeness sake: yes, even saying "when a company makes an economical decision that negatively impacts people that's not political" is political because it presupposes a laissez-faire capitalist worldview where the Friedman doctrine is unquestioned.
(Hopefully we don't need to talk about why any pretenses of a "meritocracy" or "only hiring the best" is political as these specters should have been cast out of most tech forums at this point)
This is absolutely not true. The best postings on hacker news are cool technical stuff that doesn't have an ounce of political.
And yes, there are plenty of articles with a political lean but they are really the least interesting ones here because you can read those anywhere else.
I'd much rather read about the guy who built his own video card than what (non-technical) thing Uber is doing this week.
Building your own video card is political, sorry. I'm not even kidding.
To elaborate:
* To get the obvious one out of the way: it's something you need sufficient free time, money and knowledge in order to even do, so the author likely comes from a certain amount of privilege which colors his experience.
* Building a video card is in itself only possible due to the existence of open standards and free access to the relevant information, which is absolutely political.
* The act in itself is to a certain degree anti-consumerist because it's likely driven by a desire to understand rather than merely use the technology.
* Building a video card that actually works will likely require some reverse engineering and working around proprietary restrictions, which may enter DMCA territory. So it's willfully doing something legally questionable if not downright illegal, i.e. protesting the laws in question, which is absolutely political.
Everything is political. If you don't see the politics it's only because you agree with them and think they're a no-brainer.
You may see a cool hobby project but try to explain the project to a non-technical person and you might find that you're carrying a lot of preconceived notions of what the world is like, how it functions and what is acceptable or not. That's all politics.
No, an article about building your own video card is not political. Admittedly, if an article about building a video card went into opinions on open standards, included anti-consumerist comments, talked about legal considerations then it would be political to a varying degree. But an article about building a video card in of itself does not have to mention any of that and would therefore be non-political.
If everything is political then the word political has no meaning.
You can't just reply to a detailed explanation of why something is political with "no, it isn't". That's not an argument and I'm pretty sure it isn't in the spirit of HN's guidelines (whether or not I personally agree with them in general or not).
The word "political" doesn't have no meaning, unless you take it to be understood as purely binary (i.e. "there are politics in this or there are not") in which case it's indeed a useless qualifier because, as I explained, there are always politics in it if there are humans involved. So yes, "x is political" is a useless statement because it is practically tautological in most situations where it is uttered -- but the same is true for "the Earth isn't flat", yet that's a perfectly sensible thing to say when dealing with Flat Earthers, just as "everything is political" is sensible to say when someone claims it very much isn't.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
EDIT: It's also important to understand the distinction between "x has no meaning" and "x is no useful distinguishing quality". "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do, including what humans write, especially when they write about other humans. That's meaningful. But the qualification of something humans do as "political" is indeed useless just as qualifying water as "wet"[0] is generally also useless, because if those qualities are always present for everything in that category (i.e. all water is "wet", all human communication is "political") there's nothing the presence of the quality distinguishes any of those things from (of course water is "wet", hence why we don't talk about "wet water" and just talk about "water" instead, with the implicit understanding that because it is water, it is also wet).
[0]: Using the colloquial definition of "wetness" here. There are other definitions according to which e.g. soapy water is "wetter" than pure water but that's not generally what a layperson means when they say something is wet (i.e. is covered or soaked in water).
> You can't just reply to a detailed explanation of why something is political with "no, it isn't".
That's an interesting take since I refuted your points. You simply added a bunch of potential political concepts to something that wasn't political and then claimed it was.
> You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
> "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do
If it applies to everything that humans do then there is no "involves politics" or "expresses politics". A human taking a shit isn't expressing politics no matter how hard the struggle is -- so I've just refuted that obviously over-broad point.
> In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is.... a "haven for alt-right",
Really? Do you really think that a strength of HN is that it is a haven for the alt-right? This is shocking and extremly scary to me. The alt-right wants me to die. Is this site a haven for those who want to kill off people like me? That's abhorrent. I agree that HN is a haven for the alt-right but I do not think that is a GOOD thing! From Wikipedia,
> The alt-right ... is... white supremacist, white nationalist, white separatist, anti-immigration and sometimes antisemitic movement based in the United States
I do not think that it is a strength of HN that it is a haven for the modern day Nazis of the world. I think it strictly devalues the site and reduces conversation quality here dramatically. Those people do not argue in good faith, they flag climate change articles so we cannot talk about good solutions to real problems facing all of us, and they also convince the moderators to ban discussion of Russia's cyberattacks here. The moderators cave their policies to white supremacists and hard-line rules that minimize the points given and comments written about Russian cyberattacks.
That HN is a "haven for [Nazis and racists]" is decidedly not a good thing.
The "alt-right" is mostly a boogieman for talking heads. One of my personal hobbies is hanging out in politically extreme internet communities (of both polarities) and arguing with people. Groups labeled "white-supremacist" rarely even contain a large number of white people.
> The "alt-right" is mostly a boogieman for talking heads.
No, it's not. The alt-right uses anonymous web boards like this one (but not HN to my knowledge) to coordinate and celebrate mass shootings that are directly admitted to be race-focused and white-supremacist-led. (Edit: The alt-right does use HN to spread hate and their "ideology", but I have not seen direct specific calls to violence here)
> Groups labeled "white-supremacist" rarely even contain a large number of white people.
I don't see how this is relevant at all. Being white has nothing to do with being a white supremacist. There are lots of non-white white-supremacists in the world. You're using logical fallacies like whataboutism and appeals to false authority instead of debating anything of substance.
> No, it's not. The alt-right used anonymous web boards like this one (but not HN to my knowledge) to coordinate and celebrate mass shootings that are directly admitted to be race-focused and white-supremacist-led.
This happens equally on both ends of the political spectrum, and I would not entwine "coordinate" and "celebrate" so closely. If you have any real exposure to these communities you recognize any "celebration" as a performative stunt by losers (for lack of a better term) who have few other outlets for asserting self-worth. I've never witnessed a crime being publicly coordinated online.
> Being white has nothing to do with being a white supremacist. There are lots of non-white white-supremacists in the world.
Do you take it all these people are uncommonly virtuous martyrs? Authentic mental handicaps totally lacking self-awareness and logical consistency? I'm genuinely curious what you think the story is here, because I've always found this observation interesting.
> This happens on both ends of the political spectrum
No, it doesn't. The left is not a racist, hateful group and they do not coordinate and perform mass shootings. This particular problem is not shared equally by both sides.
You should look into the beatings of the Marines going to a dance by members of Antifa. The Antifa assailants said vile, racist things to their non-white victim.
they do not coordinate and perform mass shootings. This particular problem is not shared equally by both sides.
There are calls for arming on the Far Left, and documented cases of their acquiring and training with weapons, while planning for conflict. The Dayton shooter thought of himself as Antifa.
I believe I asked you a while ago to provide citations for your claims. Can you provide me some citations? Since you seem to consistently make claims that the left is as violent if not more so than the right and I'd love to see some data.
It's hard to know the context. The last time I remember I was asked for a citation, I found the Washington Post article I was going to refer to was paywalled. It's now available to me again.
Most likely the specific observation you're referencing was that in the last 2 years of the chart (2016, 2017), if you go down to the bar charts for left wing and right wing violence, you'll see that there are 11 incidents of right wing violence for that period and 17 incidents for left wing violence.
More generally, in terms of incidents like vandalism, threats, and assault, there are lists going into several 100's of incidents for the past several years for the far left. If you want to find them and analyze them, that sounds worthwhile. There were tons and tons of such incidents on YouTube, seemingly endless. However YouTube seems to engage in suppression of videos that go against certain political agendas.
> No, it's not. The alt-right uses anonymous web boards like this one (but not HN to my knowledge) to coordinate and celebrate mass shootings that are directly admitted to be race-focused and white-supremacist-led. (Edit: The alt-right does use HN to spread hate and their "ideology", but I have not seen direct specific calls to violence here)
I'm not sure they are calling themselves alt-right or match that description. They are also not coordinating attacks but posting their manifestos and celebrating is correct.
I could of course be wrong and I know that the alt-right movement has been mired with white supremacists and others from the start but I did like the description when it at least on surface was not about that but a different take on the dominant version of the right-wing in the US; similar to the tea party movements or difference between socialism and democratic socialism.
Unobtrusive is far from what the moderation here is on Hackernews. They literally have to moderate as a regular comment. Thus, being obtrusive and breaking their own rules. You might not have noticed it, but me, being a "bad" member, gets the moderation comments all the time and I definitely find them obtrusive. I'd rather just get downvotes from members, like the site should be, instead of comments from dang.
why don't you strive to be a "good" member? Try autogenic training! (why not?) If you say, "Life is suffering. Life is not happiness. Best you figure that out now." it will influence/overtake you. Try the opposite :-)
I'm a bad member according to some users who down vote me. I do strive to be a "useful" member and post what I think is conversation. Some disagree and down vote. I like to be "devil's advocate in life". Does that make me wrong? No, it's helpful to have arguments and converse. Life is great. Not sure why you think I'm depressed. If you are pulling an old comment of mine, it was context based not my life philosophy. :)
PS My original comment here is being downvoted into oblivion. One of my points is made by this gesture.
It doesn't really seem to do justice to the problem that all moderation has:
1) Moderators always assume the worst of people.
I remember asking one time about car repair online, and at the time, I had a repair that needed to be made to make driving at high speeds safe. But moderators and others seem to assume that when you can't do something 100% right immediately, you are therefore going to do something wrong. I simply wasn't driving at high speeds to make up for the issue - not everyone has access to the money they need all the time. I mean why would I even be posting such a question on a forum otherwise.
2) Downvotes are based upon agreeing with your answer and not especially geared towards how qualitative your answers are.
I've gotten upvotes for basically stupid answers, which have no business being upvoted ad infinitum for essentially being a dumb meme. I've been downvoted (rather than debated) for answers that others outright disagreed with. At this point, it really feels like online forums are a place to beat people's opinions into submission, which is something I strongly disagree with. There's a famous saying that states "If everyone is thinking the same thing, then someone isn't thinking." I hold fast to this comment, and I look forward to hearing why people think and believe different things, especially when they are able to articulate why. No forum I have ever been to has really appreciated this, especially in the face of controversy. This feels too much like a new breed of close mindedness, which I am supposing is not too different from the thought crime, which if I recall correctly was conceived in the book 1984.
I've always been interested to see if a forum moderator would "down vote proof" a post that falls into that category: Unpopular but well reasoned and not inflammatory.
In the same way that "anti-brigading" approaches watch for floods of upvotes from a single referral source, it seems like clearing + blocking down votes would be beneficial in the other direction (or temporarily suspending access to down voting for users exhibiting the behavior).
I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.
I would argue that HN culture is evolving within the culture it exists in. I don't recall the beginning of the decade having so many intersections of tech and everyday life. In the beginning of the decade, Google wasn't known to have paid off high level employees for sexual harassment, Facebook wasn't known to have hordes of contractors watching horrible stuff for their job, no one knew the good and bad effects of the 'gig economy' yet, etc.
That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard NPR tell listeners they could visit "their FB" or follow them On Twitter in 2010. I got a visceral bad feeling.
In the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was not to disclose personal info on the internet because it was understood that "the IP stack" was designed with maximum liberty and tolerance for all kinds of garbage (with personal tools to filter, and the assumption of personal responsibility). Comparing the dynamics of Usenet vs. FB is quite revealing and brings insight into the discussion about distributed vs. centralized power. We've dumbed everything down to the point of ridiculousness.
I rarely get downvoted, but I feel that most of the ones I have received are unjustified. It usually comes from posting nuanced details that go against a prevailing narrative in a contentious thread.
I'm at the point now where I immediately hide submissions that seem like they have anything to do with American health care or American transportation.
> certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.
Typically when I find my statements are downvoted it is because I had a quip that could reasonably be construed as negative, combative, etc. I tend to edit and remove those bits.
When I find things to be "reflexively" (probably the wrong word) downvoted, it is in regards to simple questions. Simple example, there was an article regarding Manning's confinement yesterday. One top-level comment asked "Why is this not cruel" to which I asked the opposite, "How is it cruel?" - simple as can be. I watched that one go down to fairly negative, then bounce back up, settling on a score of 0. I don't care about the score itself so much as what that delta represents.
Perhaps I'm just too narrow minded, but I fail to come up with a reason to downvote a simple question asking for perspective that doesn't involve me reading some kind of intent. One of the core tenets of this site is to assume good faith, assume the most charitable viewpoint. When I say that I believe HN culture is dying, it is this that I am talking about. There seems to be less and less good faith discussion as time goes on.
As always, I'd love for an alternative perspective that I'm (probably) missing here.
Regardless of one's political opinions, it seems relatively uncontroversial that answering the question "how is A not X?" with the followup question "how is A, X?" has contributed very little to the conversation. "X", in this case "cruelty", might be a debatable quality, but it isn't as though we have no information about the situation. Google is chock-full of different arguments for and against Manning's various punishments. (No links from me, because that would make my opinions obvious.) If you were genuinely curious, that would have been a place to start.
The original question seems fine as a conversation starter, since for one thing it identifies a particular motivated action that most humans would agree is cruel: 'admittedly imprisoning someone for "coercive" reasons', but if the only responses it had inspired had been more meta-conversation like yours then it would have been suitable to flag the whole subthread. Fortunately there were lots of thoughtful responses.
It might be a feature of HN believing that HN is becoming more combative and snarky. Hence, simple questions like "How is it cruel?" are more often read like a quick snarky comment instead of like a simple honest question.
In other words, perhaps the perception of a drop in HN quality makes people more likely to reflexively assume bad faith.
Not the person you're replying to but I wrote a script to track when I got upvoted and downvoted and that parsed my comment tree for the past 24hr.
The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me.
This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
I looked at my overall karma once per minute and keeping a running total in a text file as well as the increase/decrease from the last file.
For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates.
Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities
HN culture or SV culture? I suspect it may be far more a reflection of a) which continents are awake/asleep and b) the increasingly international nature of HN compared to early years.
In its earliest years HN felt to me to be a decidedly American place, steeped in the politics, culture and views you might expect of its origins. Now, there's far more Europeans, Asians - and increasingly Chinese as HN apparently isn't firewalled. The attitudes to many things have moved to being more international, whether that's in terms of politics, healthcare and regulation, or simple corrections to the trivial but often fascinating things that are just done or viewed differently around the world.
Sometimes the split shows up quite clearly with votes going one way when it's mostly the US awake, and quite another once Europe and Asia has had a chance. Early GDPR discussions were probably the clearest follower of this pattern. :)
Then the beginning of the decade yes... but really not any different over the past 7 years or so (source: HN reader since the beginning).
2007-2012: The first 5 years everything was new and cool and shiny and we were just going thru the economic crash.
2012-2017: growth and scaling. Slightly more political posts, but that's mostly because tech and politics mix a lot more then the previous 5 years.
2017-present: stabilization. An even mix of similar articles, voting sentiments, repetitive opinions. The main thing missing is actual NEW ideas. We get tropes on "AI will rule the world", "10 reasons we need universal basic income", "why self driving will/will run the roads in 5 years", "FANG is evil", etc... all very predictable dicussions.
The external culture war is a serious problem for anyone running a functioning discussion site. HN keeps it at bay but ultimately everything interesting is in some sense political. The problem with the culture wars is making everything factional as well. Not to mention the rampant dishonesty and bad-faith arguing.
As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.
I am afraid you are correct. As popularity rises, degredation of discussions(and never-ending o-t tangents) increase. A write-up of the quality mods in the New Yorker will not change that tide, IMO.
It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!
My account gets the 'posting too fast ban' more than I'd like, but cannot say it is always unearned. My runin with the mods is always cordial. I will say HN is more open minded than most forums these days. Good job mods.
I think it's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just, at the end of the day, program websites and phone apps.
A high percentage of IT, software engineering, and professional advice on HN is very valuable, but the percentage of other kinds of commentary that's valuable is much lower. I occasionally also get sucked into the sorts of debates that I just shat on, but most of the time I find myself having to scroll past huge chunks of comment sections because half the sub-threads are pedantic political debates over some term or whatever, nested 10+ levels deep.
> It's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just program websites and phone apps.
To be fair, we can expect some diversity among several millions of readers from many different countries, points of view and experience in different fields.
Yes, but the actual experts usually get drowned out pretty quickly.
If HN had some concept of subreddits, even if it were just a few them, the situation might be different. There are quite a few high-quality subreddits out there with a lot of experts. (I don't know if creating "sub-HNs" is a good idea in general; probably not.)
To save you some scrolling: if you click the little [-] the thread will collapse. I've campaigned to make the default an all-collapsed page but it did not get much support.
Arguably, by putting the comments on a separate page they already are collapsed by default. Going to the comments page signifies that one wants to view the comments. Why do you think a further level of collapsing would be beneficial? Would you expand things once they are upvoted, or always require an additional click to view the deeper levels?
I wouldn’t mind seeing sub threads collapsed by default. (Of course I could always do that myself.) It would make for a cleaner page. I could scan the top level comments for interest subtopics/responses, and it would discourage thread-jacking.
You can have a good discussion with it being an expert discussion. Hacker News largely has neither. It really appeals to people who like, or at least can stand, the noise. As the articles says it is its own thing, but it isn't unique as phenomenon. There are many parallels to other forms of consumption, like that of sports or reality television where people create their own reality.
>The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate,
It's a good article overall, but it would be nice, just for once, to read something in a mainstream "arts and culture" outlet that wasn't absolutely dripping with fear and contempt for anything related to tech culture.
The funny thing is that discourse here isn't particularly rational and is only tends towards dispassionate because a little hint of passion makes lots of people click the ▼.
I agree. The article makes it sound like logic and humanity are disjointed, and like the most loved arguments people make here are based on impersonal data without considering ethics. I think this place is exactly the opposite. Try a logical argument in a popular reddit thread, or find the humanity in random communities. More often, arguments without focusing on what's logical creates biases and hurts a lot more feelings.
Yes, this is the point I was trying to make. The article criticizes the nature of the discussion here, and I think it is fair to say that the criticism is tied to negative stereotypes about engineers. Often this is framed as "punching up", because engineers have a lot of financial potential and business influence, but it ignores the fact that in "middle class" society (most people reading the New Yorker are probably in the top 10% wealth distribution) it is the perceived moral high ground that people seek most, and it is often inherited social, cultural and financial capital which enables people to take positions as journalists or op-ed writers from which they demean the cultural and moral depth of engineering culture.
All this despite the fact that CP Snow's observations about the Two Cultures still hold: it's far easier to find an engineer who will give you an interpretation of Hume than a New Yorker writer who can write fizzbuzz.
The biggest issue I have with the article is a lack of fair comparison. Is there non-tech site with an open commenting system where the discussion is civil, rational, and kind? It seems to me most of them disable comments altogether to forestall the inevitable shitshow.
I think the way it describes discussions here could be described as "dripping fear and contempt", slightly poetic though that wording is.
Consider these quotes (I posted some above too):
A recent comment thread ... yielded a response likening journalism and propaganda
users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions
The site’s now characteristic tone ... masks a deeper recklessness
Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational.
Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.
(the last part of this quote seems to contradict the other accusations, but we can't check what she means by the veracity of data being an ancillary concern because ironically she provides no data)
Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs
In the span of just one paragraph the journalist has:
- Dehumanized us (we sound like bots)
- Cast us as a weird outgroup (learn how they talk)
- Dismissed logic and thought experiments as legitimate
- Argued we aren't interested in "humane" arguments
- Accused the community of ignoring the truth of data
- Called us reckless
If you really think all that stuff is accurate, why post here at all?
> In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.
The thread began, "If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?"
And it's not referring to others on HN; as the replies make clear, it's about people elsewhere.
The comments on that story were nothing like the impression any reader would get from the reporter's description.
Again: "users combed through her code on GitHub"
Reality: One user, in a detached, downvoted, flagged, dead comment invisible to 99% of visitors to the site posted a link to an image analyzing her GH contributions, and was immediately and widely rebuked.
It’s not this story, it’s a global feature on both comments and stories which serves as a “undo” for fat fingering the upvote button. Before this feature you’d often see comments along the likes of “sorry, I accidentally downvoted you while trying to upvote.”
Strongly agreed. I fat-finger quite badly when browsing HN from mobile device; this improvement let me finally stop reflexively pinch-zooming the upvote button before pressing it.
I fat-finger a lot, especially on mobile where these tiny little arrows are a challenge. And one thing I notice is that since both the arrows disappear, you're never quite sure if you did. You have to question your fat fingers yourself, and if you're unsure, Undo gives you the option to take a second shot. But you're never entirely sure.
> And one thing I notice is that since both the arrows disappear, you're never quite sure if you did. [...] But you're never entirely sure.
The undo link says "unvote" when you upvoted, and "undown" when you downvoted. And yeah, after every single click on one of these arrows, I check the undo link to make sure I clicked the right one.
There are people who build hospitals and there are people who stand around talking about who should build hospitals.
The former group in any population in any country is very small. The latter group is very large and thanks to the current architecture of the internet have gotten so over amplified that they think they actually matter.
Their resumes don't have any actual achievement beyond drawing attention to things. They don't matter. People who are driven to build hospitals will keep building hospitals irrespective of all the "discussions" going on.
The idea that the 'doers' are the only ones that matter, and that drawing attention to issues is mere posturing for social standing is a bad-faith critique of many people who act with good intentions.
Yes, there are always those seeking to attach their names to worthy causes for their own gains. However people have taken that legitimate critique and amplified it to the degree that "If you aren't fixing the problem, you have zero right to complain about it" which is flatly ridiculous. You can be in a position where helping fix a given problem is simply not possible for any one of thousands of understandable reasons, but that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to speak about it, if for no other reason than so the other people who are able to help might know about it.
People like to rip on others for the perception that they only draw awareness to issues and nothing more, but what exactly is a 20-something in college supposed to do? They often don't have disposable income, they often lack the means to travel to places, unless they are in the right college chances are they can't join a protest, the one resource they have in abundance is time. And so they use what they have to generate whatever impact they can.
However small it might be, that impact is still worlds more helpful than the collected caws of "WhY aReN'T yoU fIxINg iT YOuRseLf?!"
It doesn't take money to join protests. It doesn't take money to volunteer, even if it's just maintaining a newsletter or occasionally seeking donations for your local org.
It's very easy to throw stones from afar when you've never been in the trenches. Those who don't do often make unreasonable demands because they have no connection to the reality of the situation of actually getting a thing done.
Travel expenses, taking time off work, food and drink, accommodations...
> It doesn't take money to volunteer, even if it's just maintaining a newsletter or occasionally seeking donations for your local org.
Many activists do those things, though. They're still dragged through the mud for "not doing enough" or "just talking."
> It's very easy to throw stones from afar when you've never been in the trenches.
I've never flown a helicopter, but when someone puts one in a tree I can still say "dude fucked it up." and be correct.
> Those who don't do often make unreasonable demands because they have no connection to the reality of the situation of actually getting a thing done.
"Reasonable," "civil," "practical," are all examples of words used by those empowered by a status quo to resist changes to it. "We're happy to discuss issues, but the discussion should be ciiiiviiil" which I mean, yeah, I generally prefer civil discussions, but when the topic at hand is decidedly uncivil, for example taking people's children and imprisoning them at the border, then I believe an uncivil response is warranted.
> Travel expenses, taking time off work, food and drink, accommodations...
Most protest organizers can set you up with a free bus ticket if you reach out to them and are in a reasonable bus distance. Your city may even have discount bus tickets already available if your protest is happening at a government building (which is an ideal place to protest). There are people at protests who go not for any protest cause itself, but to make sure people get water and don't die from heat stroke. Fill a water bottle before you go.
No, going to protest on the cheap won't get you an airplane ticket and a free lunch. Pack a sandwich if you want to eat. If you can't afford that, ask your fellow protestors for some crackers or something. Remember that your fellow protestors are on your side, and will actually help you.. if you ask them. They're not psychic.
> I've never flown a helicopter, but when someone puts one in a tree I can still say "dude fucked it up." and be correct.
Can you? What if it was a SAR helicopter that was given bad flight relay information and got caught in a storm? Helicopters sometimes crash, and it's not always the fault of the pilot.
> but when the topic at hand is decidedly uncivil, for example taking people's children and imprisoning them at the border, then I believe an uncivil response is warranted.
It's possible to disagree with a situation, be civil, and take time to understand it. I've spoken to the people who work in those "prisons" with children, and most of them are dramatically against the wall, but also recognize when a kid who is 8 shows up at an international border alone, they need to go somewhere.
Again, that doesn't mean you have to agree with it, but throwing stones at the people who are at least trying to help isn't productive.
I should have phrased that better. Didn't mean only doers matter. People who bring attention to things matter. But there is a line above which discussion does not matter. And I think news/social media and internet forums push things way over that line to the point where people are recognizing all the jibber jabber going on isn't translating to outcomes.
In the context of the linked article, HN for example could easily shut down 2 days a week and Planet Earth will continue to spin. And maybe the mods(and the addicted readers) will get a break from what appears to be a thankless energy draining job.
OK, but hospitals don't get built by people waking up in the morning, buying some bricks and stacking them up. Hospitals (and anything else worthwhile) require a lot of people with specialized skills to work together while other people make food and roads and schools and so on. Some amount of talking is required to coordinate it all.
Is the fraction of people who actually build things small? An economist would say no, we're at nearly full employment. To the extent that too many people are doing non-worthwhile things in their job, the solution to that might involve more talking, not less.
The internet selects for these low info, useless discussions because outrage is profitable. The longer you rant on facebook/twitter, the longer you are on the site looking at ads.
Most problems in the world require a substantial technical background to fully appreciate well enough to have a relevant opinion, but people blindly comment anyway because they better understand the outrage on the internet than the actual real world issue.
>There are people who build hospitals and there are people who stand around talking about who should build hospitals.
And the latter are even more important, especially if we don't use a contrived example of the hospital and naively assume "more is better", but extend it to other things people can build where building them is controversial and/or more is not necessarily better. (And even for hospitals, there's the question of how to build them, where to build them, and how to run them).
The people that just "charge ahead" and build are marginally useless. Given the funds, one can hire workers in almost any part of the world to build a hospital to spec. That's the easy part.
Getting the funds, knowing why, how, when, for whom, etc you want to build X, whether X is good, how close it should be to other Xes, whether we really need more Xes, and what's the opportunity cost of building an X, all those are the difficult and important questions.
As a Jewish coder, I would like to take this opportunity to thank moderator "dang" for banning antisemites wholesale. As a fellow Jew, he has gone above and beyond in preventing hate and ignorance from spreading on this website, ensuring that there's absolutely zero tolerance for intolerance. Dang, thank you for silencing the antisemites!
[I, honestly, am hostile to n00b accounts discussing non-tech topics.]
I agreed with you from your opening thread until you held high Dylan's lyrics, rather than his instrumentally produced melodies which entranced me in the 80s. Poetry is not legalese or code, and is open to interpretaion.
There's no requirement to explain downvotes on HN, because for every comment that added signal that way, there would be a thousand that added noise. That means each of us has to sort of figure out what led their comment to get downvoted. It's slower perhaps, but doable.
In the case of your parent comment, the bit about hostility to noob accounts wasn't very kind, and the rest of the comment was sort of shallow and dismissive. Those things lead correctly to downvotes because they're against the site guidelines. Ditto for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650649. Probably your best bet would be to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart when commenting here.
I know this. I was annoyed and responded in juvenile fashion. I was wrong.
> the bit about hostility to noob accounts wasn't very kind
You know far better than I, that these green accounts are created with reckless abandon and they weigh-in to controversial topics without any credibility. I realize you have access to server logs, so I'm not questioning your superior knowledge WRT the topic.
I openly admit I have deficiencies in my self-discipline, but if it ever gets too much for you, just tell me I'm unwelcome and I will not comment. I'm no zealot even if I have a propensity to over-react.
> I openly admit I have deficiencies in my self-discipline
That makes two of us. Of course you're welcome to comment here. All we ask is that you review the site guidelines semi-regularly and work at following them—not because you're somehow deficient but because we all have to do this. They don't exactly come naturally—certainly not to me.
I'm sure it's true you're no zealot. As for propensity to overreact, one trick I use is to set 'delay' in my profile to 1 (it can be 0-10 minutes). That way I'm the only person who sees my comment at first. That gives me time to re-read it outside of the edit box, and I usually notice something I want to change.
You're a parent, which seems to make a difference WRT empathy. I can openly admit that I share the viewpoints of Spock more often. Principles are costly.
I never investigated 'delay,' nor have I ever seen it discussed on HN, esp. compared to 'showdead' or 'noprocrast.'
“In April, when a story about Katie Bouman, an M.I.T. researcher who helped develop a technology that captured the first photo of a black hole, rose to the front page, users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions.”
This is an odd statement as it implies the purpose was to undermine. Reading code and critiquing isn’t meant to “undermine” but to identify truth and constantly look for better ways.
What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists.
There was also the pervasive sense of being on the side of the rest of the team, even though highlighting their contribution was the first thing Katie Bouman did. And at least Andrew Chael, who did write the plurality of the code in the GitHub repo, did come out strongly in favor of her and was horrified of the hate she got. Quote:
"So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop."
It's curious that, at least in my subjective impression, the tech community has a far larger problem with women than any of the other groups that have traditionally suffered discrimination: racism and especially homophobia really are extremely rare, at least overtly. But the uglyness Katie Bouman, or Ellen Pao, or Marissa Meyers brought out seems to be alive and well.
If a man received personal acclaim for a discovery, and someone looked at the repo and found that someone other than the man wrote most of the crunchier code, then yes I'd evaluate the acclaim for the man the same way.
Note most of the acclaim aimed at the scientist, rather than the team, was from the media. Whom as usual, likes to omit their own role.
If it is the case that she didn't contribute the most complicated stuff, then I can assure you it is not the first time in history that the face of a project is not the one that did the hardest work.
Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
This is all said with the caveat that I didn't follow this 'controversy' and never cared to look at the contribution distribution of all the project members.
No. But if someone else checked the repo, I'd be interested. That said the media would be less likely to publish 'this young man took a photo of a black hole'.
> Also as has repeatedly been said, she always said it was a team effort.
Yep. Also mentioned in my comment you're replying to.
I think of this conflict as 'developers versus the media' - the media having pushed the narrative of 'a young woman who took a photo of a black hole'.
The media (who like to remove their own influence from discussions) have turned it into 'sexist developers vs young female scientist'. They've been very successful at doing that, yet again, because, well, they're the media. It's easy to shape a story when you control all outlets deemed noteworthy enough to cite.
Every person I showed this to was disgusted, as was I. So even if you disagree with the characterization, it certainly wasn't just the media, but also your fellow developers. It was a shameful moment (one of many, most of a similar kind) for HN that reflected horribly on developers, and the media called it up on that, as they should.
Whoever is "right", it wasn't just the media, but also lots of developers, who felt it was a shameful display of misogyny. So it is certainly wrong to claim that the media spun this story a certain way out of the blue.
Also, if I didn't think my opinion was correct it wouldn't be my opinion.
One could say the exact same thing except for the other position. Certainly there exist a number of journalists who think the media’s reporting on the topic was biased in order to garner more clicks and/or push an agenda, so it is wrong to claim Bouman just fell victim to sexists. Total non-argument.
One could say anything, but while it's unsurprising that women's achievements are highlighted because they are objectively a minority in a field that, like other fields, was shown to suffer from sexism in numerous studies, the response was different from when a man's achievement is highlighted, and that, too has been shown in studies. So I do think empirical observation is on my side as well.
Maybe the response is different because if a man’s achievement is highlighted, the fact that a man did it isn’t highlighted, which isn’t exactly the case for women (apparently a woman in the team suffices for an achievement to be credited to a woman), making these two kinds of articles about fundamentally different things: “X was achieved” vs. “A woman achieved X”. One of these is far more loaded politically and hence of course more likely to elicit strong responses. There’s no reason that indicates misogyny in any form.
Studies show otherwise, and I think that the gut reaction of those who read that discussion also shows that at least some developers felt that way, if not in general, then at least in that particular case. Also, that women's participation in software has drastically decreased since the eighties to the point they're now a small miniority is just a fact, and so focusing on them is natural, if not justified. Various causes for outbursts of xenophobia and misogyny have also been studied, and no one thinks they're unexepected, but that has nothing to do with their actual nature. I always anticipate a "strong reaction" on HN when women are discussed, but I'm still saddened by it.
I could only recommend to the curious readers of HN, if they are interested and certainly if they think they should voice their "strong reaction," to try looking at the rather vast scholarly literature that research has produced over the past decades. It's not a matter of a difference of opinions among people with equal knowledge of the subject matter, but usually one between those who have more knowledge and those who have less.
> the gut reaction of those who read that discussion also shows that at least some developers felt that way, if not in general, then at least in that particular case.
> ...because if a man’s achievement is highlighted, the fact that a man did it isn’t highlighted, which isn’t exactly the case for women (apparently a woman in the team suffices for an achievement to be credited to a woman), making these two kinds of articles about fundamentally different things: “X was achieved” vs. “A woman achieved X”.
You dispute that claim, and say the consensus scholarly view is otherwise?
The media spun the story in the first place (the reductive 'a woman who took a photo of black hole') because stories of women achieving things generates clicks.
The media spun the story in the second place (the incredibly simplistic 'developers hate women') because the media dislikes people arguing with it and because sexism generates clicks.
From my perspective the story is: some people on HN which profess to value knowledge, scholarship and professionalism and "reducing" things for the sake of simplicity, express strong opinions on a matter of which they know little, their behavior mirrors archetypical behavior studied in the literature, and then rage when they're "reduced" based on scholarship they don't know. This is too long, so I'd summarize it as "HN commenters stuck in a bubble of ignorance rage on a topic they know nothing about."
It's hard having a conversation with you as you don't seem to respond to what the points anyone is making when you write a follow up comment. What is the literature you're repeatedly referring to? HN and the scientist seem to be in agreement on the work not being that of an individual, why is that ignorant?
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that it was the work of only one individual, and I'm referring to the literature (you can Google for it) showing that women face, among other kinds of discriminatory treatment, increased scrutiny. In other words, the reaction of some on HN (thankfully a minority, but a predictable and loud one) is a textbook case of sexism. Not recognizing that is not a matter of opinion but a simple ignorance of the scholarship on the subject.
As a counterpoint, comapre that with eg. reaction to QuickJS, when it was announced. People did not know who's to be credited for most of the work (only that two people claim copyright in the code), but if you look at the comments, it's all praise for the better known name, Fabrice Bellard, and almost no mention of the other person.
People will praise who they want to, and will bother to verify, only if it disagrees with their prejudices in the first place.
There's also a difference if those prejudices are based on something like past achievements of the praised person, or on something unrelated, like being a woman.
The reason people were trawling through her Github contributions and comparing them to other members of the team she worked with, and then posting about lines of code as if that's a measure of the value of someone's contribution to a project, was absolutely to undermine her work and show that she wasn't deserving of credit (despite the fact she was repeatedly quoted saying it wasn't all her and that it was a team effort).
When that story was on the front page it was one of the few times I've thought about leaving HN. It was embarrassing.
She did great work, and so did dozens (hundreds?) of others on that project.
She wasn't deserving of the level of credit that the media gave her when they cast her as the star, visionary, and quasi-leader of the whole enterprise.
Nobody was ever against Katie. They were against the way the media handled the story - by slanting the story to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do with the discovery itself, and then calling everyone who had a problem with that sexist while entirely eliding their own role in the controversy.
It was entirely a conflict between the media and the people calling out the media for obvious bias. As always, the media's response was to build a narrative where their critics were just trying to hurt [insert victim/victim group here].
'Nobody was ever against Katie' is a bold claim not at all backed up by the thread or the harassment she received which was addressed by her colleagues.
It seems like rather than own up to the fact that yes there were people that were remarkably awful to her and attempting to downplay her contributions it's easier to just blame the media.
Okay, I'll retract "Nobody was ever against Katie" since clearly some individuals, somewhere, were. Of course there were people who were awful to her. In any controversy, some Internet weirdos are awful to everyone involved. That's how the Internet works today. It means absolutely nothing; it's not significant.
99+% of the people who were critical of that situation, including me, never did anything against Katie. I don't have numbers but I suspect 99% also had nothing against Katie opinion-wise either. It's entirely against the notion that one person should be selected for media celebration entirely based on their genetics. That's wrong, wrong, wrong and I'll argue against it proudly any day.
What's disgusting is the media's taking this insignificant background noise 1% and making the entire story about it, specifically in order to distract from the criticisms leveled against them.
It's about the constant refusal to even address the media's choice when they elevated her. A refusal that is still going on in this thread.
Was it right to elevate her like that solely because of her gender? Or did the media do a wrong?
It was an overreaction which, however, was only enabled by absolutely lazy journalism. They basically took Bouman's Facebook post with a photo of her smiling next to the black hole claiming that she produced the picture, blowing her contributions way out of proportion. Some reports corrected this later that day, but by then, the shitstorm and investigation had already started. Perhaps understandably--she did not produce the picture. One could argue that Bouman's reaction was also way too delayed and she did not enough to clarify the situation, but this is perhaps understandable assuming she did not follow social media very closely.
The entire fiasco was mainly caused by the obsession of the media to put women at the forefront.
>It just comes off as a "In your face! Racist white people."
It shouldn't, though.
Mentioning gender in relation to a woman's accomplishment is not an implicitly anti-male statement, nor is mentioning race in relation to the accomplishment of a person of color an anti-white statement. Nothing in any article about Katie Bouman was disparaging of men or white people or anyone.
>I'm fairly certain that most sane folk could care less about the gender or colour of the person making progress for mankind.
Meaning no one who disagrees with your opinion on the matter is sane? Yet reacting defensively and interpreting any mention of gender or race as hostility doesn't seem particularly sane to me.
I'm concerned that articles like these paper over the myriad issues that arose when one person (dang) holds a monopoly on the content of a community. I further worry that this is only going to embolden dang into further deluded thought that he can't make mistakes, that his judgement is without flaw.
I don't consider the moderation on this site to be strict at all?
It's tone police more than it is content police. HN continually lets comments and statements go completely unquestioned, and in some cases actively supports view points, that are objectively wrong in the most vanilla fashion all because it was said in the correct manner.
Are you suggesting that the moderators should make decisions about what is objectively wrong or right? Because that would be a lot of work for them and they would probably get it wrong.
When it comes to the content, we (the commenters) are the ones responsible for holding each other accountable.
Tone is important. Nobody was ever convinced by being screamed at. People who argue against tone policing are mostly just using that as a way to shut down their opponents.
And what's your point? You'd prefer the site take the more active role required to moderate based on content – which ostensibly includes opinions, and not just objective facts – rather than enforcing general civility?
Both those posts mention them already being involved in moderation before officially being declared moderators; you can do that too if you want! Just write email to hn@ycombinator.com if you see anything that you believe requires moderator intervention and they'll consider it.
>One of the problems for me about HN is the secretive nature of moderation.
I agree some aspects of moderation here are too opaque. While the mods will mention to users that they're about to be banned, or warn them about their behavior, this can take place enough after the fact that it's unlikely the comment will be read. Also, flags on your account, such as the loss of vouching or flagging privileges, or being slow-banned (as my account currently is,) aren't always apparent.
What might be useful is a message queue from moderators that appears on your account. This would not only make certain that users were aware of penalties to their account, but it would sequester discussion about it away from the primary threads.
Usually when I read a comment like this, I find that the commenter is grossly misrepresenting the situation, usually by leaving out important details. But in this case, yes, that seems like an accurate description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20467198
Personally, I like Dan's "Nietzschean flamewars" phrasing, and I sort of agree that "trying to get him to conform to slave morality" was a personal swipe. But if so, only barely. This could well be an example of overly sensitive moderation.
The real problem with that thread (in my opinion) is that Rayiner's comment was allowed to stay flagged to death. One might not agree with his opinion, but it's a viewpoint worthy of reply (as you did) rather than censorship.
For what it's worth, my only interaction with dang was being gently chided for a slightly glib dismissal at the top of a comment I made. The phrasing I used is very common (and treated as harmless) where I was brought up in Yorkshire. But he was right; without the benefit of that context it came over as rude. I've been a bit more careful since.
I've gotten into a couple of arguments with dang and have never found him to be unfair, although I do think he sometimes interprets criticism of the site or the community as an insult to him personally.
That said, it's better to have moderators who care than moderators who don't.
This reads like a mediocre college admissions essay full of breathless, overdramatic characterizations of minor, anodyne exchanges. I had to stop reading when a two word response from a user gave the author "a small rush of triumph." The tone and word choice is just nauseating. Examples abound:
> "Commenters . . . . bickered about the word 'soul.'"
> "Conversation spiralled, with users making arguments about Cartesian metaphysics and quoting Socrates."
The interesting aspects of this article could fill a tweet. "1/3 of HN users come from europe. It has mods. They have tatts. Check out @shit_hn_says"
I'm at a loss at what word choices you object to; people bickered over the world "soul" in that thread, and talked about Cartesian metaphysics and quoted Socrates. Perhaps your real objection is someone else taking their work seriously.
I always make a fresh new throwaway account here every time I make a post, and,so, by this post you can deduce yourself. This is a zero-minute account, as all my accounts are. You're welcome.
HN is a community. It's totally fine not to use your real name, but users do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
You're welcome to create throwaways where appropriate. But in doing what you're doing, you're very likely making it more difficult for those with a legitimate need to do similarly to do so.
I wish you wouldn't do that, as I think it's destructive to the community. Certainly things aren't perfect here, but certainly they could become worse. Violating the (difficult to enforce) rule that one maintain an "identity that others can relate to" contributes to making things worse.
I think anonymity per se is not that bad, and I'm pretty sure many regularly create throwaway accounts for harmless discussion on many forums just for privacy reasons (avoid profiling & analysis, big brother, personal attacks, etc), not for posting inflammatory or controversial comments.
Websites like Reddit Profile (https://redditprofile.com/about) and HN Profile (https://hnprofile.com) systematically scans all HN comments and identifies all users' expertise, personal interests, activities and emotions, and allow employers to uncover their E-mails and hire them. And it's just a one-man's startup as a social experiment, larger agencies and corporations have at least many order-of-magnitude higher budgets. And I definitely think not everyone wants that.
The problem, I think, is this type of behavior encourages inappropriate uses and abuses of anonymity.
Deeply impressed by the author's dedication to fleshing out this story. Learning about n-gate's existence, and then tracking down the creator to get his take on Hacker News? Excellent work. N-gate's comments are an excellent summary of the portion of HN's population that gives the website its unique reputation:
>>>The proprietor of N-gate is an engineer who grew up in Palo Alto and now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he works in high-performance computing. He agreed to exchange e-mails on condition of anonymity. “Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail,” he wrote. “They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education. They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with. Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see.”
>Every single time poll restrictions have been proposed, it’s been for racist causes,” wrote one user, in response to a commenter with the username rokosbasilisk, who...
This is why I don't read hacker news, unexpectedly you will get an existential nightmare. (Lucky for those who never heard of LessWrong
)
Call me cynical but that piece reads like an ad. Normally you see this sort of articles when an entity is trying to raise it's profile for some reason. Maybe a funding round coming up, asset sale, IPO, etc.
I didn't think it was very ad-like. If Anna Wiener were trying to boost the profile of HN then she probably wouldn't have included all those random examples of "toxic" comments and political discussions that she disagrees with.
It was certainly positive toward the moderators, but not the site as a whole.
Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a self-taught technologist, HN has exposed me to SICP, functional programming, and just yesterday someone posted a book about Data Structures and Algorithms that I started reading. Dang was quoted as describing HN as a "hall of mirrors" or "fractal tree."
The author's focus on the controversial political parts of HN seems to me like going to a music festival and commenting on the food trucks. Yes, it's part of the experience, but that's not why people go and not what makes it magical.
Communicating the beauty of unfamiliar technical topics to a lay reader is much harder than politics, but the New Yorker has done well at that elsewhere (I like the Sanjay and Jeff profile). Moderation is an interesting topic in its own right, though, especially in the age of the IRA and meme-warfare.