
Ask HN: Who are the most controversial (yet still popular) HNers? - 19eightyfour
Popular == karmic, on here. So controversial is, you have a high ratio of 
spectacularly downvoted comments, but you&#x27;re still popular, in other words, you still have a high amount of karma. Someone more experienced in statistics than I am at the moment can come up with a good metric for calculating &quot;most controversial (yet still popular)&quot;.<p>I find this interesting because I know that karma causes me, anyway, to be cautious in the opinions I voice, since the downvotes are painful to me. I am interested to see people who are brave enough to not give a s%%t about getting downvoted but are still popular overall.<p>I&#x27;m interested in diversity of opinions, not echo chambers, and people who can combine having their own unique point of view that doesn&#x27;t follow the crowd, as well as still pleasing the crowd a lot of the time are very interesting to me right now.
======
inopinatus
I disagree with many things that tptacek has to say, but I rarely downvote
him. Indeed his remarks seem to be a source of much debate and I find that
commendable. In my view, downvoting should not be used to indicate
disagreement, but to maintain the relatively high signal to noise ratio this
forum enjoys. I reserve downvotes for ambit claims that are patently false,
personal abuse, offensive language, wilfully begging the question, excessively
sloppy or lazy reasoning, pretending to expertise, or simply being a pig-
headed asshole about something. Having myself been guilty of these things from
time to time, particular this latter, I feel comfortable suggesting that the
majority of this community's members appear to apply a similar standard.

~~~
alex_duf
I quite like your guidelines on what to upvote or downvote.

I'll try it as well.

In fact, I wish there was a voting etiquette described here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Nothing too formal, but just a "here's how the community like to use voting
tool"

~~~
inopinatus
My upvoting is much looser. I will upvote as a mark of agreement, or if I
liked someone's framing of their point, for a nice story, for alliteration and
wordplay, or if they mention someone or something I'm fond of, or indeed
almost any other positive response from my limbic system.

Guidelines are a potential bikeshed. I don't think it's a terrible idea, but
be careful what you wish for.

------
shubhamjain
> I'm interested in diversity of opinions, not echo chambers, and people who
> can combine having their own unique point of view that doesn't follow the
> crowd, as well as still pleasing the crowd a lot of the time are very
> interesting to me right now.

I disagree. It's an overused defence: voicing idiotic opinions is "having a
unique point of view"; being rude and domineering is "having an outspoken and
blunt demeanour". Your opinions should stand on facts, not your I-don't-give-
a-shit attitude. The difference should come from your interpretation of them.
Respecting so-called controversial figures leads only to a downward spiral
where we encourage bad behaviour.

Hacker news, in my experience, respects different opinions if they carry any
weight. A thread on Uber has both who attack and defend Travis Kalanick.
Controversial opinions, unfortunately, often means saying groundless shit and
later, defending them with "I-am-a-contrarian" attitude.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Only problem with relying on "truth", at least when it comes to Science,
studies often can't be reliably reproduced, former editors of prestigious
medical journals say half of what they publish is pure rubbish, the NEJM gave
up trying to hire independent reviewers of their papers in 1991 because they
couldn't find any scientists who weren't tainted by pharma funding. I'm all
for rigorous science, it's just that we have too many practitioners these days
motivated by money rather than the pursuit of unbiased truth, and in their
process, pervert science into nothing more than public relations.

You need look no further than the largest study of bee populations published
this week in Nature to see what I'm talking about. It concludes Roundup is
killing the bees, and Bayer comes out and calls the study "inconclusive"
because it defies the tobacco science they previously bought and paid for.

And I just know someone is going to post a link from Snopes, confirming
Bayer's version of the truth, without investigating any of the underlying
science, but will accept Snopes' version of the truth as the actual truth.
Because Snopes. Let's not even acknowledge nobody at Snopes has any
journalistic nor investigative credentials.

~~~
babyrainbow
Very interested to see some sources for these things you mention in first
para. Do you have them handy?

------
sarabande
One way to calculate this would be to use this controversy formula
([https://math.stackexchange.com/a/318510/10887](https://math.stackexchange.com/a/318510/10887))
on all comments of a user whose total karma exceeds a certain threshold, say
1000, and then add up those controversy scores.

The problems is that the HackerNews API
([https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)) only
provides a total score for a comment, instead of up and down votes, so you'd
have to modify your controversy formula to use an appropriate measure of
dispersion instead
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion)).

I'm not a statistician myself, so I can't help further.

------
sametmax
What do you want to do with this information ?

Getting downvoted in HN is not very hard. You can mention how Bill Gates is
trying to buy a stairway to heaven or that Rust should replace C and you'll
get spanked. If you express personnal opinions enough times on a website full
of intellectuals you are bound to displease regularly unless you have nothing
interesting to say.

It's a good thing. You can't be right all the time. You can't agree all the
time. Actually, quite often you won't.

But to be downvoted spectacularly, it's quite easy: promote religion, or
borderline sexist/racism allusions and you're it. Doesn't matter if you are
right or not.

On the other end you can be pretty much who you want to be. I mean I worked in
porn and had only one snarky remark about it during the last years.

~~~
19eightyfour
I mainly want to see what people are like who are effective but also don't
care about being downvoted.

------
brudgers
Several years ago, I started treating downvotes as feedback on what I wrote.
Maybe I was not clear in stating my view. Maybe I did not sufficiently back my
view up with examples, facts or rationales. Maybe what I wrote was just plain
wrong. Maybe what I wrote didn't add anything to the conversation.

The practice of _editing_ [and deleting] of my comments seems to have made my
writing better. Writing for myself is easier than writing for an audience. And
writing for an audience that expects me to give a shit is harder than writing
for the audience that admires people for pretending to not give a shit. And no
doubt, this thread illustrates -- as if the rest of the internet did not
already provide overwhelming evidence -- that there is a large audience for
writing that pretends not to give a shit.

Flame warriors and trolls are the original internet crowd. Not giving a shit
is not a unique point of view. It's the default content of all the little
internet boxes into which people can type. It's good that downvotes hurt
because the solution is writing something better.

Good luck.

------
guardian5x
Maybe TerryADavis, he gets a lot of praise and admiration on HN for creating
TempleOS, but his comments are often downvoted, and with good reason.

~~~
sofaofthedamned
Bloody hell, he's definitely fallen out of the tree, hard. I just looked at
his site [http://www.templeos.org](http://www.templeos.org) \- he sure does
like to use the N-word.

~~~
honestoHeminway
Beeing shizoid, the ultimate minority, feels less outside of society, if you
have someone to look down upon. If it was a normal person, i would call it
racism- this way, i would call it desperat socializing, with a willingness to
consier even racists as company.

------
hungerstrike
Comment voting is a form of mob rule that only serves to make the average
person more comfortable while obstructing change.

In my opinion they need to be replaced with something more decentralized that
puts each individual user in control of what kind of comments they want to see
and makes them each decide individually.

Imagine if people who everybody disagreed with always got censored? We'd have
all sorts of situations where everybody would suffer until things like basic
hygiene for physicians were discovered. Oh wait, that already happened and you
can read about it here - [http://www.medicaldaily.com/mad-
scientist-6-scientists-who-w...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/mad-
scientist-6-scientists-who-were-dismissed-crazy-only-be-proven-right-years-
later-362010)

Online systems are so much more fluid than real-life and we have a good
opportunity to change the way things are done, but unfortunately the biggest
sites for conversation all follow the same brain-dead upvote/downvote system.
I hope that one day we'll have a better system which at least lets individuals
choose their own moderator or moderation style.

------
moomin
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mjg59](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mjg59)
is a good one: a talented developer with strong views of free software,
personal freedom and social justice. I can easily see individuals furiously
upvoting and downvoting him on a single day.

(Not everything he says triggers these reactions, but it's entertaining when
it does.)

------
joeblau
I would throw a vote in for Joshua Stein, person who started
[https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs).

    
    
      > I was a frequent reader and contributor to Hacker News since 2007, 
      > but got hellbanned[1] in 2012 for complaining about the mystery-
      > moderators constantly changing submission titles for the worse.
    

[1] -
[https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...](https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/)

~~~
matt4077
Oh, I didn't know that practice has been going on for that long. It's sort of
become my pet-peeve as well, seeing as how the "war on clickbait" has resulted
in moderators frequently changing perfectly good titles into bland three-word
summaries that often do a worse job of representing the articles.

I think they're operating from a definition of "clickbait" that includes
anything that makes a headline appealing, including any sort of pun or
metaphor. There's nothing wrong with changing "Ten reasons MySQL is better
than PG–and how switching may safe your Data". But it should be done
sparingly, and default to respecting that the headline is also creative work,
and deserves a bit of respect.

The worst example was
[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5139](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5139).
Halfway through, the post reveals that the author had a heart attack. Not
mentioning it in the title was quite obviously a literary choice.

HN changed the headline, before changing it back, to something like "Jason
Scott had a heart attack"

(but I guess I better shut up now :). I'd also like to mentioned that, with
dead_posts=on, I've come across some seriously above-and-beyond work by dang.
Just recently he was basically giving therapy to some guy posting wild rants
in low-contrast posts at the bottom of some thread. )

~~~
jwilk
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13765240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13765240)

------
SFJulie
Since I got the pattern of downvoting, I am bored.

I thought first they were smart and it was funny to understand what wwould
made you upvoted/downvoted.

Then I understood it was plain propaganda/censorship whether you were taking
an opinion refuting the godliness and virtues of VC/startup/entrepreneur.

HN is the modern pravda except it is liberal instead of being sovietic.

Same shit

------
davidivadavid
Funny — I scrolled to the bottom and saw two comments citing two names that
popped in my mind after reading the title: 'yummyfajitas, and 'michaelochurch.

There are other people who are "topically controversial", e.g. people who have
a background in HFT getting downvoted on every HFT thread, and so on.

------
yason
_since the downvotes are painful to me._

Why?

~~~
itengelhardt
I guess it's just the general loss aversion people experience - at least
that's it for me.

~~~
_0ffh
Also I think getting downvoted for something when you honestly can't see that
you did anything wrong is kinda hurtful, which happens mostly when downvoting
is used as shorthand for disagreement. I've seen a single comment of mine go
up-down-up-down with every refresh which still ended up at +4 or so. Which
makes me curious if separate up- and down-counters might offer some additional
insight over a single counter.

~~~
19eightyfour
Yeah, when you talk and track people's facial expressions in real time, you
can see which particular things they disagree with, so you have useful
feedback. A down vote is sort of like someone running up behind you and king
hitting you, for something you said in some other group earlier, and maybe you
don't know why. It's not always so non-specific...but not being able to
respond to a downvote...makes it an incredibly potent tool to control
discourse.

~~~
_0ffh
Yeah, I think being denied the opportunity to find out _why_ you are being
downvoted, and maybe argue the point, makes you feel exposed and powerless.

Maybe one could even argue that at least a short reply should be a mandatory
precodition for downvoting.

~~~
19eightyfour
Definitely. And I can't downvote back...so I don't like that asymmetry.

~~~
_0ffh
I think there might be a potential problem there in that retaliatory
downvoting might be used as a weapon to disincetivise criticism, especially
when (unavoidably) defensive retaliatory downvote cliques form.

So I think I would be okay with a mandatory anonymous reply as a precondition
for downvoting.

~~~
19eightyfour
Oh no I didn't mean it in a retaliatory sense specifically, I meant it like
everyone having the option to do it, or no one except the few ( the mods? the
ones who have objective standards ) having the options.

I meant like they can downvote me, and I can't downvote them, or anyone, at
any time, because I don't have that whatever the requirement is ( mod level,
karma level ) yet...so it's like this asymmetry that doesn't exist in the real
world.

I don't feel any restriction talking to any human in real life. Nothing they
can do to me I can't do back to them. So it's balanced. I'm safe. We're equal.
I understand other people may feel differently, this is how I feel.

But on HN, I can't downvote. So there's this asymmetry. To me, it's a
perversion. Because in the real world, only the State has a monopoly on legal
violence. Only the state can use violence, legally. But on HN, downvotes don't
only come from mods or police, they come from whoever has accrued sufficient
karma -- and I don't equate this with a sort of objective, regulated,
principle-based State level power.

So the state has a (correct, IMO) asymmetric monopoly on legal violence and
can dish it out to people as it sees fit, but people cannot do the same,
without either expecting to get the same in self-defense, or getting
consequences from the state. But on HN, any random Jo with enough karma has
the analogous asymmetry power.

That's what I meant. It's not necessarily about retaliating, it's about having
that option on the table, rather than some people having it and others not
having it.

Or no one having it except the State ( the mods, I guess ).

------
boyce
I guess idlewords? Always worth reading his comments

------
gaius
michaeochurch

~~~
jwilk
I guess that's a typo for michaelochurch.

------
statictype
yummyfajitas

