

The orange/not orange experiment - mechanical_fish

I didn't think that this new Orange Name feature, which is currently the talk of HN, was a big deal until I read this comment in a completely unrelated thread:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467657<p><i>Without trying to be harsh, and given your 'orange' status I realize I'm walking on thin ice here ;)</i><p>[Note how, unprompted, the responder bows and scrapes!]<p>... and suddenly I realized that I've seen this <i>Frontline</i> documentary before. It's the legendary blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment:<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott<p>"On that day, a Friday, she decided to make the brown-eyed children the superior first, giving them extra privileges like second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym and five minutes extra at recess. She would not allow blue-eyed and brown-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain. She would offer them praise for being hard-working and intelligent. The “blueys” on the other hand, would be disparaged. She even made the blue-eyed children wear crepe paper armbands.<p>"At first, there was resistance to the idea that blue-eyed children were not the equals of brown-eyed children. To counter this, she used a pseudo-scientific explanation for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making brown-eyed children… also was linked to intelligence and ability, therefore the “blueys” lack of pigmentation would result in lack of these qualities. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.<p>"The following Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the blue-eyed children superior. While the blue-eyed children did taunt the brown-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous Friday, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Monday, Elliott told the brown-eyed children to take off their armbands and the children cried and hugged each other."<p>I'm not sure what to conclude about this. Except that I want to issue a desperate plea: Please don't go on to reinvent the Stanford Prison Experiment!
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jacquesm
As the person whose comment you are quoting you completely picked up on what I
was trying to signal. Of course I _still_ posted my comment but I felt like
talking back to someone 'superior', and of course that is not the intended
reason for the change but one of the not-so-nice side effects.

I personally think that the real quality measurement of comments is not up to
a mere algorithm and a voting system that is so susceptible to bias.

Just looking at my posting history an hour ago or so to see what if any of my
'1' rated comments I should take back considering the effect on the average
karma over the last of my 50 posts, and I'd have to conclude that for me that
really would reduce the value of HN to < 0.

I'd quit, that simple.

Lots of the meta discussion around this subject has been a pretty good
learning experience for me, I consider the time on this 'experiment' well
spent in that sense, but I think the outcome to date has only been:

\- more incentive to game the system

\- exploding meta discussions about the subject including one open attempt at
revolt

\- something deep inside me that I can not put quite in to words that makes me
uncomfortable about distinguishing individuals instead by 'their cover'
instead of reading what they have to say.

~~~
jgrahamc
And I'm the orange guy you were replying to. As I replied later in the
thread... please ignore my oranginess. I don't like it either. I think it's a
mistake. You want good comments to rise to the top, not assume that only
people who've made good comments in the past are the people to listen to.

I might have only BS to say on a particular topic, yet get flagged orange
because I've said interesting things about other topics.

~~~
mst
Happily, it appears that with my setup (vista on high contrast black theme and
FF3) everybody's just blue. Not that I think I'd actually care if they were
different colours; I suspect quite a few of us on here have the personality
trait / social dysfunction / whatever of not giving a flying fsck about
externally determined rank, and being much more interested in whether a person
has earned -our- respect directly.

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TrevorJ
The flaw in your argument here is that in both of your examples there is
nothing that the people could do to change their status via behavior.

I think the hope here is that posters who have proven themselves to be
valuable to the community will have a tiny bit more perceived authority and
thus help preserve the tone of discourse we have all come to enjoy. If anyone
feels the desire to see there user name in orange, it seems fairly easy to
accomplish that goal whereas in your examples there is no such opportunity.

I think the majority of regulars here aren't going to care too much one way or
the other about the color of their name and will continue to post as they
always have, and newcomers will have a goal to reach for that will encourage
behavior that is in line with what we have had up to this point.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I still agree with this, as I was initially inclined to agree with it. It's a
few upvotes, people! Surely nobody takes it that seriously!

And yet the sight of someone, out of the blue, acting out some elaborate
deference to an orange-named person was quite jarring. Yeah, it was a joke,
but the disarming smile is always part of these things, even when it's
serious. Which I don't think it is, here, and at any rate it's too early to
tell. But I remain... uncomfortable.

It's much like the disturbing feeling I get whenever someone suggests that the
solution to the site's woes (whatever they are this week) is to give those of
us with really high karma an array of superpowers that we can use to smite
evil wherever it occurs. (Fortunately, that really _has_ been treated as a
joke, so far. The awesome powers granted to high-karma people -- you can
change the color of _your own menu bar_ \-- are cute and completely
appropriate.)

It's not a big deal, but if I had the power to turn off my orange name I
probably would.

~~~
TrevorJ
I think maybe that deference you noted is one of the intended consequences
though. What I have heard overwhelmingly lately is A: HN as it stands now is a
great community and B: People wish to preserve the current tone but are
worried about the influx of new people who may not 'get' what HN is about.

I see the new 'orange' feature as a way to give a tiny bit more authority to
users in good standing with the community, and as such it increases their
ability to help maintain the tone as new users join.

~~~
diN0bot
the influx of new people and the change (loss?) of culture are at such odds
with me desire for inclusiveness and internal (personal) regulation, or free
will.

~~~
TrevorJ
The point I would ask you to consider then is that a focused topic, even if it
is as broad as "Hacker News" will necessarily exclude certain other topics and
as a corollary it will exclude or discourage certain types of behaviors.

Because I do have a free will, if I have the desire to behave in a certain
way, and it's at odds with the goal of HN, I can choose to use any number of
other outlets for my communication, or even create my own avenues.

The counter intuitive truth is that if all of the social news sites where 100%
inclusive in terms of content and were 100% homogenized (that is to say, the
culture's of those sites fully exhibited all forms of communication/topics)
then that would actually inhibit free will because nobody would have any
choices in terms of what type of content they wanted to interact with:
everyone would be subject to the same exact atmosphere with no viable
alternative.

~~~
diN0bot
i meant inclusive within the bounds of hn's goals. there are still sub
communities; eg: dev hackers, startup idea folks. no one is necessarily wrong
in their interpretation of hn's community and submission policy. sometimes it
is not that the level of comments has gone down but that the amount of
comments has gone up. this is bad for the morale of commenter, to say nothing
of the time readers waste (since without collapsible threads...). maybe after
20 comments no one should be able to comment.

i'm not advocating homogeneity so much as customized views. as the community
grows it becomes harder to be a part of it. there's a social quality i'm
trying to explain...and a concern for how exclusion is implemented... but i've
spent far too much time on hn today as it is, so i'll let it rest.

~~~
TrevorJ
Ah, yes I do see the distinction you are making after clarifying.

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noodle
by and large, this community seems to be fairly resistant to these types of
things and to the general woes that plague places like reddit/digg. if an
orange-namer starts getting out of line, i'm sure they'll be taken down a peg.

edited to add: about the only problem i forsee with orange names is that they
become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "oh this guy is orange, he posts good
comments, this is probably a good one too, i'll vote it up", leading to orange
namers rarely losing orange-named status unless they really step out of line

~~~
tptacek
Just want to note: that was already happening even without the orange. At a
certain karmic critical mass, my comments started getting voted up more often.
But I'm just as much of an asshole now as I was 9 months ago.

I agree the orange makes it worse; it's a step in the wrong direction. On the
other hand, it's not introducing a new problem. And we're all way to obsessed
with this silly number.

~~~
SwellJoe
_But I'm just as much of an asshole now as I was 9 months ago._

But you're an asshole we all know. You're _our_ asshole.

------
swombat
I'll chip in with a tiny little insight, which I think applies in this whole
karmic discussion:

Complex systems encourage simple behaviour. Simple systems encourage complex
behaviour.

~~~
tome
That's a cute aphorism, but I'll mod you up if you can provide interesting
examples!

~~~
unalone
Perhaps this is a bit over-the-top, but look at The Internet versus Wordpress
versus Tumblr.

Given a blank page, people will create anything. You can take three HTML-only
pages at random and you'll come up with 3 very different results.

Given a blogging engine, people will start restricting themselves to the form
of their engine. That means you get lots of different posts, but very rarely
will you see a blog using the Wordpress engine for something really standout
and unique.

Given a system that divides posts into 6 types of content, the vast majority
of blogs created will all start looking the same. The average tumblelog is
self-referential, generates long winding tags of citations upon reblogs, and
content tends to be amateur and haphazard. Very rarely is a tumblelog
interesting or a source of good original content, and deviations from the norm
are even rarer.

I'm in the middle of writing an essay about how medium affects content - it's
taken about 5 months so far, so perhaps it's not quite even "in the middle"
yet - and the gist of one of the things that I state is that the more defined
your form is, the more rigidly people adhere to it. And form is good for some
things. For other things, it's better to keep the form as loose as possible
and let people riff on their own.

~~~
rantfoil
Your observation about 6 types of content is fascinating -- it makes so much
sense! The medium is the message, right? So content expands to fill the
container it is given.

~~~
unalone
Exactly. As you add more features, you simplify certain things, but you also
limit the sorts of things people will come up with.

------
davi
Hey mechanical_fish, drop the meta and come back to talking with me about
Drupal:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467926>

(Perhaps you've already seen this & chosen not to respond, but I think it's
more likely you haven't seen it since my response came ~8 days after your
comment. My apologies if the former.)

( _And_ \-- regarding the orange/not orange experiment -- for some reason my
erstwhile orange status seems to have goaded me into making lots of little 1
point comments which I know will take me to not orange status if the feature
ever comes back -- which is not the response I would have expected in myself.
Any experiment that produces a surprising result without harming anyone is an
experiment worth conducting.)

------
jmatt
It will be interesting to see how this changes voting behavior. I know I am
already voting up above average gray comments over above average orange
comments. It wasn't purposeful. But easily apparent when I looked back at my
voting behavior.

I haven't quite decided if I should just completely ignore the orange/gray
experiment or if I should see it as an intellectual challenge. In some senses
I have much more freedom to post as I please when I'm gray. On the other hand,
there is seemingly more influence being orange. And there is something to be
said about being gray and still having a highly voted comment.

------
biohacker42
Uhmmmm.... I think the Stanford Prison Experiment is exactly what we want.

We deliberate seek a way to enforce an exclusivity based on a shared hacker
"culture" if you will.

~~~
paulgb
I think you must be thinking of some other experiment.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment>

~~~
biohacker42
I also managed to drop the ly of the end of deliberately, that's why my name
isn't in orange.

------
brm
The beauty of the Orange name is that it only reflects your last 50 comments

~~~
diN0bot
good reminder. nonetheless, see noodle's comment for why this fails to
console.

