

Ask PG: Would Less Anonymity Help HN? - euroclydon

I'm growing weary of reading long posts which dispense advice or tell stories and then when I go to the users profile, it's blank.<p>It would be nice if users were encouraged to say who they are, perhaps with a special colored handle for verified identity.<p>Thoughts?
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ryandvm
Mercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit?

Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable
sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the
phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by
hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...

~~~
chc
Although that works for some very trivial discussions†, it's unrealistic to
think that every comment has easily quantified value without respect to the
author's expertise. Not all opinions are equal. That's the kind of malarky
that you hear from school districts that want to teach creationism and
evolution as two equal theories. It's simply ludicrous to suggest that a
comment from somebody who just read 40% of the Wikipedia article deserves the
same standing as a comment from somebody who has devoted two decades of his
life to the subject.

† _The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems
unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic
is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the
people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more
deference._

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waqf
"Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".

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chc
If comments can stand purely on their own merits, then one person's opinions
_must_ be equal to another person's — otherwise something outside of the
comment matters. If the only thing that matters is _what_ you say and not the
actual expertise that causes you to say it, then your doctor telling you "You
need to go see a surgeon right away" is equal to a drunk bum telling you "You
need to go see a surgeon right away." That is obviously not true. Thus
comments cannot stand solely on their own merits. QED

~~~
waqf
What you're saying now is reasonable (though I still don't agree that HN needs
identities).

Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal"
followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man
since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person
advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because
creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.

~~~
chc
There is no intrinsic merit to the statements "God created the world" and
"Animals evolved from simpler lifeforms and ultimately from non-living
compounds" — their merit is entirely extrinsic, deriving from research done by
scientists. It's ignoring these extrinsic factors and "letting the statements
stand on their own merits" that leads to creationism being taught in school —
that literally is the way the school board members usually put it. That's what
I'm getting at: The more context you get for a claim, the better. In technical
matters, the identity of the person telling you something is very important,
because the value of an expert's opinion is extrinsic to the actual words that
comprise the opinion.

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walru
I hate to be so disparaging, but this has to be one of the worst ideas I've
seen thrown around here.

Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose
conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the
meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting.

If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of
someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more
critically.

I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made
HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes
against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for.

Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut
their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or
hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't
mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type.

Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one
thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been
getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little
further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?

~~~
euroclydon
_Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the
point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or
intelligent words to type_

I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes
more interesting that just ideas.

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knowtheory
This is an intermediate question.

What is the _actual_ symptom that euroclydon is concerned about?

Verifiability of stories users relate?

Trollish behavior?

Something else?

Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly
interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something
unpopular.

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hef19898
Being quite new to HN, I don't think less anonymity would improve it,
mittigating the "fatt finger" syndrome in mobile would help more :-)

As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment
here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following
the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey,
good stand point after all".

I think that's where the voting buttons come in.

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rcamera
If they left the profile empty, it was their choice. You can interpret that as
if they simply don't want to be contacted. Doing what you suggested won't make
HN any "better", it will only drive away the commenters that don't want to be
reached out, or those who want to remain anonymous.

For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment
quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely
unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job
or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any
kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.

~~~
euroclydon
I used to think a comment should stand on its own too, but I now think that
the benefit of knowing the background of the person speaking to you outweighs
the downside of introducing your own personal prejudices. I mean, should HN be
optimized toward mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the
enlightened?

~~~
rsanchez1
What benefit is there to knowing the background?

~~~
euroclydon
How is having less information helpful, in this case?

~~~
rbarooah
You've already acknowledged that the intent is to reduce prejudice and priming
and to allow comments to be judged on their merits.

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davimack
What's next, then, "real names" a la Google? No, thank you.

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officialchicken
I guess independently verifying claims and facts is too hard, regardless of
their origin.

Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.

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mike-cardwell
How about a function for sending a direct message to a user through the
website? It could be enabled by default, but users could disable it if they
don't want to be contacted.

That way, users _by default_ can be contacted, without giving away any
personal information.

------
philjackson
What does "verified identity" actually mean? That a user has filled in their
profile?

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drucken
This has to be one of the worst suggestions I have ever seen. Also, I cannot
believe you would even consider asking a technical audience to just give up
anonymity so lightly ("growing weary"?!) when they most understand its true
value.

There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who
may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity
would be forced out of them.

I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a
requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).

HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.

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Maxious
Dare I say it but providing more identity hints has really improved reddit.
Thanks to some css :after trickery (and now built in support for managing
that), it became possible to put more identity information next to usernames
called "flair". This ranges from the football team a user supports in
/r/soccer, to being a Mojang employee in /r/minecraft/, to getting an AK47
flair for being a verified successful sender of candy in /r/snackexchange. And
of course reddit employees, past and present get global flair avoiding awkward
"do you know who I am" incidents ;)

~~~
rsanchez1
But HN is not reddit!

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davidw
Something simple like asking if the user wants to make an email address and/or
web page _public_ on their profile would be nice.

~~~
p4bl0
There's already an "about" field for that, you can put whatever you want in
it, and people do use it for this exact purpose.

~~~
davidw
Yeah, I do, for instance, but giving just a bit more encouragement to do so
would be nice.

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pvillega
+1 I believe knowing what interests a user has, or what experience, may help a
lot to filter people who speak without knowing the facts (when talking about
programming or startups, for example) or whose interests conflict with the
subject, so the comment may be strongly biased.

Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for
job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter
"conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may
be too subjective and not useful") would be great.

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Tichy
Would be an easy hack to write a Greasemonkey script that displays user info
next to their name. If you care, why don't you go for it?

~~~
kiiski
Where do you propose to get the info from?

"...when I go to the users profile, it's blank."

~~~
Tichy
I thought you don't want to see posts from people with blank profiles.
Apparently I misunderstood.

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DanielBMarkham
This is very tricky because while I understand not wanting to read things of
low quality, the entire purpose of the voting system is to establish some kind
of quality indicator (although it never works that way -- longer story)

As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile.
Might be a good idea for others to do the same.

As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down
based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this
probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of
those folks who probably benefits from it.)

This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has
problems. I'd personally love to see both real names _and_ posts/comments
being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more
meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful
activities.

I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to
watch the brainstorming on this thread.

Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early
votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read
are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those
12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read
them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.

~~~
hef19898
So I've been right about that whith the early votes, already doubted that.

My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking
around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast
moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.

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paulsutter
I'm curious why you aren't posting under your real name?

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kami8845
i feel it's pretty easy to find out who people are

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jcampbell1
What about optional links to github/linkedin/etc accounts in the profile and
badges next to the comments to show what the person reveals in their profile?

I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way
to make identity relevant and optional.

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rsanchez1
Does a blank profile somehow de-legitimize good advice or stories?

To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just
pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment
quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.

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pagekalisedown
Maybe an acceptable compromise would be simply to indicate someone's age.

It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled
veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.

~~~
arethuza
Age? I think one of the good things about the relative anonymity in HN is that
things like age aren't usually seen as a factor in rating someone's
contribution to a discussion.

[And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the
spectrum].

