I think there's a larger point in what he said. Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war or something if we don't find some way to check it.
The outrage seems to be like a drug. Nothing generates engagement quite like it, even if it's toxic in the long-term. So all social media platforms that embrace it grow bigger until they become near-monopolies, and all that don't so far have had a hard time growing userbases, making money, and generally fade into irrelevance.
It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.
A little over 10 years ago I started a social network for neighborhoods. Instead of people joining the network, houses would join, and people proved they lived in a house by having us send them a postcard with a code on it. Incidentally, while searching for a domain, I even tried to track down and buy "nextdoor.com," which I learned a year or so later had been in stealth mode.
I first did a small launch in my own neighborhood to tune the product before going broad. It was during this phase that I discovered the toxicity of social networks. I was either a witness to, or drawn into, every petty bickering match on my side of my zip code. I am certain my product gave a wider voice to the wrong people. I should have known; ten years earlier I was an officer of my homeowners association, and it was the same thing, but face-to-face.
This wasn't the only reason I shut down the project, but it was the biggest. I thought I'd be bringing people together. I was right, but I had incorrectly assumed that doing so would be a good thing.
bringing people together is right, but it's not enough. you also have to set the tone, and block out hostility from the start.
one way to do that is to make friends with neighbors, one at a time. if there is a conflict, help solve that conflict friendly and peacefully. develop a reputation for a friendly atmosphere. have neighboorhood activities, for adults or children, work on causes such as cleaning up the neighborhood, fixing play ground equipment, helping neighbors with difficulties. effectively you need to build the community.
the thing is, this can only be done by people who live there, and the tools used are almost secondary. any chat room will do. the barrier to join is not a proof of address but a proof of goodwill, verified by an existing member.
You're right. While I'm sure the project could have been better designed to at least facilitate those sorts of constructive interactions, it was, overall, yet another technical solution to a social problem (YATSTASP, if that's not already an acronym). We engineers are fond of such solutions, even if they don't work, because they're what we know how to build.
Even with those filters, there seems to be a pretty consistent tendency given scale, or topics, or simply social interactions with time, that leads to toxicity, or stasis.
I'm offering this not just from 30+ years of online community experience, but from observing and studying histories of other groups --- offline / IRL, epistolary communities, clubs and organisations, shared. housing situations, families, neighbourhoods, academic departments ....
Look at long-lived groups, and how those are structured and function. I'm not saying this from the position of "I have done this and I know what works", but from a strong suspicion that at least part of the solution (and many of the pitfalls) will be found there.
> I should have known; ten years earlier I was an officer of my homeowners association, and it was the same thing, but face-to-face.
I think this is a big part of it; it's not intrinsic to the technology, but the techology is a magnifier and accelerant for everything that humans do.
The operators of social networks are dishonest in claiming credit for the benefits while disclaiming responsibility for the fact that they've also accelerated the harms.
Facebook is a pretty good example of how neither of those things actually help, and if anything only amplify the harm that comes to marginalized people who have good reasons to not use their real names or faces.
I wonder if that’s due to everyone ending up in bubbles on FB.
I can’t prove it, but it seems to me that a social network where the social graph is optimized for minimizing physical distance has more potential to encourage good behavior.
I’d also note this has been done successfully before, for example with non-denominational churches. Of course some basic shared religious beliefs help, but I’d argue that many/most of congregants who attend regularly are primarily motivated to do so by the social aspects.
Interestingly, I joined Nextdoor expecting to see exactly that: complaints and bickering. I was surprised that most people in there are nice and supportive of each other. I'm sure there's some kind of moderation.
>> I was surprised that most people in there are nice and supportive of each other.
Well in my experience this is only true if you're exactly like them. different color/religion/landscaping views == the toxicity alluded to by the parent.
I vaguely remember a stunt where Koko the Gorilla was used in a mass-chat on AOL. The crowd, enthused at talking to another species for the first time, would ask things like, "Is there a god?" and "What is the meaning of love?"
Koko would reply, "Apple juice" and wander away.
Social media is a bit like running this experiment with "the mob." Maybe it has a mind and profound thoughts and we can have a discourse with it?
Our expectations for enlightened dialogue are sometimes a bit too high.
>I should have known; ten years earlier I was an officer of my homeowners association, and it was the same thing, but face-to-face.
This is the thing that baffles me the most from these discussions about the toxicity of social media. It's not social media, it's people. Everyone knows someone with an HOA horror story, or a story about a horrible, lazy, shitty neighbor. It's confusing to me that so many people are surprised that humans at shitty to each other on the internet, when we have decades of recent memory of humans doing just that in real life.
Bringing people together aka social networks, shouldn’t have been the ideal. Telephone was not a social network itself. It was a tool which gave people the opportunity to communicate - come together. Wish we had stayed with the similar ideology of providing just the tools. Email was/is there. But then, Facebook happened.
If I design a city whose main artery is a highway where traffic grinds to a halt for two hours every day at 6 o'clock, I'm going to see frequent incidents of road rage. The takeaway there isn't "people are toxic", it's just "people can be toxic when they're stuck in traffic"
People behave in predictable ways in specific environments. Social media brings out the same side of human nature as does a blank wall and a Sharpie in a gas station men's room.
There aren't a tonne of environments on the internet today, though: there's effectively one.
It's generally: normal people thrown into a garbage dump with a few psychotic basket cases, some attention-seeking ten-year-olds, some bots, viral-marketers, narcissistic grifters... all with pseudonymity, and scant moderation.
If you were to lock twenty Tom-Hanks-level-affable people, into a room with three people who continually rant, push buttons, interrupt you, tell obvious lies, and spout inanities, eventually you'll have 23 badly behaved people.
The design of the internet, especially its current incarnation, incentivizes stupidity and vitriol.
I had to stop frequenting the r/amitheasshole sub for this very reason. Getting outraged at the assholes, and then having my comments about the assholes get hundreds of upvotes, was too rewarding. It was certainly drug-like.
It is strange, too, because I am normally an extremely forgiving person, and am often criticized for giving too much of the benefit of the doubt to people. Even if I am like that in real life, I was still able to be sucked into the outrage cycle.
That is a truly bizarre subreddit. It’s exactly what you say, people love to go there and get on their high horse.
I also suspect there are a ton of troll posts there. Too many “I am the asshole” questions that seem perfectly aligned to the politics of the day. And the stories seem perfectly written to create conflict.
It probably doesn't help that a huge portion of the content is just fictional outrage porn. So instead of a real person posting their mistakes, you are seeing a caricature of a person crafted to accumulate internet points. This caricature, of course, is optimized to make you feel angry at that "person" for their actions. These days it might as well be /r/amitheangel+creativefiction
I wonder how many families have been broken by people following the advice they got in AITA or relationship advice. Everyone always suggests the nuclear option.
I think about it quite differently —- “outrage culture” has always existed. White flight, lynchings of black men suspected of rape, “mob justice”, “community justice”.
Because we saw that this was a dead end, we created institutions whose purpose was justice. Their mission was unfulfilled because the justice was not meted out equally, and this racist backlash in the form of outrage culture fought against it strongly (still does).
A few things have changed though — before 24/7 news we didn’t have constant, unfiltered access to a stream of all that was wrong in the world. People with differing opinions to us ranging from benign to hateful, constant tragedy, etc.
And additionally, due to the rot of our democratic institutions (unions, etc.) and the growing imbalance of power between everyday people and elites, people are starting to turn towards outrage culture as a solution to societal ills again. And so the calls for “community justice” and the sort return as well. The difference this time is that social media has democratized access to a voice. So now anyone and any cause can be fought for, and with minimal effort.
Fixing social media won’t fix outrage culture, it will just mean that the only people with the power utilize it will be financial and racial elites.
If we want to get rid of it entirely, we need to make our society more democratic.
This outrage is neither happening in a vacuum, nor is it simply a reflexive reaction to outrage on the opposite side.
Real actions in the physical world are at the root of this outrage.
The internet, in all of its forms, simply increases awareness of what's going on around the world.
In the past, there was a relatively miniscule amount of information you could get about what was happening, and you could only get it through some gatekeepers. Now you can see what's happening, often as it happens, in cell phone camera footage and in direct reporting from people who are there, and the opinions of your fellow men are not filtered and reduced to a trickle by gatekeepers.
A pessimistic view is that, like the babel fish, such increased communication will only lead to increased conflict, yet there is evidence that increased understanding and compassion can come from it too.
I think it's largely a communication problem. People are reacting to what they perceive the other side is saying, without actually taking the time to hear what the other side is saying. They're encouraged both by their side and by the inevitable outrage from the other side. There is also an incredible amount of intentional misrepresentation of the other side (for and from both sides).
If someone posts "B" in response to "A" they're usually doing so because they don't really understand what someone means by "A". They're looking at things at face value while adding in their own filters and biases and respond to that mess, instead of asking questions or seeking out information elsewhere.
On the other hand, the counterresponse to someone posting "B" is often also tone-deaf. It is either assumed the person ought to know what "A" means (even if the people run in different social circles, have access to different news sources, or don't have as much free time to educate themselves); or it is assumed they person does know what "A" means and is being intentionally (as opposed to ignorantly) inflammatory.
Seldom does someone on either side ask for clarification from or help to elucidate the other side.
All of this seems to happen much more on the internet than in "real life."
In my experience, asking people for clarification, regardless of which side of a discussion they are on, leads to inflammation. People seem to be attached to the idea that they perfectly understand the others point of view and therefore the other perfectly understands their own point of view. To them, more talk will not help.
Typically i find when you ask for clarification you find the person doesn't even understand their own point of view. Probably also partly why they react so badly to being asked for clarification.
Unfortunately, we are stuck in this world where most do not actually listen to, let alone evaluate, the content of arguments, just the context. And in online discussions the context is diminished. What to do apart from wait for the world to catch up?
As the years wear on, I find Reddit, FB comments, and Twitter (and in my decade of lurking, HN less so) to be great examples of the importance of the Nonviolent Communication framework.
True, but kind of misleading, at least in my opinion.
One of the issues with social media is that it's too easy to promote and share information about real-world events that provoke outrage, while paying no attention to broad-level statistics that give a better representation of what's really happening overall.
The greater truth IMO is that, in a large society, a massive number of essentially random things happen every single day. Plenty to construct any type of narrative that you want. If we want to have unity, there is no way around having to sweep some individual events that are outrageous under the rug to some extent.
I find it helps to compare against causes of death such as lightening strikes, falling out of bed, pools, Tylenol overdoses, and car crashes. None of those generate outrage. People worry so much about various violent acts (terrorism, school shooting, police shooting, etc.), but do they wear Faraday cages with lightening rods? Do they stay clear of cars and swimming pools? Do they own a bed or a bottle of Tylenol?
Social media is but a small part of the problem. Traditional media is still largely deciding which issues will be part of today's buzz, and it is those issues that determine elections. The degree of power here is astonishing and disturbing.
So thinking about that... One the one hand, suppose I log into reddit and see police officers clubbing some people drinking beers (this specific instance was in a foreign country).
Yes, on the one hand, I'm just more aware of a bad thing in the world. But on the other, if a million people get outraged watching a clip like that, it seems it does create a "magnification" effect where potentially the outrage is entirely disproportionate compared to crime that isn't brutal and on video (e.g. rich avoiding taxes) but may actually be much more important.
> The internet, in all of its forms, simply increases awareness of what's going on around the world.
The internet is not just a signal booster, but also an amplifier. Ideas which would otherwise be fringe become quickly mainstream. That's not always a bad thing, but it often is.
The echo chamber effect is also incredibly powerful, psychologically. Especially through social media, outrage begets community. At first, you're a person who is angered at something that's happening in the world, but then you find others who feel similarly. Now you're a part of a community. Not only that, by discussing it in public, you're taking action. Now you're part of a movement! Now you're fomenting real change and making a difference in the world!
This is true no matter where on the political spectrum you lie. No matter what opinions you're defending, those dopamine hits feel the same.
> The internet, in all of its forms, simply increases awareness of what's going on around
I think this gets overlooked too much by people in tech sociological bubble.
The shape of the world is at any point in time a function of (1) the various frictions to information flow that are present, and (2) exploitation of the same by the powerful.
The shape of the pre-information-age world in particular contained within it latent sources of conflict and instability (examples abound, I won't specify here) that could only be maintained by keeping some people voiceless and others in the dark.
What we're witnessing now is a tumultuous transition period as we reach a new equilibrium.
Two of the forces that will determine the shape of that new equilibrium: (1) People acting in their interests based on new information and (2) new restrictions on information transmission better adapted to the evolving state of technology.
I think it's very much both: you're right that awareness of what's going on is increasing and the GP is right that social media is optimized for outrage, and we can add a third thing that the circulation of misinformation is also increasing. I'm not talking about deliberate misinformation, just that people repeat things so quickly and interpret them through the prism of their own assumptions. e.g. the Covington kids case. Correction of the misinformation may follow, but it never spreads as far or as quickly, and in many cases may not bother existing for all the good it does.
Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war or something if we don't find some way to check it.
Outrage-driven profit models existed before social media as such. Once known as tabloids and the guttered press, this kind of media existed a while before Facebook. William Randolph Hearst was credited with starting the Spanish-American war back in the day (as fictionalized in Citizen Kane). This is to say the "outrage complex" extends well beyond social media platforms though such platforms certainly serve to accelerate it.
The discussions on HN dont go deep enough to look at the antecedents of the current imbroglio.
Human brains are weak to a variety of manipulations. Media manipulations are one of the oldest, and have been going on for ever.
The 24/7 news cycle preceded the net and created the exact same issues.
Right now what we have added is mobile internet which means people can access the material all the time, and we've added algorithmic creation of inciteful content.
We've gone to the industrial complex era of outrage creation.
Even HN has this problem where the users themselves stoke outrage in certain topics. For example, 99% of threads are see are great with in-depth discussion and nuanced opinions, even on topics that get flamed on other social media: climate change, gender issues, divisive art and personalities. However, lately I've noticed a huge disconnect between these threads and anything that mentions China/TikTok or solar/wind energy. For some reason, these two specifically seem to push people into baring their teeth.
Wholly agree on the first part, HN is a great place for good discussions and insights.
For me the discussions about Corona has been the most controversial, as we simply don’t have a good understanding of it yet.
It tends to lead to not very constructive discussions.
Oh, wow, really? I'm sure it is a topic that is debated, but you would put that approximately on the same level as China/TikTok? (Not disagreeing, I just don't follow HN as closely as I used to.)
They sure did. None of this is really new in concept, but it seems to be amplified quite a lot by modern technology. If it can already be credited with starting real hot wars, what will happen now that we've ramped up that same effect hundreds of times or more?
I ran (and wrote the software for) a forum for a number of years circa 2003-2012, FWIW. Did some things well and did some things poorly.
It would be a real service to society IMO if we could
find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and
energy to challenge the big players without the outrage
culture.
It's not too complex to run a mostly-positive community. It's not easy, mind you. It's just not complex. Sort of like running a marathon - it's not complicated, it's just really really hard. =)
As far as shaping a positive community, you attract good people and reward good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior.
This is at odds with things you might reasonably do to "challenge the big players" (if by "big players" we mean Facebook, etc) in my experience, though. It's hard to scale up because it's labor-intensive.
Camaraderie is relatively easy in small groups but tough in large groups. Not sure what HN's size is but I suspect it's right around the tipping point.
Reddit shows one possible solution to scaling up: you scale horizontally. Each subreddit is a semiautonomous "shallow silo." It's partially successful at this: you have a lot of shockingly supportive and positive subreddits and some absolute dumpster fires.
FB sort of does this well, with their groups feature.
Ultimately a challenge faced by those two is their revenue model. It you don't charge users directly, you are either going to be privately funded (HN) or ad-supported. Relying upon ads is the kiss of death as far as sane discourse goes. It means you crave engagement and eyeballs and pageviews above all else. It is how you survive.
> Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc
This is my impression too. What should we do or even think about it ? I tend to go slightly radical and cut socnet while allowing a few IRC and a bit of reddit.
I think our understanding of 'social' is incomplete, as if social bonds without simple and clear goals (important tasks to be done, or sharing moments with people we have deep bonds with) leads to degenerate noise tsunamis like we're seeing.
> It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war
I'm more inclined to think that social media is where people go to let off steam. Most people I know have full lives outside of social media, and just get online to relax a bit, if at all. Many people I know have stopped using it at all. The ones who do vent and rant online are the minority, and they are more likely to be doing it online than in person. Of course, there are plenty of trolls and shills who join them, and together they make our society look more ready for conflict than we really are.
Now, it is true that we have some serious problems going on, and are vehemently divided in the USA at the moment, with some actual riots and violence. I don't want to be dismissive of that. But I believe social media is still a magnifying glass over all our troubles, not a true barometer of our collective readiness to get into physical combat over our differences.
If this were true, people would feel better after being exposed to social media. The evidence has shown that, instead, their anxiety increases as they are fed a stream of conflict, injustice, and sometimes even violence.
Your thesis is true, but we should keep in mind that outrage almost always comes from a perceived injuste in the world.
We have always and will always disagree about political issues. Issues that from our subjective appreciation are destroying many people's lives, so it's not surprising that we resort to all sorts of toxic behaviour in order to "help the cause", whatever it might be.
This emotional need for justice (even when misdirected) can not be discarded in the discussion about toxic behavior. Sometimes it takes the form of physical violence, sometimes it's an insult, a threat, doxxing, etc.
We should strive to channel these desires and differences of opinion in healthy ways. "just ban all heated political discussions" is a good enough workaround at the forum level, but not a noble solution to the root problem at a societal level.
Have read comments on journalism sites? It looks like CNN got rid of it a while ago but it’s still there on Fox News. It’s a cess pool. Even on ArsTechnica which skews towards a more educated audience the comments are often mindless trash.
It’s not about outrage or any kind of drama. It’s achieving or supporting agreement and like-mindedness, which is a mob. Any outrage present is a secondary consideration of potential challenges to the agreement at present.
So long as people are coalescing into groups out of mental laziness others people will be there to manipulate the mob for some selfish reason. The problem isn’t big players or media. The problem is foolish people.
What's different about HN is the only ads are basically promoting YC companies, so outrage doesn't feed any internal engagement metrics. Any outrage you see here is what we've brought on ourselves.
A few years ago I helped build a large social media site that had discussion threads at its core, and we quickly discovered how much time and effort it took. We quickly realized that so much of the grief was coming from the, ah, older generation — people over the age of 50 just loved to escalate things.
For many of these people it seemed like they hadn't ever used the Internet for communicating before, and for us employees it always felt like supervising children. Sometimes they would dig up the phone number of the CEO or some poor developer, and call them with some angry complaint. Their anger died down somewhat when they got a human to talk to. I suspect a lot of the heated discussions stemmed from people's inability to see the other party as a real human; people behave online with a completely different level of respect than in real life.
One of the most amusing experiences I had was hearing about how the "like" button next to comments had become a form of bullying. People would (rightfully, it would appear) complain that other people "liked" their comments ironically, and asked us to remove the likes. People in their 60s being bullied by other 60-year-olds through "likes". Both hilarious and sad.
> It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.
I'm not being cheeky (see below), but this already exists. It's talking to one another, person to person. :)
Social media, at its core, targets the very primal part of our brain and bodies. This is my feeling and observation, and I would be very interested to see if there have been studies that show there are fundamental differences to how people communicate online, primarily via text, versus communicating in person. I would suspect there are differences in that our brain literally responds differently.
As I type this, you can't see me. You don't know me. And I can't see nor do I know you. We can't respond to facial expressions or hear the cadence and tone of voice. Many, many times on the Internet, conversations get sidetracked by someone making a joke and then someone taking it too seriously. That's a simple case of online social media interaction, and there are far more complex examples. It's the same thing as working at a company. Often times you hit this moment where you just stop typing a message or an e-mail and just call the other person or go over to their desk. Even with just voice-to-voice communication, things are communicated much faster, and in person is even faster.
A lot of this has to do with the process. Online, someone types something and then someone else types another thing in response and so on. In person, it's a more dynamic exchange.
So at the core, my hypothesis is that almost all media (such as news) and especially social media are doing nothing but bypassing our natural filters and sensors for understanding things and try to directly target our inner primal self. As we can see online, humans are innately primal, especially when you remove all of our other evolved methods of understanding and empathy. When people see someone online say something they vehemently disagree with, they immediately ignore all possibilities and empathetic responses. We go straight to the core of finding the thing we hate about what they just said and then let them know that. However, if a stranger on the train says something like this, we often let it go. If we do engage, we are much more empathetic about their feelings and thoughts, both for human and societal reasons.
Given this, I think it's essentially impossible to build an online community that is directly based upon this type of communication. It's tough enough to build one in person with people you know. And as we've all experienced over the past months, even digital face-to-face communication is hard. There's still dynamics missing like low-latency, body language, tone, hand motions, subtleties of voice, etc.
I view it as an API or architecture diagram. If one drew one out for human communication, there's a lot of abstraction built upon our inner primal workings. But modern media, the Internet, and now social media has given a way to bypass all of that. The inner core can be accessed directly via advertisements, news, social media, propaganda, forums, etc., and now the Internet is like a connection between all these primal cores. It's why it's so insane.
Adam Curtis' documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace covers this.
The difference in what I'm saying is that I'm starting to think that it's just not enough to tell people to interact face to face instead. We've built all of these outrage-amplification machines that work so very well at demanding our attention. Requests to be nice to each other or abandon them have the problem of not being outrageous enough to stick in our minds and spread on a large scale.
What's the solution then? I don't really know. Maybe we'll all just get tired of it at some point. Maybe some unforeseeable event will happen that will make us put the worst of it aside and unite after all. Maybe the Government should regulate it all somehow - though in the climate they've created, it's hard to hope that we'd be able to do something that's a net benefit overall. Or maybe it'll all just keep growing until it blows up in our faces somehow.
I think the main issue is that we have simply outpaced ourselves in that our technological progress far exceeds our emotional progress, which is essentially locked in to our biological makeup. So I think your latter point is on point. I don't know how to solve these issues, and I don't think we can.
Humans were not made for the technology we've gifted ourselves. I am reminded of Christmas Island that is mentioned in Planet Earth II, episode 1. It describes an island with a crab that flourished there for millions of years. Human settlers brought a type of non-native ant to the island, the yellow crazy ant, and it turns out that the ant can easily kill the crabs, which have zero protection against the ants' attack. This shows there are moments in which life presents change in which there is no going back. The crabs are not able to evolve quickly enough against the ants, and the ants must be controlled by humans to even give the crabs a chance.
Why I was reminded of this is because I feel technology is the ant, and us humans are both the crabs and humans who brought the ant. There's a quote by David Attenborough that stuck with me: "the greatest threat they [the crabs] face is change".
I feel we've reached a turning point in which we've changed things forever, and I see no indication that things will get better or that we'll be able to adapt. I feel we are simply biologically limited, both in intelligence and emotional composition, to handle the worlds we continue to create.
And now I am reminded of a speech by El Jefe in The Counselor, written by Cormac McCarthy. It shouldn't be surprising that McCarthy is a resident scholar at The Santa Fe Institute, the only author to have such an appointment to my knowledge.
> Actions create consequences which produce new worlds, and they’re all different. Where the bodies are buried in the desert, that is a certain world. Where the bodies are simply left to be found, that is another. And all these worlds, heretofore unknown to us, they must have always been there, must they not?
> Counselor, at some point, you have to anknowledge the reality of the world you're in. There is not some other world. This is not a hiatus.
> I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you’re in, Counselor. That is my advice. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There’s only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago.
> I don’t mean to offend you, but reflective men often find themselves at a place removed from the realities of life. In any case, we should all prepare a place where we can accommodate all the tragedies that sooner or later will come to our lives. But this is an economy few people care to practice.
It is nothing less than exhausting to watch how people who frequent various types of social media have been driven to devolve into the worst humanity has seen in a long time short of causing physical harm to each other. I have watched as a couple of local FB groups that I used to just monitor for local information go down to the gutter on almost every single post.
People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.
It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?
Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.
And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.
And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.
The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.
I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.
> I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I believe they are aware, because I sometimes read various country's leaders and diplomatic corps on twitter, and it's very clear that some of them word things in ways that show they're speaking to a global audience, and some of them word things in ways that show they're preaching to the choir back home.
> Sure Americans have always thought it was acceptable to spend trillions destroying property and killing people as long as it was done on foreign soil “to bring democracy”.
That's so far fetched as to be silly. You mean "always" as in rarely have Americans agreed with that, and it didn't occur in the style you're implying until after WW2. The US military had very rarely left its own shores until WW1, and not in a huge & sustained way until WW2 and thereafter. The US didn't even have a proper standing military capable of leaving its shores leading up to WW2, it had to be rapidly assembled.
The US was an isolationist heavy nation culturally until after WW2, the globalization superpower era.
Vietnam was so popular & acceptable (ie not at all) among Americans it helped cause a severe cultural revolution.
The American people overwhelmingly do not want involved in foreign wars: they get ignored by the globalist war & meddling hawks. And now when a populist isolationist in Trump tries to leave Syria or Afghanistan or Germany, bring troops home, and pull back on the military industrial complex and its foreign adventurism, the globalists (in both parties) lose their minds and try to stop him. It's all hilarious in a farcical sort of way.
Let’s look at the last 40 years. We funded Osama and the Sandinistas in the 80s, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan to start.
Unless there are a lot of Americans being killed, no one cares.
If Trump were truly trying to pull back on the military industrial complex, he would cut military spending on weapons that goes to private industry - especially weapons that the military doesn’t even want - and finally close some of the military bases that military leaders are suggesting but the civilian government keeps open as a make jobs program.
> "Limited in their experience of Europe as a whole, and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies.
... Poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg with Sieg and Not with Tod. Solemnly the poets swore never again to have any cultural association with a Frenchman or an Englishman ; they went even further, they denied overnight that there had ever been any French or English culture. It was insignificant and valueless in comparison with German character, German art, and German thought. But the savants were even worse. The sole wisdom of the philosophers was to declare the war a “bath of steel” which would beneficially preserve the strength of the people from enervation. The physicians fell into line and praised their prosthesis so extravagantly that one was almost tempted to have a leg amputated so that the healthy member might be replaced by an artificial one. The ministers of all creeds had no desire to be outdone and joined in the chorus, at times as if a horde of possessed were raving, and yet all of these men were the very same whose reason, creative power, and humane conduct one had admired only a week, a month, before."
(sometimes two minutes hate doesn't pay off: Bismarck used the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident leak to sucker[1] the french into declaring war, in much the same way that a toreador waves the cape to citar, to provoke a charge from the amygdala, not the cortex, or the same way that Kenobi suckered Vader by turning off his light sabre)
I honestly think the only solution is for individuals to recuse themselves from those networks (I say on one of those networks), lower the trust they place in digital information, etc. It's become clear that the downward spiral is intrinsic to the medium itself (or possibly just the scale). I don't believe that any amount of technology, or product-rethinking, or UX will change that. We just weren't meant to interact this way. My only hope is that people eventually get disenchanted or burned-out enough that they simply stop engaging.
I replied to the original tweet too ("what would you do if you were Jack Dorsey?"). I said I'd shut the whole thing down.
Actually what happens is the level headed people on one side of an issue divide recuse themselves, leaving a "seemingly level-headed consensus echo chamber" behind. IMHO, that's worse. This account exists largely to counter exactly that trend. It's important (to me) that newcomers to the site don't get the idea that "hackers" are all fringe libertarians on every non-technical subject.
This site may feel like a "consensus echo chamber" but in reality it is nothing remotely close to that. I think you may be running into the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since you report noticing fringe libertarians, we can be sure that you dislike fringe libertarianism. We can also be sure that they have just the opposite picture of HN, since everyone crafts their picture in the image of what they dislike, without realizing that they're doing that. It just feels like an objective picture. I can list dozens of examples of this, but I'll restrain myself for once and spare you.
Unfortunately, these extremely contradictory subjective images of HN seem to be a consequence of its structure, being non-siloed: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This creates a paradox where precisely because the site is less divisive it feels more divisive—in the sense that it feels to people like it is dominated by their enemies, whoever their enemies may be. That's extremely bad for community, and I don't know what to do about it, other than post a version of this comment every time it comes up.
Thanks for caring about level-headeness, in any case.
Just the other day I noticed HN take a heavy hand on removing an article that hit the homepage about a virologist publishing a paper that suggested the only logical explanation for COVID is that it’s manufactured.
There are absolutely topics and perspectives that are not welcomed on HN, as the lead moderator it would be unwise in my opinion to think otherwise (given your biases would be the most threatening to an open forum) and you naturally would have a tough time identifying the absence of a perspective you don’t share.
As an example, I would challenge you to pick five articles that discuss unions that hit the homepage on HN and see what % of threads (and how much of the up vote they accounted for) were inherently anti union. I would also be sure to give only partial credit for threads that added boiler plate sentences saying something along the lines of “while I believe in the value of XYZ” because that’s basically a requirement to take any contrarian (to liberal / Silicon Valley ideology) or conservative view on this site. I can give you a laundry list of topics that will show this trend.
From my (biased) perspective (and from someone outside of the valley reading this site religiously for 13 years) HN is increasingly hostile to certain perspectives (and I’m not talking about social issues here). I don’t care much about it - I just opt out - which is the point.
It seems to me that you're confirming my point by making a strong generalization about HN based on what you noticed and disliked. I assure you that the people who dislike the opposite things notice the opposite things and make the opposite strong generalization.
If you're talking about the covid submissions that gus_massa came up with, they were flagged by users. In one case we lessened the penalty and the other looks like one we didn't see. I do think that it's unlikely that HN can have a curious conversation about that theme, much as we might both prefer otherwise. I don't think you can validly draw significant general conclusions from that.
For the record: I rather think that comment validates my view. This is what you're hearing: "This guy is complaining that you took down a winger conspiracy theory that got upvoted, therefore HN must be balanced."
Here's what I hear: "A winger conspiracy theory goes to the top of the HN front page before being taken down! That means that the voting population of HN is horrifically skewed."
See the difference in perspective? I'm happy you take conspiracy stuff down, I really am. But I'm not happy about the population that pushes it finding a home here, which they clearly have.
You're drawing extremely skewed conclusions about the "voting population" of HN. One of those posts made it to #16 before being flagged, the other did not make the front page at all. It takes only a handful of votes to make the front page (much of the time, anyhow—it's complicated), and #16 is not high—any sensational story can easily get that far before being flagged down (and by the way, it was users who flagged it down, not us).
HN is a large enough population sample that you'll find that scale of upvoters upvoting anything, some of the time. You can't conclude anything significant about the "voting population" of HN from that, and the fact that you're doing so strikes me as an indication of what I'm arguing—that your generalizations about HN are determined by your own ideological priors, just as people with opposite ideological commitments arrive at the opposite generalizations, and by exactly the same mechanism.
I think you'd arrive at the same conclusion that I have, if you were forced as I have been to look at all sides of this under unrelenting personal pressure. I also think that I'd be arriving at your conclusion if I hadn't been forced to have this experience. That's a pessimistic conclusion—it means that rational discussion of this is probably not possible. (I mean that structurally—not a personal swipe but exactly the opposite, and I hope that's clear.)
I really appreciate the time you put into hashing this out Dang (And newacct583), on a Saturday night no less. I love and am grateful for what you and this community do for me personally. I have a lot to reflect on and will drop the point. Good night team.
> One of those posts made it to #16 before being flagged, the other did not make the front page at all.
Well, presuming we're talking about the minervanett.no article, there's also this submission that made it to #2 with 24 votes and 18 comments in the 10 minutes before it was flagged to death:
[flagged] The most logical explanation is that it comes from a laboratory (minervanett.no)
> You'll find that scale of upvoters upvoting anything, some of the time.
I found that to be a surprisingly high number of votes in a short period of time, likely indicating that there is a substantial population on HN who would have liked to discuss that story but were prevented from doing so by a (presumably) much smaller number of flags. Is it actually common for stories without a broad degree of interest to get that many votes in their first few minutes?
> it was users who flagged it down, not us
Technically, but I'm hoping that you try to review the flagged stories and recover the ones where you disagree with the flagging? Otherwise this would seem to allow a "tyranny of the minority" where a small number of people who want to prevent a discussion from taking place are able to enforce their beliefs on the rest of the larger group. I'm a lot more comfortable with you using your expert judgement than with trusting that flags will always be used appropriately without review.
Ah, that was the one I remember seeing. In such cases, if (a) article is substantive and (b) there is a chance of an intellectually curious discussion, we turn off the flags and (probably also) downweight the article as a counterweight to sensationalism, which always attracts extra upvotes. In this case (b) seemed hopeless, so I didn't.
Sorry, I kept editing, probably after you had already posted. And I should be clear that I don't have a strong opinion on whether this particular article is actually appropriate for discussion here. I do think it's an example, though, of how certain topics are "off limits" because a small group does not want them to be discussed. For me, it exacerbates my long standing worries that abuse of flagging (or the counter-reaction thereto) may be the eventual downfall of HN.
> I do think it's an example, though, of how certain topics are "off limits" because a small group does not want them to be discussed.
> For me, it exacerbates my long standing worries that abuse of flagging (or the counter-reaction thereto) may be the eventual downfall of HN.
It doesn't really worry me, but topics that I may have wanted to discuss on HN long ago and try to today on some posts, I usually spend more time elsewhere discussing them now and less time on HN doing so because they usually have a very short shelf because of the above and that's fine for me, but maybe not HN.
The typical ones are horrific, with many having been started explicitly for political battle.
The common tactic for something like "virus from a lab" would be to move the goalposts and hope the reader doesn't notice. Breeding coronaviruses in a lab actually happened, with scientific papers published about how genetically engineered cells with both human and bat traits were used to help the bat coronaviruses adapt to growing well in human cells. A typical fact checker tactic would be to purposely confuse that fact with the claim that the virus was created from scratch, modeled in a computer and assembled by a machine. Supposed experts say that this is impossible, and so the fact checker can claim that the fact was proven false... but it was a straw man.
The URL you gave is not quite so directly misdirecting, but still vague and IMHO just wrong. I've looked over the scientific papers, and I think the evidence is clear.
> In such cases, if (a) article is substantive and (b) there is a chance of an intellectually curious discussion, we turn off the flags and (probably also) downweight the article as a counterweight to sensationalism, which always attracts extra upvotes. In this case (b) seemed hopeless, so I didn't.
That's the point, in my opinion at least.
Above you say:
> This site may feel like a "consensus echo chamber" but in reality it is nothing remotely close to that. I think you may be running into the notice-dislike bias...
If a certain class of articles get flagged by a large number of people who have a strong dislike for the topic, and you as the moderator are ok with it because here at HN with the culture being the way it is you allow it to be removed because it won't generate "intellectually curious discussion", then how can you say that HN is not a "consensus echo chamber" when it comes to these particular topics?
It seems to me there are some very obvious errors in your explanation above. You can run this forum however you want, but being aware and transparent about what topics are and are not allowed seems like a better way to do it than disingenuously explaining away flaws. No person is omniscient, however it may seem that way. Just as you can observe flaws in other people evaluation that they themselves cannot see, is it not possible that you too may have some flaws that you cannot see?
It's more complex than just "what topics are and are not allowed". Threads are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. One thread might discuss a topic within the site guidelines while another thread on the same topic might turn into a massive flamewar. Subtle (or not so subtle) differences in article, headline, URL, site design, and who knows what else can make the difference too. The decision I made was based on the thread, not the topic. As I mentioned above, we reduced the penalty on one of those threads. We wouldn't do that if the topic were "not allowed".
Is it possible that I may have some flaws that I cannot see? That is beyond possible, it is certain. The trouble with these arguments though is that operating this place is a lot more complicated than people assume it is, and so they say oversimplified things like "aha, you are suppressing topic X so HN is an echo chamber after all" and I have to try to fill in the information gap before we can have a sensible conversation about what the actual flaws might be. I'm super interested in the flaws—but first we have to be talking about the same world, which unfortunately is already not so easy.
I am well aware that it is complicated. When a controversial thread is reported, a rather large number of variables are referenced by your mind - some of these you are aware of, some of them you are not.
But at the end of the day, in the aggregate, either there is zero slant (by topic) whatsoever, or there is greater than zero. Based on my anecdotal observations over a long period of time, my perception is that there are indeed certain topics that are less welcome than others, and the assurances I've read, while plausible, do not seem adequate. If we were able to see a log of removed topics it may be more reassuring.
I'd rather HN had more freedom of topic discussion at least occasionally as an experiment, and then perhaps we could see if some modifications to guidelines (perhaps just on those threads) could keep things a bit more civilized. If no site is willing to put some effort into finding a workable approach to this problem, it seems reasonable that the world is just going to keep becoming more polarized as people spend more time at sites that are designed from scratch to be information bubbles.
First of all, I'd like to thank the moderator dang. I don't always agree, nor do I expect to agree. I'm comfortable with disagreements.
If we are serious about avoiding echochamber effects, then we shouldn't take voting so seriously. What is wrong with having a polite disagreement? Why should we value popularity?
Have we reached a point where we cannot discuss certain topics as adults? If so, can those individuals not simply choose to opt-out of the discussions?
I didn't read the discussion in question, but I don't understand what stopping a discussion solves. From my perspective discussions should be stopped when they are needlessly toxic, when participants can no longer advance their ideas politely. Humans have limitations, sometimes emotions become too hot. I appreciate when dang closes these types of discussions.
An illegitimate reason to censor would be to remove ideas which cannot be countered, but the reader disagrees with. Some people find disagreements and discussions disturbing. Others enjoy the opportunity to challenge their ideas, as a matter of 'intellectual curiosity'. Some simply relish in the tactics of formulating arguments, regardless of the underlying position.
> I didn't read the discussion in question, but I don't understand what stopping a discussion solves.
The explanation dang gives above is that it prevents discussion that is not "intellectually curious". This type of discussion occurs on HN on a daily basis, but some topics seem to have an extra layer of moderation filters to go through, presumably because they are nearly guaranteed to create significant disharmony. Which is fine - if optimizing for community harmony takes precedence over free discussion of particularly controversial topics, so be it. I just don't like that combined with a claim that HN is in no way an echo chamber.
But of course, transparency and honesty are simply my personal preferences, and HN can't cater to every individual's personal preferences. Surely there are some people here that would not enjoy having a list of blacklisted topics explicitly published, perhaps because it would give the impression of false equivalency or some other perception like that.
I'll agree that it is an echochamber. Voting/flagging will always cause that. In someways this brand of moderation cements that. Perhaps the lack of willingness to have an explicit list of verbotten topics is a way to avoid ossification or deny that it has happened?
Mises.org and their lengthy critiques of MMT/UBI are shadowbanned. In my reading of what you've explained, it sounds like this is banned because users are incapable of discussing it in good faith?
For me that is a poor reason, we should strive to be better. Moderators should be able handle it. After all if the goal is intellectual curiosity, but the community can't accept critical articles of a heterodox economic theory...
Issues surrounding the CCP are another divisive topic. These threads are usually invaded by pro-CCP trolls and whataboutists.
I agree that it would be nice to have an admission of topics or domains which moderators feel HN is incapable of discussing. I expect that this would challenge users to discuss these topics civilly.
I think the most obvious bias/skew is towards defending the merits of upper middle-class western lifestyle rather than any particular subject in itself. Obviously that will cause certain subjects to be more vehemently defended than others.
An obvious example is where there's a collective disbelief, or perhaps just avoidance, of the bad side of the gig economy since it improves the upper middle-class lifestyle so much that defending it comes naturally even if it's not grounded in social justice.
[Personal opinion: The evidence is not enough to prove that is was created/improved/selected in a lab. It has a few "lucky" features, but normal coronavirus don't cause pandemics, so we already know it is a "lucky" case.]
18 points by haltingproblem 8 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
I've seen an article claiming that it spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But not in the sense that they created, improved or selected it. I gather that they were simply isolating and studying viruses from bats that had been collected in southern China. And they were doing that based on concerns about new pandemics, given experience with SARS and MERS, and the expectation that there would be more zoonotic jumps from bat populations.
I would not dismiss his arguments at first sight. but they are presented as anecdotes, not as convincing proof. his gut instinct might be right, because he is experienced, but there should be a proof. And genomics proofs are actually easy nowadays. everybody is familiar with neural networks and how long it needs to come up with optimized mutations. I just miss the mathematical proof of the low likelihood of natural mutations in x generations to come up with that special spike. Note that the period of 10-14 days per generation is extremely fast. Like with the drosphila. extraordinary claims need better proofs.
Google around and you will find it. To me it makes no difference whether it was or wasn’t, what was eye opening was the speed of it hitting and being removed.
It’s the unwillingness to even allow the topic on HN which intrigued me. Believing what I believe (ie my bias) I was surprised it got as far as it did - because I know that’s not the HN community party line - and then noticed it disappeared within seconds of me seeing it on home page. I was the first to comment on it so it couldn’t have been because the threads descended into a flame war and I was unaware of which other guidelines it could have broken given it was a legit site referencing a legit paper in a legit journal (but taking a perspective the broader Hn community won’t tolerate).
> it was a legit site referencing a legit paper in a legit journal
It wasn't. the article explained how they couldn't find a publisher for it. That's why I flagged it, because that's a red flag.
It was also based on the statistical fallacy that Feynman once summed up with "There is a car with license plate GH02B [a sequence with no meaning] outside. What are the odds?!"
I dislike fringe libertarianism but my experience here is the opposite - I notice posts, sometimes I reply to them, I'm often downvoted by those commenters, but it's not a central element on HN, and I don't feel it dominates the narrative.
There is a silent upvote majority here who will un-down almost anything that isn't clearly toxic or counterfactual.
So I certainly do appreciate the level-headedness here.
The sensitivity with which you replied just tells me I'm probably right about this. I assure you that, having dealt with HN readers in real life contexts on both sides of that divide, that the perception absolutely isn't symmetric. HN is seen as a "safe space" for some demographics and definitely as hostile by others. (Edit: I'll just say it. I've had multiple conversations with real life women where I have to make excuses for the perspective of posters here and explain why it's still a valuable forum anyway.)
I mean, I agree with you that we all have biases and blind spots in our perception. Which means... so do the mods. I comment because I want HN to continue to be a site that people like me want to comment on. The site that "people whose comments dang likes" want to comment on surely looks different.
I totally empathize with what it's like to try to defend HN as a worthy place to participate when you're talking with someone who has extremely strong feelings about how awful it is, and the fact that you're willing to do that makes me feel much more sympathy and common ground with you than any disagreement we may have on other points.
But I think your explanation of why this is is much too simplistic. The difference seems to be that you aren't being bombarded every day with utterly contradictory extremely strong feelings about how awful it is. If you were, you wouldn't be able to write what you just posted. Your judgment that the perception "isn't symmetric" is wildly out of line with what I encounter here, so one of us must be dealing with an extremely skewed sample. Perhaps you read more HN posts and talk to a wider variety of people about HN than I do. From my perspective, the links below are typical—and there are countless more where these came from. Of course, there are also countless links claiming exactly the opposite, but since you already believe that, they aren't the medicine in this case. I sample that list when responding to commenters who see things this way:
A sample email, for a change of pace: "It's clear ycombinator is
clearly culling right-wing opinions and thoughts. The only opinions
allowed to remain on the site are left wing [...] What a fucking joke
your site has become."
I think there is a solution to this problem. If moderator decisions are made and recorded publicly then the data can at least be analyzed objectively. If there is indeed a bias then someone should be able to sit down and do the statistical analysis and show that "Yes, X type of stories / comments are more consistently flagged / removed / downvoted / etc." or "No, there is actually no bias in this instance".
I think there is contention right now because moderator decisions are opaque so people come up with their own narratives. Without actual data there is no way to tell what type of bias exists and why so it's easy to make up a personal narrative that is not backed with any actual data.
User flagging is also currently opaque and a similar argument applies. If I have to provide a reason for why I flagged something and will know that my name will be publicly associated with which items I've flagged then I will be much more careful. Right now, flagging anything is consequence free because it is opaque.
I completely understand, believe me I get it—but based on everything I've seen, it's a hopelessly romantic view. If I've learned one thing, it's that people are going to "come up with their own narratives", as you aptly put it, no matter what we do. Adding energy into that would only create more pressure and demand on a system which is maxed out already.
Making this mistake would lead to more argument, not less—the opposite of what was intended. It would simply reproduce the same old arguments at a meta level, giving the fire a whole new dimension of fuel to burn. Worse, it would skew more of HN into flamewars and meta fixation on the site itself, which are the two biggest counterfactors to its intended use.
Such lists would be most attractive to the litigious and bureaucratic sort of user, the kind that produces two or more new objections to every answer you give [1]. That's a kind of DoS attack on moderation resources. Since there are always more of them than of us, it's a thundering herd problem too.
This would turn moderation into even more of a double bind [2] and might even make it impossible, since we function on the edge of the impossible already. Worst of all, it would starve HN of time and energy for making the site better—something that unfortunately is happening already. This is a well-known hard problem with systems like this: a minority of the community consumes a majority of the resources. Really we should be spending those making the site better for its intended use by the majority of its users.
So forgive me, but I think publishing a full moderation log would be a mistake. I'll probably be having nightmares about it tonight.
I merely outlined what I would want if I was a moderator. I would rather receive email with statistical analysis than be compared to Hitler and Stalin without any data to back it up. It would be way funnier if someone proved statistically that I was Hitler and Stalin at the same time. They'd have to go through a lot of trouble to actually do that and if they managed to do so then that would be some high art.
Any complaint without data to back it up would be thrown in the trash pile.
In any case. It's a worthwhile experiment to try because it can't make your life worse. I can't really imagine anything worse than being compared to Hitler and Stalin especially if all that person is doing is just venting their anger. I'd want to avoid being the target of that anger and I would require mathematical analysis from anyone that claimed to be justifiably angry to show the actual justification for their anger. Without data you will continue to get hate mail that's nothing more than people making up a story to justify their own anger. And you have already noticed the personal narrative angle so I'm not telling you anything new here. The data takes away the "personal" part of the narrative which I think is an improvement.
Alas, there's no way to avoid being the target of that anger. It's inevitable in the system. You're right that one has to develop strategies for managing one's reaction to it. I don't think requiring a mathematical analysis would work in my case. It might not work in any case; I expect most angry people would probably get angrier if told that their anger is invalid because not backed up mathematically, and the dynamics of escalating mass anger could end up destroying the whole system.
There's a deeper issue though. Such an analysis would depend on labeling the data accurately in the first place, and opposing sides would never agree on how to label it. Indeed, they would adjust the labels until the analysis produced what they already 'know' to be the right answer—not because of conscious fraud but simply because the situation seems so obvious to them to begin with. As I said above, the only people motivated enough to work on this would be ones who would never accept any result that didn't reproduce what they already know, or feel they know.
Hey dang, first, I appreciate all of your comments in this post and your deep commitment to both HN and the state of online discussion. I'm learning a lot from reading your comments.
I'm curious if given all that you've shared, you think it's even _possible_ to scale a "healthy" discussion site any larger than HN currently is? It's clear that HN's success is in no small part due to the commitment, passion, and active participation of the few moderators. Contrast that with some of the top comments, which describe how toxic Twitter is, and I wonder if there's some sort of limit to effective moderation, or if we just haven't found more scalable solutions to manage millions of humans talking openly online sans toxicity? cheers
I'm not dang, obviously, but I think it's a testament to his hard work that HN functions even as well as it does.
Most sites its size are far, far worse, I think.
I personally believe that is due to human nature.
I think that is what dang has observed and is trying to articulate - no matter how smart or rigorous or mathematical you are, you still are human and thus subject to the human condition.
One way that manifests is this persuasion that the Other is winning the war (and that there is a war, for that matter).
I take it as almost axiomatic that a site with Twitter's volume cannot be anything but the cesspool it is.
It's too big for a single person to even begin to read a statistically-significant fraction of the content.
That means moderation is a hilariously-stupid concept at that scale. Any team of moderators large enough to do the job will itself suffer the fragmentation and conflicts that online forums do, and find itself unable to agree on what the policies should be, let alone how they should be adapted in contentious cases (and by definition, you only need moderation in contentious cases).
I agree with a lot of this, but the things you're talking about already apply to HN, so the argument can't really be used to show that a larger site would necessarily fail to work as well as HN (however 'well' that really is—I'm not making any grand claims here).
For example, the human nature you're talking about is by far the strongest force on HN, and the scale (though tiny compared to Twitter or Facebook or Reddit) is already beyond what one would suppose possible for a forum like this.
I would agree that HN is far too big for moderation alone to save it, though I hadn't quite put that together when I wrote my first post.
I think pg's original guidelines managed to capture enough of a cultural ideal that much of the original culture has been preserved organically by the users themselves (though I'm not qualified to speak to the culture of the early years, or how much it has changed since then).
You and the other mod(s?) have done a great job of being a guiding hand, and of understanding that it's too big for anything other than a loose guiding hand to be relevant, from a moderation perspective. You can remove things that shouldn't be discussed, show egregious repeat offenders the door, and encourage people to behave well and be restrained (in large part by example).
Twitter is so much vaster, and grew so fast, that even a guiding hand and good founding culture could not hope to save it. I suspect the way its design encourages rapid-fire back-and-forth also really hurts the nature of interaction on the site.
Hey, when you say “already beyond what one would suppose possible.” Could you describe it. And to promise that this in good faith - a personal example of when you stood on the precipice and saw the scale of the yawning depths below.
I’ve found that clear vivid examples from people are crucial torch lights which can be shared around to give people a snap shot into what mods feel or witness. This then allows the conversation with non mods to progress faster, since this type of story telling is what people are best optimized to consume.
I don't mean anything fancy, just that HN is a large-ish (millions of users, but not tens of millions) completely open, optionally anonymous internet forum, and it's not obvious that one of those could function as well as HN does. When I say "as well", I don't mean "well". This place has tons of problems. But it could be a lot, lot worse, and the null hypothesis would be to expect worse.
I wrote about this a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23727261. Shirky's famous 2003 essay about internet communities was talking in terms of a few hundred people, and argued that groups can't scale beyond that. HN has scaled far beyond that, and though it is not a group in every sense of that essay, it has retained, let's say, some groupiness. It's not a war of all against all—or at least, not only that.
As we learn more about how to operate it, I'm hoping that we can do more things to encourage positive group dynamics. We shall see. The public tides are very much against it right now, but those can change.
We haven’t really found it before the internet (these problems are endemic to human/sentient nature.)
The internet only makes things industrialized.
There are things you can do, that reduce the number of friction points, thus making it possible to self govern
1) narrow topics/purpose - the closer to an objective science the better.
2) no politics, no religion - as far as possible.
3) topic should not be a static/ largely opinion oriented. More goal driven, with progress milestones easily discussed and queried (lose weight, get healthy, ask artists, learn photoshop.)
4) clear and shareable tests to weed out posers - r/badeconomics, askhistory
5) strong moderation.
6) no to little meta Discussions
7) directed paths for self promotion
8) get lucky and have a topic that attracts polite good faith debaters who can identify and eject bad faith actors (the holy grail.)
Each of these options removes or modulates a source of drama. With enough of them removed, you can still get flame wars, but it will be better than necker having done these before.
I don't know. I think it might be on the unlikely side of possible, but I don't have any compelling reasons for saying so. It would require a lot of learning, but it's possible to learn. It's hard and wouldn't happen by default though. You'd be attempting to induce a group into functioning in a way that that no group that large has ever done before.
NateEag makes some good points in the sibling comment. You'd have to create the culture at the level of the moderation team, and that's not easy. The way we approach this work on HN has aspects that reach deep into personal life, in a way that I would not feel comfortable requiring of anybody—nor would it work anyhow. If you tried to build such an organization using any standard corporate approach it would likely be a disaster. But maybe it could be done in a different way, or maybe there is an approach that doesn't resemble how we do it on HN.
Would it be possible with the economics of a startup, where the priority has to be growth and/or monetization? Probably less.
There are 2 mods running HN. Responding to people is TAXING - as in its hugely costly. And it has some terrible edge cases which destroy the process:
The costly occasions are when you meet people who are either
a) Angry
b) Rule lawyers
c) malignantly motivated
AT this point their goal is to get attention or apply coercive force on the moderation process.
These guys are an existential threat to the conversational process and one of the win conditions is to get people to turn against the moderators.
Social media is a topic that HN gets wrong so regularly, and without recourse to research or analysis so frequently that I would avoid discussing moderation in general here.
The fact is that if people are arguing in good faith, we can have some amount of peace, and even deal with inadvertent faux pas and ignorance, provided you never reach an eternal september scenario.
But bad faith actors make even this scenario impossible.
If you know of research or analysis that is essential on this topic, please tell us what it is. I'd like to be sure I'm aware of it, and other readers would surely be interested also.
Hmm. Given the broad range of topics "social Media" covers, there are vast numbers of papers on it.
For people who have NEVER thought of social networks and conversations online I find this site to discuss some of the blander but more game theoretic elements of networks/trust and therefore online conversations:
For you guys (HN Mods) I'd bet that you in particular are abreast of stuff.
- I'd ask if you have heard/seen Civil Servant, by Nathan Matias - its a system to do experiments on forums and test the results (see if there is a measurable change on user behavior)
- Censored, suspended, shadowbanned: User interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/146144481877305... (I need to read that paper, but I expect it to be a good foundation of knowledge and examples)
Hey really big thank you for posting this! I'm working on a new discussion site and so much of this is pertinent. I may return with some follow-up commentary once I've read through some of it, thank you.
Yes. That's what I mean. If there is an API then we can use mathematical models to answer questions about bias or lack thereof.
I also don't think that it's possible to have any forum without bias so the data I'm certain will indicate bias but at least it will be transparent and obvious so people can point to actual data to make their case one way or the other. It's hard to improve a situation if there is no data to point to and argue about. Without data people just tell stories about whatever makes the most sense from whatever sparse data they have managed to reverse engineer from personal observations.
Kudos for having those links easily available, or easily searchable, even though (and I say this with all of my good-heart) I'm not sure how "good" they are at keeping one's mental sanity intact (only by reading a few of them I sort of became agitated/semi-outraged).
I find that a good rule/compromise was to almost never talk about HN per-se, i.e. to avoid almost all meta discussions (I think that rule would have avoided many of the comments present in your list of links), but I am aware that that sort of thing is less and less easy to accomplish in this day and age.
Later edit: Saw your comment bellow about the rationale of collecting those links, glad that it works for you and that it helps you, sincerely.
Dan, I assume you quickly pulled this list of URLs out of a huge bunch of bookmarks related to how hn functions and is perceived by its users. (the alternative, that these mostly negative comments related to your moderation etched themselves in your memory in such a way that you were able to search them out quickly, seems both sad and highly unlikely)
I wonder if you've got a plan for the knowledge and information you're accumulating related to the function and moderation of hn, and sites like it. Have you written about your experience moderating hn?
I started collecting them years ago after posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004. After a while that joke felt a little mean, but I kept adding to the list because I found it to be a stabilizer for my own sanity. When someone accuses you of Hitler it helps to review the Stalins and vice versa. It frames the situation differently and makes it a little easier to calm down and hopefully react better.
I haven't written much about my experience moderating HN because I don't want it to be about me. Occasionally little blobs squeeze out under pressure. Also, I'm not sure I could describe it very well. It might take more of a novelist's skill to explain the experience. I'd probably just use a lot of words like "surreal" that don't say anything, or come up with metaphors that are good for venting but again, don't really explain much.
What I do want to do is distill the moderation explanations I've posted over the years into a sort of expanded FAQ or commentary. If anyone has noticed how often I post HN Search links to past explanations (which I hope is not too annoying), that's because the explanations have converged over the years, on I'd guess at least a couple dozen different significant issues. Things like how we moderate politics on HN, how it's not ok to insinuate astroturfing, how we handle reposts, and so on.
> I'd probably just use a lot of words like "surreal" that don't say anything
Here's one to add to your list from today (now flagged dead) that I thought was particularly surreal in its logic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808107. It's short, so I'll just quote it in full:
Hacker News pays close attention to the content on the main page. They purge anything that doesn't trend left leaning or counters the standard left's corporate interests.
For example, I posted a link to Michael Moore's film in which he eviscerates bio-fuels. This post was mysteriously removed. It was also removed the second time I posted it. This was despite the link the "A year wearing shorts to work" as another HN article link at the time continued to exist.
A link to a Micheal Moore (the quintessential 90's leftist documentarian) film "eviscerating bio-fuels" is "mysteriously removed", but a fluff piece about shorts remains: Collect underpants, ?, profit!
Quote seems fairly accurate to me if you just replace "Hacker News" with "Users of Hacker News." It's a forum that's populated heavily with Silicon Valley tech liberals (basically fairly left leaning with a libertarian streak, and minimal exposure to the working class demographic Moore is involved with).
On top of all that the forum is skittish about embracing controversial political topics in general, because many people would prefer to just talk about tech.
Why wouldn't HN users flag some Michael Moore content to oblivion?
What is wrong with this? I'm a far cry from a Silicon Valley liberal, and nothing's wrong with it that I can see. There is no One Forum To Rule Them All, and there shouldn't be. Let a thousand forums bloom their own way.
The one thing I'd like to see is a franchise model based on HN - this place pays just enough attention to civility and topicality to promote good discussion without feeling Orwellian. If only that magic could somehow be replicated.
> It's a forum that's populated heavily with Silicon Valley tech liberals
That's mistaken. Users in SV are about 10% of the population here, last I checked, but that was for a very wide definition of SV, and by any measure some chunk would not be "tech liberals", so the number is significantly less than 10%.
This site is far more geographically and culturally distributed than people assume it is. I've written about this in several places; one is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 if anyone is interested.
I mostly agree with you, there's nothing wrong with it. What's happening is the same thing that goes on everywhere in social media. People projecting their worldviews, opinions, and believing that their opinions are special and The One view that should prevail. That they should have a right to be heard everywhere, that their opinions should carry weight everywhere (regardless of the forum).
It's like we're dealing with a very emotionally & intellectually spoiled generation, brats. The everyone gets a trophy generation. People that can't accept that their opinions don't govern the universe and are not important everywhere; nor are all opinions equally important everywhere. Social media has warped all of that severely. It's almost like it has deluded a mass of people into thinking their opinion broadcast inside of their home/space, has (or should have) the same weight when broadcast outside to the world and that the two should be given the same kind of consideration.
I think this is a very common logic failure. They're unable to mentally separate concepts effectively. In my observation very few people actually invest into thinking, how to think, how to use logic, how to reason. It takes a lot of effort to get good at it.
Critically people need to learn that their opinions do not always matter and are not valuable all the time. It's a concept that the woke, cancel culture generation can't tolerate. I think the US culture needs a hefty dose of this right now: your opinion is not as important as you think it is; your feelings are not that important; feelings are not more important than facts.
It really is the fragile, coddled generation. They can't live with the notion of the lack of their importance. It makes perfect sense though, it's also the hyper narcissistic selfie / influencer generation. It all goes together.
> On top of all that the forum is skittish about embracing controversial political topics in general, because many people would prefer to just talk about tech. Why wouldn't HN users flag some Michael Moore content to oblivion? What is wrong with this?
There's nothing necessarily wrong with the flagging itself (well, except in this case I believe a lack of awareness of the content of that documentary likely contributes to ongoing destruction of the earth's ecosystem)...but there is a problem where the moderator of HN claims that what you say above is outright false. Purely a misperception on your part.
Another way I can see it being harmful: a never-discussed here (or anywhere else that I know of) topic that I believe may be a key issue with the growing polarization in the world (in turn increasing danger across multiple dimensions), is that there seems to be certain topics that render the human mind unable to sustain consciousness and rational, unbiased thought. Of course Reddit and Facebook are full of this sort of behavior, but there is no shortage of it here on HN either. If solutions to existential threats like climate change require public consensus (do they not?), and even we here on HN are unable to behave in a conscious, logical manner (or even try), then how do we expect the general public to do so? And if no one here is even willing to consider the potential importance of this idea, then those same people shouldn't be too surprised if people like me (and I'm far from unique in this respect) have about as much respect for them as they have for Trump supporters, and roll our eyes at the low-dimensional thinking behind climate change hysteria. If it was really that important to people as intelligent as HN'ers, they should be willing to think - or at the very least, consider the notion of thinking.
As for how this general phenomenon may be dangerous: as a mental experiment, let's assume that it is a very real phenomenon, that does occur in objective physical shared reality. That's bad enough. But now imagine if one or more powerful entities were able to realize that certain things are virtually guaranteed to sink humans into subconscious, unthinking, tribal, non-cooperative behaviour. Could this knowledge be used for nefarious means, and what might the techniques look like? Now, look around the modern world - do we see any new (in the last decade or so) phenomena that have become quite common that may plausibly be invocations of these techniques, to achieve certain goals? Might that perhaps go a little ways to explain the inconceivably irrational behaviour of people on certain topics?
I've found that having some amount of time spent to just keep a timeline of notable events on a forum is extremely crucial for any forum that lasts a long time and has political discussions on it.
This should probably be a feature for all subs/forums.
The problem is that as a moderator those type of posts get your attention. The outliers are the ones you worry about.
As someone who participates I basically ignore those. There will always be complain posts even when everything is perfect.
People might have had a bad day or there might be another reason for their reaction.
They are outliers in intensity only. They are not outliers in terms of the underlying phenomenon of how users arrive at their generalized perceptions of HN. On the contrary, the phenomenon itself is routine and typical. I would even call it universal.
If you see a comment complaining about "(Apple|Google|Microsoft) fanboys", that's much the same thing. The only actual information in such a comment is about the commenter—specifically, what they dislike (in this case, (Apple|Google|Microsoft)) and therefore what they notice and assigned greater weight to.
Such commenters routinely produce entirely opposite outputs about the exact same input set. Indeed their complaints are interchangeable except for the direction of bias they're complaining about. This phenomenon is so reliable that I'm not sure I've seen any more reliable phenomenon on HN. There is clearly a deep cognitive bias underlying it. I've done my best to try to explain what that is. I'd be interested in hearing other explanations, but so far most responses seem to deny the phenomenon, which from my perspective can't possibly be correct.
Where I think being a moderator makes a big difference is that we get bombarded with these contradictory complaints every day, often in personally abusive ways. You can't help but notice the contradictions when you're getting bashed for one reason one minute and than bashed for exactly the opposite reason the next. When one side calls you Hitler and the other side calls you Stalin, and each side complains bitterly how you ban everyone they agree with and moderate in the other's favor, the only sane response is to become curious about how the exact same thing can result in such an extreme variance in perception.
Sure, that's by far the biggest issue in my working life and therefore one of the biggest in my life. My approach is to try to take it as an opportunity for growth. I've spent a lot of time with forms of therapeutic process work that have affected me deeply and which overlap in some ways with the challenges of moderation. I sometimes imagine that there is also a spiritual aspect of sorts (I hesitate to use that word because it sounds inflated in an internet comment, but you touched on something similar when you said 'zen')—something that allows for an intense and crazy-making situation to perhaps be a catalyst if you use it in the right way.
Two simpler factors are (1) I'm paid to do it and (2) I have creative freedom, which is important to me. Just remembering those two things reminds me that I'm choosing to do this. That sounds so trivial but psychologically it's a big thing.
No I can see why it works for the situation you are in. It's sort of artisinal work in this case. Plus the act of moderation and just speech online is nearly 0 steps removed from they original techie ideals of exchanging and encouraging good ideas.
Plus its HN, so the mission is matched by positive history within the community.
Part of the reason I ask is because the handling of the mental costs of such a job is not something covered in the content/research on moderation. We know that employees at firms get PTSD for example, but that's also from staring at the highest levels of radioactive content. Those people need therapy.
For something much milder (hopefully), what do mods do to make peace with things and not lose their minds?
> When one side calls you Hitler and the other side calls you Stalin, and each side complains bitterly how you ban everyone they agree with and moderate in the other's favor, the only sane response is to become curious about how the exact same thing can result in such an extreme variance in perception.
As another commentator has said, being a moderator means you only see a certain side of the equation. Users don't see the amount of abuse or nonsense that gets thrown at moderators because a lot of that is invisible or removed, that's just the unfortunate nature of running a forum. Even worse when it devolves into threats or actions against moderators.
But it also blinds you to the smaller shifts in the userbase because the larger conflicting voices are the main thing you hear. It becomes harder to notice when women feel less comfortable posting here because other posters chase them off. Or when minorities have trouble sharing their experiences because any mention of their race triggers a flamewar.
That ends up cultivating a certain level of bias on the forum where only individuals who either silently agree with or add fuel to the fire rotate in and other users rotate out. I mean I've fought with you before because you had to remove the word 'Black' from a story because it caused some users to lash out at the fact that black people were sharing their story.
You did so in order to stop a flamewar, but why did you need to do so in the first place? If a small subset of users can poison a discussion as a result, then you have a problem with the overall bias of the forum.
There are lots of different small subsets of users who can poison or destabilize the system, and yes, that is a huge problem with the forum. It doesn't follow that any such subset dominates the site's overall userbase. Each certainly believes that the opposite subset does, though. That's the phenomenon I'm trying to describe.
It's not true that what I'm arguing for or perceiving is based only on extreme comments. I tried to explain this in the very comment you replied to. It's based on massive numbers of comments, some extreme and most not. I probably read more of this forum than anyone, for the simple reason that it's my job. I've also spent thousands of hours working on evaluating it as objectively as I possibly can. That does not mean my perceptions are correct or that I'm immune from bias; au contraire. But it's not nothing either.
Based on feedback I've gotten and posts I see, I don't believe that women feel less comfortable posting here than they used to. I believe there has been a slow trend in a better direction, though not everyone agrees. Race is a harder issue to assess because that issue has flared up so massively in society at large lately that the macro trends simply dominate whatever is specific to HN. We can't expect this site to be immune from that.
Somehow it is popular to adhere to binary thinking.
Eg.
- For operating systems: only apple is good, the rest is bad.
- For politics: choose a side
Also the "if you are not for me, then you are against me" kind of trope.
That's just how it is, I don't think you can change that.
Some people have made their mind up and are only willing to make you change your mind and not listen to any reason from another point of view.
Then there's the abuse.
Where somebody is no longer debating a topic, but start getting personal. That's almost always a sign of acting in bad faith. Those are the type of posts that have a likely hood of needing some moderating. Once somebody like that pops up, they are likely to have crossed a limit that makes them easier to show up on your radar. Sometimes it is an accident, but other times it is a pattern.
It can be interesting to know why somebody acts like that, but perhaps it is better to not know that. Especially when they are not willing to change their behavior.
First: those are hilarious, thanks. Second: I don't see how "Look at all these crazy reactionary right wingers" is really evidence that the median poster here is not skewed. Again getting to sampling error: you're a mod, you see the complaints more than the signal.
I'm talking about the skew of the people in the actual threads, and what opinions become acceptable consensus. And that's not the same population. Frankly most of us never see the garbage like that, because you flag it.
But what remains isn't "balanced" just because you find jerks on both sides. It's just as likely that one side is working the refs better.
Now again, I don't expect you to agree. But I see what I see. And I post to make sure that others don't see the same thing.
I have to say, that first one gave me a laugh. HN is a "leftist echo chamber?" Considering how the political range of HN runs from center left to bordering on far right, that doesn't hold water. You can't talk about anything on the political spectrum to the left of Bernie Sanders, who, in Europe, would be a rather tame social democrat. But, I guess y'all like UBI and land value taxes, so, sure, it's totally a leftist echo chamber. :P
> You can't talk about anything on the political spectrum to the left of Bernie Sanders, who, in Europe, would be a rather tame social democrat.
I hear this repeatedly, and I'm not sure this placement of most American politicians on the same dimension as European politicians (if there's even a single dimension there) works very well. I would certainly agree on fiscal issues, for example, but on social issues, at least compared to the western European country in which I live, I suspect Sanders or other far-left US politicians would be on the far-left here as well.
>That's extremely bad for community, and I don't know what to do about it
If I were to start a site for online discussion, I would probably not even try to foster a sense of community in the participants.
Although is quite unhealthy for most people not to belong to a community, the human need for belonging is not so pressing that the average person cannot afford to participate a few hours a week on a site that has no hope of ever providing belongingness.
One advantage of having a T/V distinction in a language is that one can set the tone of a site by the address used, informal for "chummy aligned community" (belonging over contributing) and formal for "respectful diverse community" (contributing over belonging). Fortunately english has a formal "you" which we could use to demonstrate that this site is a community of inquiry among diverse opinions, not a community of like-minded folk. Unfortunately english no longer has the informal "thou"[1] so that signal is worth exactly zero bits.
Also, in the old days, T/V was asymmetric. If A V'd B, B T'd A.
These days we use symmetric address, so either A and B T each other or they V each other. (if A are a business advertising, the choice of V or T implicitly segments their market. Some businesses wimp out and advertise in english to avoid making any decision.)
As a German speaker, I can assure you that T/V doesn't necessarily say something about the level of politeness or respect in a discussion. I have witnessed newspaper comment sections or Facebook threads where people would V each other but still say very rude things.
I'd have to disagree. I've noticed a growing trend of comments like [1] getting upvoted rather than flagged despite making some awful remarks. I don't think it has anything to do with HN being 'non-siloed' because that would be the same argument as on Twitter or Facebook which mostly lack silos as well.
To make an unflattering comparison, Gab and the like are also non-siloed. But that doesn't stop a site from having an innate level of bias to the userbase. The nature of any forum on the internet is that it will cultivate a certain type of userbase over time. Obviously I'm not the greatest one to speak here because I definitely trend more towards the asshole side of the spectrum but I think it's something to be aware of.
We must understand the word 'silo' differently. Twitter and Facebook are the leading examples of siloed sites in my sense of the word. Twitter has follow lists, Facebook has the social graph. Similarly, on Reddit there are subreddits. HN has no mechanism like any of these: everyone is one big room, for better and for worse.
Re 23743914: I've banned that account. We didn't see that post at the time. I don't think it's typical for such a comment to get upvoted. From what I see, the vast majority get downvoted and/or flagged and/or moderated.
The site is anchored to YC and PG's perspective. I don't agree with them the majority of the time, but that's what gives this place an identity and a location in the world to draw it's internal culture from. This place is always going to lean into predictable US tech politics. A website detached from a real world purpose accumulates so much more moderating requirements, simply being a part of YC and means that a lot of the public self-selects not to be here.
And boy it does get too repetitive sometimes, but it's not all things to all men, it's a US tech forum.
I assume you're using "this account" to mean some series of accounts you've created over time, since it's only about 80 days old, and the days when libertarianism was arguably a majority view on HN had been long gone for years by then.
In this respect HN is about ten years behind the trend of the rest of the web, culturally; even r/libertarian comments in 2020 are probably less reliably libertarian than comments on not-explicitly-political forums anywhere on the web in 2000.
I agree, but unfortunately a lot of our culture and society revolves around these social networks right now. It drives the culture at this point, and having reasonable people disengaging from the platform en-masse might accelerate the toxic effects these social networks are having on our society even more. The toxic network effects have need to be identified, quantified and stopped. By regulation most likely.
Mods, thank you all for saving the day every day. Thank you a hundred times. (On behalf of these 99% of lurkers that benefit your work the most but never say anything.) (Flag this.)
Yes! Dang is doing such a great job. We tend to have really awesome discussions here and for the first few months on this site, I didn't even realize it was moderated. Hats off to him.
Alas, Scott left. Normally we'd both have posted more prominently about that, but it happened at an especially difficult time and that simply wasn't possible. (He's fine, I'm fine, and we're fine, in case that suggested otherwise.)
Dang does a good job? He does a good job of shutting down discussion that strays from the leftist agenda. Deleting anything that doesn't conform to the SV brand of wokeness while leaving up comments from leftist extremeists.
It has become impossible to talk about anything slightly controversial that detractors don't even try since they'll just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion.
This generally occurs after Dang has shut down the discussion for an arbitrarily reason, usually for “being inflammatory” when more “inflammatory” leftist commentary, usually in the same thread, are left untouched.
I sort of agree, he's definitely trying to enforce policies to advance an agenda while claiming pretty subjective justifications [1] for any action that he takes to shut down discussions. But to me that agenda looks like it's just about rich capitalist interests - just trying to make this place mostly corporate, capitalist friendly, not satisfy anyone's interests and "intellectual curiosity" as he likes to claim.
[1] Subjective justifications cannot teach anyone anything, as people can't know what exactly is the problem, only that they have to shut up, because moderator doesn't like what they are discussing.
Honestly, in a sea of internet cesspool, HN consistently shines.
Importantly, I have changed my opinions on certain aspects of technology or politics based on rational civilized discourse that happens here. Disagreement is actually an active and important part of such discussions.
On the flipside - Let's not act like ycombinator doesn't benefit from hn. YCombinator gets free advertising to a TON of good engineers for their companies roles (the posts that you can't comment on that mention X random ycombinator company is looking for Y role). Surely that has to be worth something...
I don't disagree with pg's statement here, but IMO yc gets pretty big benefit from running the forum.
Interesting. How do you account that? Two good hires can probably repeatably be obtained for under $100k in spending or giving away $100k of your company. Since Daniel G (dang) works on HN full time, and almost certainly makes more than $100k, that doesn't make sense to me.
The key to getting good discussions is to not have a profit motive coupled to eyeballs.
HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth.
Large newspapers had strict firewalls between advertising, journalism and opinion -- but smaller papers had to fold to pressure from advertisers.
Subscription services need eyeballs badly -- but they need paying eyeballs, which means that they need to offer more than just outrage -- but if they don't show at least some of their content for free, they can't grow.
That is plainly insufficient. There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. Privacy, anything google, amazon, or Uber, gender and racial politics, Facebook, etc. There's more going on here than the profit motive.
The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.
Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction.
The fact that often the most voted comments on hacker news are the most extreme (saying something is completely wrong) shows that we love correcting people and will discount a good conversation in place of some virtual approval.
> Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction.
I to would prefer the feedback mechanism on HN be more informative than a simple upvote downvote - it would be nice to know for example if downvotes are due to objective disagreement on facts vs ideology, things like that. Yes there could be negatives with this change, but there could also be positives...at the very least it would be nice to know the reason why we don't allow voters to attach reasoning to their vote.
I've done this at times to a well-written argument that I disagree with. Could be just basic fairness, hoping to attract somebody to counter-argue, or possibly to help it rise above more poorly-reasoned arguments for the same thing, or even to make my own counter-argument post more visible.
Sometimes I do. If I don't, it's probably because I just don't have the time or energy to write a well-reasoned counter-argument at the moment. Or maybe because I don't know enough, and don't feel like doing the research to support what I think. Getting sucked into internet arguments at work or while working on my own projects is just terrible for productivity and focus.
> Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?
I usually will up vote something if I can't see an obvious reason why it was downvoted...I've seen too many downvotes for dogmatic reasons and don't really post much here because of this.
I've done this too. A thing to note is that complaining about downvotes or how you expect something you posted to be downvoted tends to attract downvotes. Kind of weird, but just the way voting forums tend to go.
you should vote however you think will foster good discussion, and that sounds like as good a reason as any. another would be voting based on how you think the posts should be ordered from best to worst, regardless of agreement with individual posts.
sure, voting can sometimes hinder discussions by collapsing the many dimensions of judgement and value into a single binary, with loads of information loss on the way, but indistinct pronouncements like that are exactly why mechanisms like voting are implemented in the first place, to weed out shallow submissions to give space to more considered ones.
downvoting is dimensionally-collapsed feedback and requires nuanced examination to internalize well. so it makes sense to self-examine a bit, then dampen the internalization to account for ambiguity (rather than quitting). that builds both flexibility and resiliency.
sometimes you get no feedback at all, which is even more ambiguous. feedback always exhibits degrees of ambiguity, so we gotta figure these things out at some point in life (well, we don't, but that's worse), and this is a great place to practice.
The problem is not with the upvotes, but with the downvotes. These have the effect of silencing any oppinions that the majority of voters don’t agree with (as the message gets invisible). This should only be used with low quality messages, otherwise the result is that there will only be a single line of thought, like a broken record.
> There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics.
That doesn't feel like a huge issue here. I see tough topics brought up often and them being passionately discussed, but it generally goes quite civilily. I would not say there is lack of nuance at all - I learn a lot from reading people's counterpoints.
I mean, it's not perfect, but compared to other online discussion areas, it doesn't feel like a total waste of time to get into a nuanced discussion here.
I'm not saying it's relatively terrible here compared to the rest of the internet. I'm more thinking about the stridence of typical discussions, say, pre-1980. Simply, there was not a context where the typical person could go to have or witness aggressive partisan argumentation, be it about a company, a political system, whatever. Certainly, very, very few people could cause their statements to be broadcast to more than a handful of folks. Whereas your humble correspondent has probably gotten hundreds of impressions on these modest thoughts he has posted here. Another thing that wasn't present was the space for those views to feed back on themselves and become more intense, more passionate, and more aggressive.
That doesn't mean everything about the world was better back then. But this one thing was different.
I think it remains to be seen how much all this really matters. We probably won't know until they're writing the history books about this time.
Partisan argumentation was f2f, in self-selecting meetings. I suspect some of the things said in some of those contexts were far more extreme than is common today - but the median today is likely more polarised and heated.
I was on AOL in the mid-90s, and some parts were at least as toxic as Facebook.
Ultimately it's set by the quality of the moderation but also by the quality of the people. You need people who have some self-awareness and restraint, and who can tolerate dissenting views without exploding all over them.
I've just watched a music forum explode. The mods couldn't quite work out how to handle a difficult situation, there were wildly polarised views, and virtually everyone seemed to be operating from negative assumptions and bad faith without actually listening to what was being said.
It was honestly one of the ugliest things I've ever seen online.
Does it matter? I think it does. Civility is the foundation of culture. Most people at least attempt it, with varying degrees of success - but some people really aren't interested in it, because they prefer their hit of outrage.
I can't see how that can possibly be a good thing. Even if the aims are good, the means are mean and there's a general reduction in empathy and collective intelligence. None of these are good.
I really don't know how we get past this. Maybe we don't, and various bad things have to happen before that becomes an option.
But I am absolute sure now that the influence of mass social media is almost entirely toxic - like tobacco for the mind. The industry badly needs regulation, de-monopolisation and federation, but it's very hard to see that happening.
Sure it's uncharted territory and we've run into some issues but it's not all downsides. One upside of such easy communication is the unprecedented availability of knowledge.
Discussions on topics for which HN has a significant number of users who are experts are almost always incredibly insightful. The same mechanism that allows for broadcasting a view to a much larger number of people is also what facilitates that outcome. It does so by allowing us to fit more people into the same context (in a functional manner) than ever before.
Historically the best a room with more than ~15 people or so could do was to host a lecture of some sort. Now we occasionally manage to achieve productive and insightful discourse involving hundreds of people simultaneously. (The dynamics are a bit different of course but that's not the point.)
As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nearly irresistible urge to "correct" them, knowing fully well that my arguments will have no impact.
Here's the thing: before the internet and social media, you simply didn't encounter that many patently false arguments in your day to day life. Everything you read or saw was produced by journalists and writers (not bloggers) who had access to their parent organization's resources. Political bias aside, if a TIME or NYT editor let something go to print, it meant that it had gone through at least some basic fact check.
But that's not true online. Anyone can write anything, facts be damned. And worse, in your social media feed, a carefully researched article occupies the same space as some random guy's harebrained conspiracy theories.
We can't limit the amount of "wrongness" online. Best we can do is learn to live with it
I can't speak for Time, which has gone through a lot of ownership travails recently (albeit not as dire as Newsweek), but there are certainly still magazines and newspapers that do fact-checking. Some have full-time fact checking departments; the New Yorker in specific and Condé Nast publications in general are historically known for that. Newspapers may not employ people with the title of "fact checker" (although the New York Times has at least one staff reporter who does, in fact, have that title, Linda Qiu), but it's something that's generally the job of the editorial staff to do fact-checking.
Sure, newspapers fail at this occasionally, especially with articles that get rushed due to timeliness -- and unless it's a big long-form investigative journalism piece, it's quite likely only what editors consider the major elements have been vetted. (The old saw "if the paper got this small detail wrong, how can I trust them on the big claims they're making" largely has it backward: the big claims are the ones they want receipts for, whereas the small details are more likely to get passed through without due checking. This is, at the least, what I was told by a newspaper editor many years ago!)
HN does care about growth as it does have moderators and methods to make sure that it is engaging with the right audience for Y combinator. And the profit motive is there, as a pipeline into YCombinator, you can see from many of the well integrated ads. Just because it is done so well, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Having been someone who has benefitted hugely from this I have no problem with it however
The best conversations I had on the internet predate the like/upvote button. As soon as conversation became about scoring points and not engaging with an individual in a discussion it went to hell.
I don’t really think you can maintain a social media company at scale without having revenue to pay the people that maintain it.
HN doesn’t have ads because they are running HN at a deficit to get eyeballs on YC. Granted, to my knowledge, they haven’t suppressed any threads in their competitors; kudos.
I don't think YC really has "good discussions" as much as "A large group of people that already agree on most topics, communicating about those topics." And this site breeds just as much outrage as the next.
This is a pretty textbook look into a very unreflective echo chamber.
As someone who started reading HN specifically because outrage tired me out on other sites, I have to disagree on the "just as much outrage" point. I would say markedly less outrage on average than other popular social media platforms
And, I would add, you can't have any significant discussion about topics which this group of people disagree on. For example, you can't say:
* The "free market," even suitably regulated, is not a good allocator of resources.
* Anything about the actual accomplishments of the Soviet Union or China, such as the USSR going from a purely agrarian society to putting a rocket in space in under 50 years, even while criticizing them for their failures (Uyghur concentration camps, etc.)
* Capitalism is not the best economic system, because it leaves too many people behind.
I could go further, but then I'd be accused of "nationalistic flamebait."
People say things in buckets 1 and 3 all the time. You've got a stronger point in bucket 2 - that one is a lot harder.
The trouble with 1 and 3 is that people often want to make big generic ideological arguments about capitalism or whatever, and the medium of a large, public internet forum is simply not capable of sustaining interesting threads about that. They inevitably become predictable and nasty, the two things we most seek to avoid here. So I spend a lot of time asking people not to do that, as you know. But that's not because of an ideological disagreement, either at the moderator level or at the community level. It's at the level of the medium itself. McLuhan was right.
It's still possible to say things in more specific contexts though.
I think you can say those things and rightly expect to be challenged.
Downvotes are what they are. For me the discussion is more interesting than Internet points. There's also a polite way to say something and a more provocative way to express the same idea. HN doesn't value snark the same way other forums do.
I don't think that's an HN-specific attribute. That's how political correctness rears its head from the right side of the US political spectrum. I've long noticed critical responses to ideas like you described and many others. It's an unfortunate way discussion is suppressed. This is equally true of political correctness from the left side of the US political spectrum.
Not that there's anything wrong with just reading the stories, but I'm a bit incredulous that you haven't passively picked up the thesis, from the stories about the investment changes, demo days, and all the uh... YC startups that get discussed and front-paged.
There were some years when there were a slew of "Here's what I learned from applying to YC" stories, but those have mostly faded, and so have most startup-focused stories.
Now HN is a mix of tech news and politics, and I'm not surprised that some HN readers who are not interested in startups have no clue what YC is about.
This has been a big concern of mine lately. I spend more time here than I used to, but I increasingly get less and less value out of the time I spend here. I used to come here to learn about bleeding-edge technology and startups and cool ideas and things that geniuses were working on. Now when I come here I almost always end up arguing politics, not because I want to but because those are the stories that people actively comment on and I have poor self control.
The few tech stories that do make it through are far more pop-tech article (right now NPR, BBC, New York Times, MSN, and Haaretz are all on the front page... absolutely nothing to do with hackers or gratifying intellectual curiosity) or talking about startups that are shutting down.
I'm tired of collapsing the inevitable "Macbooks are bad" thread and finding out that was literally the only conversation under the article. I think the mods do a great job of keeping the conversation civil, but a poor job of enforcing "intellectual curiosity" like the guidelines call for.
If I can offer advice, give your piece if you feel it matters and then move on. One of the nice bits of HN is you can say your opinion and move on. There are no reply notifications. I definitely ended up engaging on forums way more than I should have. I quit one and used that to push myself out of commenting. Now I spend some time commenting here but don’t let myself get pulled back in to needless arguments. There’s a bunch of topics you can skip here and I generally guess at the sentiment of the comment before jumping in. There’s a few things that just end up rehashing the same arguments. Skip them and move on.
That's mostly true. It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and is not very well-known, but dang maintains hnreplies.com, an email notification service for HN. Apparently only 1860 users are signed up, but it's there.
In general, I agree with your advice. Very often I get halfway through writing a comment, but delete it because I don't think it will spawn useful conversation or be appreciated, whether it's because I'm being needlessly argumentative, or the person I'm replying to is.
I think that has to do with a general souring of opinion on the tech and startup space, including by the people in it. And we're in one of those times where politics and current events are so heavily impacting everyone in every way, including tech and startups, that it's impossible to ignore or avoid talking about, especially when some of the people who have fallen out of love with tech are politicians who want to regulate it.
Can I suggest the app "materialistic"? It doesn't show votes and, unlike the website, there's no easy way to see other people's replies to your comments. Also, being on mobile makes me less inclined to write essays. Overall this cuts the engagement feedback loop, and the result is that I mostly only contribute when I feel my comment makes a meaningful contribution.
...until recently, when I discovered that the website has a way to list your comments and their replies. Since then I've been using the website more, and I don't like how it's changed my engagement patterns. More looking at and thinking about karma, more replying to someone just because they replied to me. I guess generally more "social", in the bad (for me), human-level meta communication (ego, drama, etc), instead of with the more interesting content / ideas.
I would strongly suggest looking through some of Paul Graham's essays [1]. Doesn't matter what Y Combinator is or does but the founder of Y Combinator has some interesting opinions and writes about them a lot and some of them may enrich your life.
I got internet when I was 10 years old. I was one of the first ones in a small city, Brazil. We had our first computer when I was about 4 or 5. So, when the internet came, I already had 5 years of experience with computers. We all had nicknames and IRC handles to talk anonymous on the internet. Eventually came ICQ and we start having people as contact. I knew almost everyone in my city who was on the internet. It didn't took long to understand that I was not anonymous anymore. Although I had a nickname, I had also real connection with my contacts and I knew who they were. When I was 17 internet was a thing most people have, including people who never had a computer before. This people would say things online that they wouldn't in the real world. I remember an very rude email I got that someone sent my from their workplace. I just use whois to get a phone number from the company, I then call them and explained what happened, 10 minutes after the person who sent the email sent another apologizing. As someone said in the comments: this "rage" you see online is because we still can't punch each other through the screen (or cause it's very rare when a shit thing someone does online have a real backlash). Me, who grew up with a computer and in forums, IRC channels, regular chat rooms... already had some kind of ethics. When my father (that besides being the one who got us the computer) got on Facebook he had a fight with a lot of relatives because of politics or some other nonsense like that. (imagine fighting someone over a shitty politician who will never give a shit about you).
I always wonder how would I manage a social network or online community - I would try to have well established rules and try my best to enforce them. But in the end on the day I guess I would ban a lot of people and excluding a lot of groups. anyway, I love HN and I think you are doing a great job, both you and Dang. Keep it up.
HN certainly has its faults, but it has also helped numerous people improve their skills, find better jobs, share insights, start startups, build companies. There should be no doubt that HN is a net positive, and if you can't see that, then you are part of the problem with social media: you're so focused on the negative aspects of a subject that you've lost perspective.
PG's advice is to each person. You can rest assured that I have no desire whatsoever to do many things that are net positives to the world and are, nonetheless, deleterious to my life.
You'd be surprised reading Twitter. There's a large group of people that seem to hate this site (usually calling it the orange site), and I'm not sure why. Every site will have people you disagree with, but unlike sites like reddit, people seem to be genuine more often. Also ironic Twitter is being used as a platform to say HN is bad.
I do like hn promotes ShowHN. Seeing the mammoth projects, new startups, weekends hacks, parodies is a lot more entertaining than the polarizing discussions on the other social networks.
I just get a massive kick out of people building things and sharing them with the world.
I’ll leave HN the day Show HN stops being a thing and all we see is how Google released their new chat app or some company FAANG acquired for a bajillion dollars.
I think HN's done a reasonable job at keeping the community stable (thanks @dang) but the recent backlash over the press incited by SSC and Clubhouse has made see that the darker side of mob mentality exists on HN, too.
I can certainly see his point. The more I grow older, the more I am convinced to spend less time on internet interacting with people. Not only the anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is a magnet for toxic people, it also brings out the worst in people. Even disregarding the outright abuse or outrage, the opinions I see on the internet is very hard to meet someone in real life who has that kind of opinions.
Every Google related thread immediately becomes a thread of bashing Google's history of killing products. I don't know how many times people need to have the same conversation again and again. This has gotten to the point that I don't open any Google related threads. I am here to read thoughtful discussions, not some broken records again and again. Internet forum is hard.
> Not only the anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is a magnet for toxic people, it also brings out the worst in people.
For one, yes, but Facebook has clear names (usually) and still it degraded quite a bit and hosts obscure trends such as flat eathers. So I don't think anonymity is really all too important. Maybe it's rather that you can now find like-minded people to strengthen your opinion, even when there are actually really few overall.
I don't think it has anything to do with anonymity. Most people are using their real names on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But quips and outrage get more attention and engagement than serious discussion (and none of these platforms are conducive to long-form discussion).
The biggest problem is that replying to a post makes it appear in more feeds. Never in the history of debate and discussion has "add more people!" led to more effective communication. Think of your own work experience - how many meetings were useful when they grew and grew every week?
HN benefits from the lack of a feed but also suffers from the inability to continue discussions over long periods of time between a few users. Something like slack's threads would be useful for a forum, as well as more permanent (old school) topic-based subforums and threads.
> "I don't know how many times people need to have the same conversation again and again."
such an oddly particular criticism. don't you have the same conversation with certain people all the time offline too? it seems completely unavoidable if you have other people in your life. that it happens online too should be thoroughly unsurprising.
it's like thrift store shopping. you wade through all the same boring stuff to get to that rare new (to you) thing that makes it all worth it. focus on the payoff, not the rummaging. and certainly no one is so learned that nothing new can be found in many, if not most, of the discussions.
HN is full of bandwagons where every thread about certain subjects is identical to the last. Some topics are impossible to discuss here (e.g. anything related to Google).
Well, the thing about Google dropping products keeps coming up because ... they keep dropping products. I'm not sure every google-related thread goes that way.
So, I run a company called https://www.localhalo.com/ it builds local communities a bit like discord/slack but all geo-fenced.
We found that social utility is how you solve a LOT of these issues. If someone is going to be negative on your platform then give them the 'action' instead for that pain.
In local this is normally an issue with a neighbour, something for the HOA or something for Local Gov't. Just make them slackbot-esque buttons/commands. Give reacting features for others to support and you've turned decenters into your most active patrons.
The trick with social utility is only giving access to solutions that better everyone. People are lazy and if they can find a single way to do 80/20 of their community wants it normally produces good-actors.
If you want, send a draft to hn@ycombinator.com and I'll try to help you with feedback similar to how I help YC startups with their launches (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches - that's a YC-only thing but Show HNs are similar). Just realize that I can't necessarily reply quickly. The inbox can be brutal.
Same offer goes for anyone who wants some advice about how to present their work to HN.
Regardless of the value it brings to society, I believe Hacker News brings much value to YCombinator and the startups associated with it. Or at least it did up until recent years. I’ve never been part of a YC class, but I was kept abreast of many companies and changes to the program throughout the years largely because of it.
It is no fun being a sports referee either. One has to pay constant attention and remain detached, all the while hearing from both sides what lousy calls one has made. (A legal judge's opinion, on which I model referee'ing: "be just, and if you can't be just, be arbitrary")
(or, more frequently, failed to make. in the old days one could ask "have you ever gone fishing? Well, did you catch all the fish?" What would be a modern equivalent?)
Put so simple makes it a fascinating puzzle that I will need to ponder for years to come. Why is it the case, what can be done, who is up for it, what will they turn into, what happens with the subjects if done right/wrong?
It was amusing to me watching this comment turn grey when first stumbling upon it, I wonder if some apparently think entithas is just lying about it or if they’ve truly never come across a moderator or group of moderators who were just a power-tripping JERKS in their internet lives, and so thoroughly disbelieve there are people out there who just want power over a measly phpbb message board or subreddit that they just downvoted this and ran away.
I envy everyone who has yet to come across it, yours is truly a blessed internet experience. Those kinds of rulers just sap the joy out of communities and lead to splinter after splinter.
I imagine it was downvoted because it came across as a jab at the HN moderators.
Looking at the bigger picture, yeah, I have to agree. I have seen a virtual coup d'etat on a subreddit dedicated to fast food. (One moderator got kicked out. He responded by creating his own subreddit. He actually got 90% of the posters to come with him, leaving behind an empty husk of a subreddit.)
I imagine it was downvoted because it came across as a jab at the HN moderators.
Interesting. The comment seemed quite broad and generalized for one to come to that specific assumption, just because HN happens to be the where the discussion is being held, but appreciate the insight. Maybe I’m projecting a bit, since it’s not a conclusion I would have arrived at, but that’s for me to own and work on.
So here's a startup idea: create an HN-like forum for topics that are usually avoided on HN. Such as politics.
And the only way to have a civil politics forum is to have some professional moderator like dang who can step in and explain the rules to anyone who gets carried away a bit too much. Little by little, the users get educated and start enforcing the rules themselves, either via downvotes, or via actual comments.
Wouldn't that be great? In an age of complete political polarization, to have a sanctuary place on the internet where you can go and exchange thoughtful ideas with considerate peers who may or may not share your political alignment, but treat you with respect.
Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum? While the battles going on over ideas on social media are base --- there is still progress. Ideas are being put through the grinder and being put on display for all sorts of people who might never have had that opportunity a few short years ago.
It's quite possible, that while it's hard to watch, it is just the growing pains of a whole new chapter in the evolution of human thought. One that isn't restricted to sophisticated and polished elites.
Maybe the real problem is our aversion to an all out brawl, rather than the fight itself. It's possible that younger people will just be able to deal with it better -- learn how to better cope with and ignore distractions like trolls etc.
Maybe the problem is the aversion of the all out brawl... but the deeper problem is "who gets to brawl"? In an era of sock puppets and low effort comments, I've thought of a system where only those who at least regularly make very good arguments are allowed into the main event brawl so to speak.
I've thought of this in two ways. Either you have a free for all section on the website all are allowed into and then select from there, or you actually search for users on other websites and try to recruit them.
If you give users incentive to be better so they "get selected", they will respond to that. Then once you get them in you have to reinforce that somehow, and while slashdot made a lot of mistakes, I really like the random mod and metatagging system it used for that. The particulars aside, just doing something to keep the users from devolving is the important part.
Speaking as a minority who sometimes gets downright livid with the responses here to issues where social-issu technology intersect that are simply phrased eloquently and with “proper decorum” but are still pretty deleterious and exclusionary in their markedly disparate impacts and results for people like me-as more emotionally charged (rightfully, I will defend staunchly) comments criticizing such thoughts and opinion turn grey and ultimately get flagged into non-existence.
Thank you for speaking up. I often think of HN as ivory tower. It feels great for people who have zero urgency to address social issues because those social issues don't affect them in any way. In fact, those social issues might give some of us an undeserved advantage.
It's not a surprise when you consider PG's own desires to forever be in an ivory tower and to blame any criticism of his own faults on angry mobs. He's never wrong in his own eyes and it's pretty clear that comes from a position of privilege.
HN does achieve one goal: I do love it as a place to discuss intellectual ideas. It does come at a cost of largely sweeping social issues under the carpet.
I would love to see an HN with many of the same rules but where membership is truly diverse and where minorities outnumber the privileged. An HN started by a minority and that would not have PG's DNA. I imagine it having everything I love about HN and perhaps a lot less of what I dislike about HN.
I’ve thought once or twice about starting such a forum, but it’d probably be a bad idea because I have an incredibly fuse which probably won’t do well for the community as a forum leader at large. And at this point in time-a historically low tolerance for any manifestation of some of the bad-faith but eloquently delivered “talking points” from people who hold court in various ivory towers. That alone convinced me it’s not a good idea; plus PG’s general advice of not starting a forum overall is probably good advice for anyone who cherishes their mental health these days.
And the end of the day: There are other areas in real tangible life that I’ve decided to focus this energy and righteous indignation towards that are far more fulfilling, but I will still call things out here on HN where appropriate about these types of intersecting issues, and I will take the downvotes but I’m not gonna stop getting right up in people’s faces and challenging some of these things when they come up.
I'd answer that first question with an emphatic "no", since we already know what happens when decorum goes out the window - we have most other popular forums with a political section to look at. Feelings are hurt, personal attacks come up next, good faith dies, all of those things are anathema to deep discussion. I am aware of no place online, or in real life, where discussion and trolling (or big egos) can coexist.
You don't need sophistication and polish to not be a dick. That's the low water mark, here. Not big words, just please, thankyou, and a willingness to entertain thoughts you disagree with and explain your own.
Some things are urgent and demand outrage. While the Declaration of Independence might at first glance appear to be an example of decoram, it was not. What it said is that we are done entertaining your ideas and will now start to kill those who try to stop us from putting our ideas in place. Outrage is sometimes appropriate.
Not on Hacker News, they're not. There is no point in the history of this website (and I'd argue, most if not all social media sites) where outrage has accomplished anything productive or time-sensitive.
It's not a veiled insult. It's just an accurate description of what HN is. Outrage can be conducive to discussion if you're willing to listen to what some people's lives are actually like. I've had many great discussions that start out with someone outraged. A great way to continue that discussion and get down to the interesting issues is "you sound really angry, tell me why". And then you have to be willing to listen. If you're not willing to listen to angry people about social issues, don't expect to contribute to improving social issues. It's fine that HN has chosen not deal with those things. But then HN should have no problem being called the ivory tower it is.
> where you can go and exchange thoughtful ideas with considerate peers who may or may not share your political alignment, but treat you with respect.
I'll bet that this will never happen for topics like politics.
Politics is a 0 barrier to entry conversation and a maximally emotion driven discussion.
If a forum allows politics, the mod work load goes up and the forum will polarize itself. Politics is one of the natural scissor statements of the web.
I'm not sure how you have a civil discussion about inhumane acts that are supported by an oppressive system. Sometimes the only appropriate reaction is outrage. Just as an example I wouldn't engage in a civil conversation about whether or not to interfere with a rape in progress. When you find people demanding a civil conversation about unacceptable behavior, it's a pretty good sign that the entire point is to tone police the outrage and therfore normalize the oppression. Why should anyone consider for even a second to a demand that you must politely ask someone to stop raping a child? It should be called for what it is: a delaying tactic. We actually need more, not less, outrage for some of the problems society tolerates or even encourages. So what you'd most likely find in a political forum that demands polite interaction are mostly folks who are not oppressed and for which there is zero urgency to change things. What you find elsewhere is often ugly and uncomfortable. The real problem is that no one has solved is an extremely difficult one: when is outrage appropriate? Sometimes it is. Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way. What we need is to eliminate that while still allowing for appropriate outrage. For sure the fix is not allowing the privileged and the oppressors to decide what is appropriate . I don't have any solution in mind. But I do hope I've brought some nuanced clarity to how difficult a challenge it is to moderate outrage without silencing appropriate outrage.
I heavily disagree. While outrage at e.g. societal problems might sometimes be appropriate, directing that outrage at forum posters that defend what you call "unnaceptable behaviour" is just a bad idea.
If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them. If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands.
Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...)
> If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them.
That's classic victim blaming and no one should take these threats seriously. Any further radicalization of a viewpoint is entirely the responsibility of the person with those views.
> If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands.
I agree that's a risk.
> Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation.
I agree we have to consider the topic and I did give an extreme example. Yes, I do honestly think some topics that are being debated in society at the moment are just as horrible and as urgent to stop as a child being raped. I also already addressed this in my original comment: "Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way."
That article has very little to do with the topic. The author is an expert in marriages and treating people for anger and relationship problems and he goes on to talk about exactly that situation: "Divorce and Being Right". A marriage is ideally a relationship of equals. It has very little to do with an entire group of people being oppressed by society. In most cases we stay in a marriage by choice.
There is no easy way to leave society or to replace it with a better alternative.
> That's classic victim blaming and no one should take these threats seriously. Any further radicalization of a viewpoint is entirely the responsibility of the person with those views.
I don't really think I am victim blaming here. It is simply a fact that an individual often has influence on the situation where they have been the victim. Example: I would never blame a woman who has visited an area with high crime rates for getting raped there. But I still might advise them to e.g. not visit the area at night. I'm not saying it's fair, but I think it's the smart thing to do.
Same thing here. I assume that any person who is the target of a radical group is at least somewhat interested in not creating more members of that group. I'm not saying it's fair, but I think it's the smart thing to do.
> Yes, I do honestly think some topics that are being debated in society at the moment are just as horrible and as urgent to stop as a child being raped.
The key difference is that your example is an issue that allows for immediate action, while (I presume) the issues you are alluding to are of societal and systemic nature. In the analogy, having a civil discussion about the nature of the issue at hand would majorly detract from the victim being rescued. I do not see how this is the case for the actual issues at hand.
> That article has very little to do with the topic.
Agreed. I basically wanted to give context to my claim that giving in to outrage might lead to people filtering out valid arguments and context.
> Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong in some respect.
> Mental focus, the foundation of feelings of certainty, distorts reality by magnifying and amplifying one or two aspects of it while filtering out everything else. You might discover more detail about the one or two aspects you focus on, but what you discover will have no contextual meaning, because you have isolated those aspects from their dynamic interaction with the rest of the reality in which they exist. In other words, focus magnifies things out of proportion and blows them out of context.
What I'm trying to get at is that I think it is very possible to discuss a situation that, in the eyes of at least one of the participants of the discussion, is worthy of outrage without actually displaying that outrage and staying civil. To again use rape as an example, I think it is entirely reasonable to consider the experiences, pain and outrage of rape victims and their supporters valid, while still wanting them to be involved in civil discussions about the issues of false accusations and due process. (If they are willing to do so, of course)
Intuitively understand your concerns about groups of oppressed people possibly not feeling welcome in a completely outrage-free environment, but to me that seems totally unverifiable. Someone could argue for the complete reverse and that would probably be just as valid.
> It is simply a fact that an individual often has influence on the situation where they have been the victim.
That's victim blaming. And definitely not appropriate when we are talking about society oppressing someone. No one person can control society. And if you belong to a minority, the group you belong to has a much smaller voice when it comes to influencing society.
> I assume that any person who is the target of a radical group is at least somewhat interested in not creating more members of that group.
You keep saying that it creates more members of a radical group, but that's not true. No one becomes the member of a radical group just because someone else is outraged that they are suffering from injustice.
And history says you are wrong. From the American Revolutionary war, to the Civil War, the the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and to today's black lives matter movement what we have seen is the opposite: the more outrage there is over social injustice the more people eventually decide that the injustice we tolerated in the past is no longer acceptable. When you see conservative four star generals speak up and say we have to do something about racial justice in the USA, you know that the outrage has finally worked. We are on our way to fixing things. The vast majority of the US is moral. And as uncomfortable as outrage might be to us at first, we eventually do listen.
> That's victim blaming. And definitely not appropriate when we are talking about society oppressing someone. No one person can control society. And if you belong to a minority, the group you belong to has a much smaller voice when it comes to influencing society.
I genuinely do not understand how someone could possibly claim that simply acknowledging that a victim has influence on their situation is already victim blaming. It's horrible that people even have to think about how best avoid being victimized, yes totally. They should not have to. But that does not mean it should be impermissible to suggest ways they can act in their best interest.
> You keep saying that it creates more members of a radical group, but that's not true. No one becomes the member of a radical group just because someone else is outraged that they are suffering from injustice.
I'm not convinced. Many people convert to radical groups because they feel ostracized by the mainstream. Screaming "FUCK YOU RACIST! GO DIE" at a forum poster will only push them further right. Engaging with "I think you are mistaken, here is why" might cause them to reconsider at least part of their worldview.
> And history says you are wrong. From the American Revolutionary war, to the Civil War, the the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and to today's black lives matter movement what we have seen is the opposite: the more outrage there is over social injustice the more people eventually decide that the injustice we tolerated in the past is no longer acceptable.
Would you disagree that there might be a better way of achieving change than letting it spiral into an all-out war? That seems a bit accelerationionist-y and I presume that's not what you actually want.
> I genuinely do not understand how someone could possibly claim that simply acknowledging that a victim has influence on their situation is already victim blaming.
> Screaming "FUCK YOU RACIST! GO DIE" at a forum poster will only push them further right.
No it won't. What you are advocating for is tone policing. You are claiming that reasonable outrage is going to radicalize people and therefor people should not express anger when they have every right to be angry. "If she had calmed down, I wouldn't have hit her". Classic abuser and oppressor excuse.
> Would you disagree that there might be a better way of achieving change than letting it spiral into an all-out war?
Yes there is a better way. People should listen to outrage and fix things before it's too late. That onus is on the oppressor. Exactly what I've said all along.
> I think your optimism is a bit premature.
Time will tell. When formerly silent conservatives start joining progressives and all are with one voice saying "we must fix this", it's a damn good sign.
> The dangerous neighborhood example is such a classic that it's easy to find. Items 5 and 9 on this list:
I think you understand why citing a list tangentially related statements with entirely different intent and basically no other information will not change my mind. If you don't, please re-read my previous comments.
> No it won't.
I have given a statement, which in my understanding is consistent with the modern understanding of radicalisation, that argues that it does. I'm in no way an expert but I would appreciate a better response than "No".
> What you are advocating for is tone policing. You are claiming that reasonable outrage is going to radicalize people and therefor people should not express anger when they have every right to be angry. "If she had calmed down, I wouldn't have hit her". Classic abuser and oppressor excuse.
This argument relies on the premise that I am a bad-faith actor. I am not. The abuser would have hit her regardless, I am actually interested in having a discussion. Also, you yourself state how hard it is to pinpoint appropriate outrage.
> People should listen to outrage and fix things before it's too late. That onus is on the oppressor. Exactly what I've said all along.
You fail to argue that this means that outrage is necessary in all forms of discussion and that an outrage-free environment is inherently oppressive. I'm not saying it's the end-all solution, but certainly seems like a better idea than an environment where any group or group of groups is the arbiter of appropriate outrage.
> I think you understand why citing a list tangentially related statements with entirely different intent
And yet you cited an article on divorce which had little to do with the topic. When I challenged that, you dug in harder and quoted much of the article. The article I had already read in its entirety. At which point I just stopped even discussing that point.
My list did not have different intent. It directly addressed your claim that "I genuinely do not understand how someone could possibly claim...". It's not only possible to claim. It's pretty common to claim. The article gave concrete examples of how what you were doing is exactly victim blaming with your neighborhood example. The neighborhood example is so common you can find it in multiple articles.
People who are oppressed are already victims. And you are blaming them for not being polite enough about their outrage. That the victims are the ones who are creating more racism by being outraged. It's their fault that they are radicalizing people. I'm not sure how you can blame a victim for making the problem worse and then say it's not victim blaming.
> which in my understanding is consistent with the modern understanding of radicalisation
You are the one who made the original claim that it radicalizes people so the burden of proof is on you. I did not just say no. I followed that with a persuasive argument. Which is the same as you have been doing: trying to persuade without evidence. At this point you should provide sources that anger about oppression is causing radicalization in others.
> This argument relies on the premise that I am a bad-faith actor.
People can in good faith be guilty of tone policing.
> The abuser would have hit her regardless,
Exactly! The radical would have become radicalized regardless. Well done!
> you yourself state how hard it is to pinpoint appropriate outrage.
Sure. That is the challenge. If we agree on that, then we agree that outrage in some cases is appropriate. I could end there because that pretty much summarizes my entire argument: outrage is sometimes appropriate.
> You fail to argue that this means that outrage is necessary in all forms of discussion
That's a strawman. I never claimed it's necessary in all forms of discussion, and I don't believe it is. There is a price you pay when you censor outrage. And you simply have to decide if what you get in return is worth that price.
> an outrage-free environment is inherently oppressive
It helps maintain the status-quo. If the status-quo oppresses people, then it is by definition oppressive to those people. In a society that had no racial injustice you wouldn't need to censor outrage about racial injustice. That outrage would be rare and seem weird when it happens.
> certainly seems like a better idea than an environment where any group or group of groups is the arbiter of appropriate outrage.
If you are not oppressed by society, an ivory tower like HN is pretty amazing. And I never suggested that any group should be an arbiter of appropriate outrage. What I said is that the challenge is a difficult one. I don't have answers around that. I can still point out that lacking such answers any forum that censors outrage is an ivory tower.
I think we're talking about too many nuanced issues now. The last few messages have been entirely "I said, you said" and we even have seemed to hit a reply limit. I'll admit that I have probably not considered your arguments clearly because of my previous biases. But I am also going to claim that you may have done the same. (If you don't that's fine, I am absolutely not trying to gaslight here.)
I'll try to address some final points.
> Thats's a strawman. I never claimed it's necessary in all forms of discussion, and I don't believe it is.
I went of your statement "I'm not sure how you have a civil discussion about inhumane acts that are supported by an oppressive system" in your original post. To me it implied that you think an entirely civil discussion of any form about certain issues is not desirable.
> And yet you cited an article on divorce which had little to do with the topic. When I challenged that, you dug in harder and quoted much of the article.
I simply wanted to give context to why I quoted the article. I did not want to imply that you had not read or understood the article. Sorry, bad call.
> You are the one who made the original claim that it radicalizes people so the burden of proof is on you.
I would cite the concepts of "Personal grievance" and "Group grievance" with regard to radicalization.
> People who are oppressed are already victims. And you are blaming them for not being polite enough about their outrage. That the victims are the ones who are creating more racism by being outraged. It's their fault that they are radicalizing people. I'm not sure how you can blame a victim for making the problem worse and then say it's not victim blaming.
Point taken. Again I do not want to put blame on these victims. I just want to point out that their behavior might have unintended consequences and an environment that allows them to express their grievances without possibly making things worse for themselves would be better. I realize that achieving such an environment might be an impossibly hard task - I accept that when done badly it could make things worse even for them - but I refuse to accept that trying to do so is to be dismissed as victim blaming.
EDIT: It seems the reply limit isn't actually a thing. It must have been a visual bug at my end.
The problem with such an idea is that there's a lot of room for abuse below what can be expressed in the form of rules, which means it can be difficult to moderate without appearing to censor or favor particular sides.
People can be abusive in subtle ways that enter a gray area of civility. For example, a discussion thread that devolves into a combative exchange about what a participant really meant by their comments, and whether that means they're a white supremacist, will eventually become exhausting and pointless, and everyone knows it, but what kind of rule can ban "exhausting and pointless" threads?
But any moderation that can't be enforced on technical terms will start making the enforcers seem subjective and biased. Reddit has a long record of subs abandoned in anger by a large cohort of users because they consider the mods to be unfairly biased, and it's not always the case. Conversely, forums can die if the "good" users think that not enough is being done to shut up problematic users.
I help run a private discussion board that's been active for ten years now. It's great, but it's had its own share of drama. The hardest problem we had was a person who simply incited trouble. He didn't break any rules. He was just a very difficult person, and we knew (through friends of his) that he had mental issues. In the interest of being fair and keeping to our terms of use, we let him stay. While there were people who openly argued that the community should have room for people like him, others complained and started leaving the site, just because of all the heated drama. This went on for years. After several incidents where it just became too much, we decided to ban him permanently. But it was a hard decision. We still have "problem users" who, purely by voicing unpopular opinions (from nationalist/fascist sympathies to belief in anti-vaxx or rejection of Western medicine), incite a lot of heated discussions. They're not breaking any rules, they're just loud and controversial.
I think a discussion board lives and dies by the trust its users put in the moderators.
It's a beautiful dream, but I don't think it would work. Quotes from what is civil discourse about heated political topics would get taken out of context, posted on twitter, labeled as hate speech, picked up by the media, and probably end up getting the startup more or less canceled.
Yes, until 10 years ago or so. Try it today and people, whose idea of a public discourse is to doxx, cancel and threaten people with opposing views, will still harass whoever they can identify if they read something they don't like. Even if they can't post.
People were always like this. You just weren't able to see it, because you were in an offline "filter bubble" of peaceful and reasonable people. There have been countless civil wars in history after all.
No, what online media are doing is massive propaganda at scales and levels of insidiousness unlike ever imaginable before now. Cambridge analytica for instance targeted ads at people to maximize their outrage toward other citizens. Before advertisements were much easier to avoid or ignore and weren’t being used for outrage. Ads have to get clicks nowadays for revenue and in the past they just had to be associated with wide viewership. People click on what infuriates them more often than other content.
Just because the medium is more diverse doesn’t mean it’s much different.
In 2009, the NYT started a series called “Disunion”, a day-by-day look back to the Civil War 150 years prior. Filled with sampled newspapers, opinion pieces, letters to the editor.
After a couple of months, it was quite clear how a country tore itself apart. They didnt need ads or FB, all they needed were the paper owners and the editors. They actually paused the series because (imo) the things said about Lincoln in 1859 and Obama in 2009 were quite similar.
Long before the internet there were people generating enough outrage in a society to slaughter millions of people on flimsy or no basis. I don’t think this is anything new.
If anything, it offers a counterbalance: you can also communicate with groups of reasonable people not physically proximate to you.
Not in the postwar West, and that's the area where the change we're talking about is notable, so your point is actually an argument for the opposite conclusion.
Iraq? Vietnam? Surely those count as slaughtering massive numbers of people on flimsy bases.
But yes that trend seems to be slowing down, which I'd attribute to the splintering of mass media. Are we actually becoming more divided, or are we just becoming more aware of divisions because we're all more connected?
For sure those count. I mean domestically. Obviously we do things abroad that we would never tolerate at home, and that's one of the biggest problems with our society. Nonetheless the domestic situation has been stable for a long time, and if the foundation cracks there, it will be notable.
I think the difference is that even if there were unreasonable people, they usually weren't the majority because their reach was severely restricted outside their local area. Now the unreasonable people aren't limited to their geographic area, and can form mobs with members around the world in order to harass people.
One large difference is the Internet forces us to live with each other. Without the Internet it's easier to have two differing communities with different values and laws and so on, and they can both live and let live.
But now we have put all of the communities onto the same websites, and this is much more difficult.
Perhaps to some extent. There is always a baseline level of division and conflict. But I do believe there are things that can be done to amplify or suppress division in a society. I think we're leaning real hard on the amplification of division right now. None of this stuff has been around long enough to get an overall feeling on the effect it has on a society that has it versus a similar level society that does not, so it's hard to say for sure what the effect will be. I have a bad feeling about it though.
Yes because before the internet there was never division - like actual separate water fountains, door that you had to go in based on the color of your skin, schools, redlining, and racial covenants.
People aren't the medium, and that's what we're talking about. Social media is a different kind of communication mechanism that has evolved extremely rapidly and has overrun all of the typical social systems we had in place.
We just aren't designed to handle this and it's bringing out the worst in us.
After the demise of slashdot (around 2008?), I hung out on technocrat.net, which was run by Bruce Perens. It was great, but then Perens decided to kill it because it was too stressful to run. (If memory serves me correctly.) Then I found HN.
Language is too fragile & brittle to convey most of what we would like it to convey. People keep falling into this trap, and then getting irate when things go off the rails. This is a terrible confusion to have: if the meaning is not in the words, then where is it? The meaning is in the context, not in the symbols.
Things go sideways when false assumptions are made. Assuming a safe community is hostile is a path to unnecessary conflict. Assuming a well-intended statement is intended to be malicious is a path to complete communication meltdown.
PC-ness and call out culture has hype-reduced human communication to mere words. That's not to how communication evolved.
Yes. Words matter. But they are not the way humans communicate.
> Words matter. But they are not the way humans communicate.
People communicate any way they can. On online forums, we have to communicate with words as there is no other way (so far).
> Assuming a well-intended statement is intended to be malicious is a path to complete communication meltdown.
You're right, but this is just as much, and probably more so, the fault of the writer than the reader. Because like you said, so much of our communication is not using words, when we are limited to words, we have to be extra careful about which words we use and how we craft our message because the chance of being misunderstood is much higher.
Unfortunately, it pre-dates cancel culture and such. We've allowed "always assume the worst" to be normalized. We've made one (event) into a pattern.
Communication is a two way street. If one side (i.e., the receiver) is intentionally undermining "the contract" then the processes is doomed. You can't have a two-way process where one half is trying their best to communicate, and the other is trying their best not to do so. It doesn't work that way. Which is obvious at this point. Insanity is at an all time high.
People have always been insane, we've just never been connected to so many people simultaneously and have never experienced so much collective insanity accessible anytime, anywhere.
> You can't have a two-way process where one half is trying their best to communicate, and the other is trying their best not to do so
This is impossible to prove, especially how many "trying their best to communicate" efforts I've seen are simply not good enough. People suck at communicating clearly just as much as they suck at receiving and processing unclear communication, especially via text, and I bet people who think they are communicating effectively are misjudging just how effective their communication is. These people then tend to blame political affiliation for their lack of communication skills, though of course any platform will tend to be biased in some way or other.
But yes, communication is a two way street, and particularly with divisive topics, neither the sender nor the receiver of the message is properly taking into account people of differing opinions.
I do wonder what sort of traffic HN gets in terms of Page view. Would HN consider self hosting an analytic like plausible or other cloud solution where the information is public?
Wow. Thanks for sharing the numbers. 5M uniques is impressive. That feels like a pretty decent market share of all developers in the world.
Thank god HN doesn’t run paid ads. Otherwise I can see marketers spending crazy money for promoted posts. I hate how Twitter injects promoted posts into my feed. Thank you for keeping the ad-holes away from here.
Most of the post I could find that share their Data with blog post hitting front page of HN suggest they got less than 100K PV. They do get over 100K aggregate over a few days.
100K Vs 5M. This mildly suggest HN has a very high engagement from its users.
The numbers I mentioned are an undercount because they don't include all the apps and sites that consume HN through the API. When the new API we're working on is released, it will eventually all be in-house and then we'll know. I suspect the numbers will jump quite a bit.
TIL: That PG agrees that the source for Twitter’s toxicity is the pursue of engagement at all costs. Those recommendation algorithms that surface content that triggers people’s emotions and spur divisiveness are clearly one of the main reasons why citizens in the USA are at war among themselves.
It’s hard for us to believe our fancy AI algorithms that optimize for ad clicks have this massive side effects of actually manipulating what is perceived as reality and affecting their emotions.
They surface more enraging news and create echo chambers where anyone who doesn’t think like them are the enemy.
Eternal September is a period beginning in September 1993, the month that America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users.
Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges, universities, and other research institutions. Every September, many incoming students would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks' social norms or tire of using the service.
The influx of new users from AOL did not end and Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer number of new users.
Can't we leverage this lesson then? If smaller groups can be integrated into the larger one with enough time, then the answer is straightforward. You can have very large internet forums, but new users need to be slowly integrated into the 'culture' piecemeal.
Create a good culture, then break it out and parallelize it. New users get slotted into larger groups to learn the culture, then they can be sent on their way into the larger culture.
Metafilter has been successful, I believe primarily due to the $5 charge to create a posting account and the warmup period of limitations for new accounts. New accounts trickle in at a manageable level. All account owners get that sense of ownership and care that comes with exchanging currency for something. Most internet brigading can't scale a small expense to begin with, and existing account owners who might otherwise get bootstrapped into a brigade don't want to get kicked out for being a jerk.
SomethingAwful has a similar requirement on spending money for an account, but that's not stopped people from doing dumb things to get muted or banned, keeping the moderators quite busy.
Doesn't Stackoverflow do that? You can't answer immediately, and so on? But something seems to be missing there as that community and culture can be unfriendly.
I go there for answers. I not longer participate. It's not worth the effort.
Same here. SO is good for answers, but I've been chased off trying to participate too many times now. The community is toxic even to people that have lurked there for a decade.
Exclusivity has been one of the primary driving factors in most major social web companies... and then at some point they just open the floodgates. I think, barring the extreme freedom of speech side like the chans, a good analysis and use of exclusivity would be a great way to do things. What gives you the "ticket in" is another topic that would take a lot of thinking and would depend on the site and it's goals.
That's the primary factor which would determine the outcome. As a community, you probably want to attract currently undervalued people and help them to uncover their potential. If it's just invite-only community, I expect it to stagnate and never reinvent itself for the better.
There are a few good public forums (like lobste.rs) which require invitation to comment, and I inevitably end up ignoring them after I want to contribute to the conversation and realize it's not possible.
>> dominic @casiotone · 13h
>> unless his job is "maintaining a worryingly high level of white supremacist comments" no he does not
I remember, when I was in high school, I read a book about arithmomancy, an occult practice that basically consists of adding up, dividing etc numbers until you get to a result that has some esoteric significance.
For example, if you divide 300, the number of the Spartans in Thermopylae, by 100, the number of years in a century, you find 3, 3 is the number of the holy trinity, therefore the sacrifice of the Spartans at Thermopylae heralds the Lamb of God, who sacrificed himself to bring on the glory of the Trinity in a new aeon of the human spirit. Something along those lines- you basically do some base arithmetic and jump around meanings and symbols like a little frog from lillipad to lillipad.
Anyway, after I read that book, I started experimenting with my date of birth, specifically the day of the month, let's say it was made from the digits in XY. After spending a whole week obsessively (but how else) deriving all sorts of deeply meaningful, mystical insights about the relation of XY to the month and year of my birth, the births of my parents, my friends, Jesus Christ, Olaf Palme and Gina Lolobrigita, of all people, I started seeing "XY" e v e r y w h e r e. Like, I'd go to the loo and my eyes would idly scan the surroundings and find the two digits, XY, on the back of a shampoo bottle, or I'd see them aaalmost forming in the foam at the bottom of the bathtub, or the steam on the mirror, or wherever really. It took me a while to get over it. XY everywhere!
What does this tell us? That if you look for something hard enough, you will notice it to the exclusion of every other detail around it, even if every other detail appears with the same frequencey as that one thing you're seeing - and you're seeing it because your entire mind is actively looking for it.
Aye, you got it: confirmation bias.
So with "white supermacist" (or sexist, classist, genderist, whateverist) comments on HN. There's always someone who thinks HN leans one way in whatever polarised debate. Then there's always someone else who thinks it leans the other way. Because HN doesn't lean either way. It's just, people come on here wanting to find a certain opinion that they absolutely want to do battle with. So they lower their visor and through its cross-shaped slit they see what they want to see. And notice nothing else.
You've written a lot of words which fail to address anything in real life: there are plenty of openly racist, misogynistic comments on HN that don't get flagged, they don't get downvotes, and often get upvotes.
And there are plenty more of openly racist, misogynistic comments on HN that get flagged to death. Plus, the accounts that post only such comments get shadowbanned and their throwaways get shadobanned. Then those that get their comments treated liek that complain that their freedom of speech is impinged upon or whatever and they post comments that they preface with "let the downvotes begin" and they get downvoted not because of what they say, that nobody reads, but because of the preface, that everybody knows is a sign of an unworthy comment.
Clearly, some escape. There's one moderator and a community of users who can't always be vigilant or always have time to read through every polarised screed at the bottom of a ten-comment thread. So yeah, some stuff that should really be buried, stays in the open.
"The way we recruit the best people in the world is by reaching them via multiple channels. So the alumni work is really important, hacker news is really important, putting great content online is really important"
pretty sure this isn't what I was thinking of, so still looking
The highest quality forum I know is AskHistorians on reddit. The content is amazing and it even seems to be getting better over time. They have very very strict moderation and the forum is notorious for how many posts are getting deleted by moderators (including all complaints about the strict moderation). But it works.
I'm curious what was the motivation for keeping HN going. It doesn't seem like a large capital sink, but apparently has extremely high costs otherwise. Paul is a man who is very smart about allocating resources and effort. Why HN?
Are we at a point where dividing HN into smaller communities is beneficial? I know there are Show HN, Ask HN, Who is Hiring, etc?
I want to see a section for DIY/personal projects and maybe even AMAs.
I really like the plain structure, but I also noted that sometimes it is difficult for the small projects to reach the front page. Please remember to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote interesting small projects.
Maybe adding more filters at the top is useful, but one of HN's strengths is how flat it is. If it was divided into a ton of subforums it would lead to some core boards receiving the majority of traffic while other ones becoming isolated satellites.
"Don't run a forum similar with reddit-style popularity rankings" might be a better description.
Running a forum is part of managing a community, where ideas, advice and other positive things can be exchanged. If you're a startup, a community can help seed your initial userbase and give you valuable feedback to see if you're providing value to a group of people.
That doesn't mean there aren't stressors, but I disagree with the blanket "don't do it, it's scary".
It's hard to state how invaluable HN is to me personally, and likely to the Internet as well. It's hard to say if the stress was worth it, but it created something really special.
> @theshawwn: [dang] has had a habit of silencing some long-standing members of HN: yummyfajitas, mtgx, myself – for what seem to be inconsistent reasons. He also applies penalties that last for years, and people are too afraid to say anything. I feel bad saying this, but when Dan retires, I'll feel relieved. It's hard to overstate just how authoritarian he is, underneath that disarming personality. He reads every comment. You can't say anything without speaking to Dan, indirectly.
(I have no connection to the mods, all of this is just me guessing.)
People who behave poorly, especially if it's something they've done for a long time, can dislike being held to account for that. dang has a range of tools available, and these get used to hold people to account for their destructive behaviours. These people get increasing levels of warnings before they eventually get banned.
And then, when they've been banned, they see some other account that posts similar content that hasn't been banned and they say "inconsistent!". What they've missed is the "yet" part of "hasn't been banned yet" -- that other account may be banned in future, or if they drop the destructive behaviour they may have all the measures removed.
> He also applies penalties that last for years, and people are too afraid to say anything.
I don't know what dang's email account is like but I'm guessing it's full of people who are not too afraid to say anything.
I woke up to see this on HN, and I am now absolutely terrified that my account will be put under yet another penalty, this time for saying something that was supposed to be kept on Twitter.
I can't talk about this here, or at all. When I tried, I was ... punished. We'll leave it at that.
HN is run fine, and Dan does a good job. I just hope he is legitimately happy – sometimes I worry he's been hunting trolls for so long that all he sees are trolls rather than people. But it's not my place to express such concerns.
And I miss Scott. He was something of a mentor. I've wanted to somehow contact him, mostly just to say "Hey, hope you're well, miss you." But Dan is the only one who knows how, and I no longer have the privilege of emailing him to ask, after having squandered it.
> What they've missed is the "yet" part of "hasn't been banned yet" -- that other account may be banned in future, or if they drop the destructive behaviour they may have all the measures removed.
That's a problem though. If you let some murderers roam free and when somebody says "you arrested me when I murdered somebody, why aren't you arresting them", you say "hey, you don't know that we don't arrest them, we're just haven't arrested them yet. Please wait 100 years to see whether we really don't arrest them".
I don't know what the original comment was about etc, but "maybe it'll eventually be consistent" isn't a good answer to claims of inconsistency. Maybe it will, but it probably won't. If behavior is treated differently, the best prediction is that it will continue to be treated differently.
The original comment is about dang jumpyness and unfairness in moderation. He won't touch some people for the things he will shadowban or downweight others. Whatever you can praise dang for, moderation isn't one of those things. On HN there are effectively no rules and no objectivity, only what moderators say goes.
I don’t think pg is discouraging others from starting a forum. He’s merely saying running a forum has a lot more stress in moderating it than building the technology.
But it could be that dang enjoys what pg found stressful.
I was part of running a community website but I absolutely hated running the admin side of it. I just wanted to build pretty UI and make things work. I absolutely loathed responding to support emails. It drained me out. A non technical friend of ours loved the admin and people side. He would onboard users, write nice how to articles for others, resolve conflicts, respond to suooort emails. He did not care one bit about how it all worked, just that it worked and he could help others get value out of the site.
Some people are good at building things, Some people are great at fostering built things.
> I don’t think pg is discouraging others from starting a forum.
He literally wrote "Don't start a forum". Yet, solutions to current problems with social media may be limited by the fact that only a few companies manage the content. PG is not motivated to innovate on social media tools as a builder or an investor.
We need better forums with better moderation tools that enable more users to participate in moderation. It is possible to do within existing forums or a new one, so I would encourage innovation on this rather than discourage it. There are a hundred ways you could empower better communities using things like annotator agreement or automated appeals.
I started an internet forum in 2006 whose audience was almost entirely female. It grew to a reasonable size, not huge, but what was remarkable was a nearly complete lack of trolls, arguments, and bad behavior. We saw that women just engage differently online, with a premium on expressing positive sentiments and encouraging each other to contribute constructively. Of course I don't want to generalize, but the removal of young men at their testosterone peak age from anonymous forums is remarkable.
Mmm yeah I dunno about that, based on experience. I'm not looking to enumerate all of my experiences, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that women can do just as much bad behavior as men. I would wonder if it's really due to the size being kept small, whatever vetting mechanism was used to admit users, or moderator tactics.
I have seen that small forums, especially for a specific purpose, tend to be mostly civil and positive. It is pretty easy for a handful of bad actors, maybe even just one, to be disruptive enough to pretty much singlehandedly destroy such forums. It seems almost inevitable once a forum grows to a certain size, but swift and effective moderator action can often nip it in the bud. Experience or good instincts may help a lot in identifying users who are just inherently destructive and booting them out entirely before they have a chance to really get going.
But you did, and it makes me sad to see the testosterone blaming stuff here.
To be honest, I do remember online communities being much nicer back then (we're talking 14 years ago here) but things have changed a lot. I feel like strong moderation and guidelines work great (see HN where discussions are mostly civilized) instead of blaming half of the world population from an individual observation which can quickly be debunked by visiting any female-only forum or subreddit in 2020 for example.
I'm not sure that's what they were saying; at least, the second part qualified that first sentence.
It feels like you're changing what they said into something that is obviously false. It isn't so black and white as "do you believe hormones don't affect feelings", so asking that dumbs down the conversation and detracts from the point that testosterone may not be the only thing affecting online conversations.
I guess it's similar to replying to you with the question: "do you believe testosterone is the sole cause for unkind behaviour online?" That just isn't what you meant.
I think that women can also be very toxic when given the right incentives.
I saw certain MLM groups where women (and exclusively women, since these MLMs didn't cater to men) would say pretty nasty and offensive things to push their agenda and using the same idea of positivity, encouragement and "female empowerment" and any naysayer will get shut down supposedly because they are being negative or not supportive (completely overlooking the fact that they're hawking a scam).
I am not sure whether women need an external trigger for this (such as the MLM in this example) whether as men tend to do it by themselves, or if you simply got lucky and happened to be surrounded by good people, especially in that early era when computers, internet access (for non-work purposes) and social networking was still relatively niche and acted as a filter compared to nowadays where every idiot has access to all those things.
MLMs are the corporate equivalent of social networking - but worse. And they appeal to a certain kind of person.
But it's a much more general problem. So much of what humans do is about creating Happy Brain and avoiding Unhappy Brain.
We're held hostage by our chemical pathways, usually in ways we're not even aware of.
We'd likely be more effective and have better survival potential if we could break out of the hedonic loop and not fall straight into the obvious traps.
I think there is a genuine difference in how men and women interact, online and off - different tolerances for confrontation might be part of it.
More confrontations can lead to trolling or unnecessary flame wars, but also avoid the kind of misunderstandings that lead to festering resentment. I think bad behaviour is a human universal, but how it manifests might be quite different from community to community.
Good point on the nastiness in the name of positivity. See the askwomen sub on reddit. On some threads EVERY comment is deleted and the topic is closed because people supposedly weren’t being positive/inclusive/whatever enough. Really, every single person?! The moderation is off the rails and it creates an atmosphere of paranoia.
I've been part of new mother forums when my wife was pregnant - the bitchiness and the flexing on each other was massive. Either you were tone deaf to it or some other factor prevented that on your site.
I think it's simply because 2006 was a different (and better) time when it comes to social networking on the internet.
Computers were still more niche, more complex and required more effort to use which acted as a built-in filter; if you invest all this effort into getting onto the forum to participate there's a higher chance that you legitimately want to contribute constructively.
Nowadays, every idiot out there has access to an internet browser and already has a social media account (and can use it to log into most other websites which implement social login for the sake of growth) and start spewing bullshit.
I have noticed a similar trend when it comes to online PC gaming. I used to play a shooter game (Crysis) back in ~2008 and the atmosphere on servers was always great; the chat was respectful, there were actual discussions happening in-game and I haven't seen any disrespect, rage or anger. Nowadays I play Battlefield and the chat is mostly empty, only interrupted by insults and the occasional server info message. Console gaming introduces voice chat and seems dominated by kids swearing their lungs out. I guess back in the day the cost of a machine capable to run these games acted as a filter, where as nowadays everyone has access to them, even those that shouldn't.
I like that the link you posted is for unreal 2004. I used to play that with my mates in 2004 when I was 16 years old.
The server with the least lag and most players was always a French server, when it was the end of my night I'd start yelling "France is shit" into the mic until I got banned. I'd go to bed then play on the same server the next day because my DHCP IP address lease would renew overnight on my 2MB broadband ISP.
I don't know why I used to do that - we all thought it was hilarious though. We were actually quite a good onslaught and CTF team too.
There's something to this. Online PC gaming communities can be really problematic, but online console gamers tend to be even worse. I think it's the younger age and lower bar to entry.
Toxic does not even begin to describe it. The rampant bullying and misogyny, the stupid machismo... It completely turned me away from pvp and competitive play.
Online new-mother forums are an extremely special and extremely toxic outlier.
We know how heated normal online discourse can become over the most trivial things. Right?
Now, raise those stakes by orders of magnitude. Now, if you're wrong, it doesn't just mean you have a bad opinion about Rust or mechanical keyboards or Star Wars or whatever. No, being wrong means you are literally a bad parent, or will perhaps be perceived as one.
Oh, and on top of that? Everybody on those forums is stretched beyond their physical limits due to chronic sleep deprivation.
And they probably just chugged a bunch of coffee.
And there's a crying baby in the background.
Yeah.
I wouldn't draw conclusions about anything else in the world based on new-mother forums.
I was part of, and eventually managed an internet forum around the same time.
Male and female were about equal, and no specific issues were more related to either gender.
Just one additional data point.
—-
In my experience, men will generally be overtly hostile/assholes.
Women will be nice to your face and then try to destroy your reputation behind your back.
It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).
> It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).
I felt the same way until I read ‘Sapiens’ (yes yes, I know it’s something of a meme book around here), where in a certain section it is pointed out that gossiping is one of the most efficient ways to disseminate information in social groups without creating direct conflict.
To be honest, I still largely feel the same way. I too don’t understand how people can be so incongruent as to talk shit behind people their back, but somehow operate on the mode that this doesn’t happen to them (they wouldn’t like it
if people talked shit about them, so why do it). But, I’ve largely come to accept it, and even mildly participate. Apparently it is an important social construct, so by joining in you don’t seem like you are disapproving of the behavior and judging people for it.
One nice thing about male platonic relationships is that ribbing on each other with harsh jokes is commonplace, which allows to perform the same function as gossip but now in plain sight, including the person it is about. And because it is packaged as a joke it is both less hurtful and still allows the plausible deniability for either party to evade direct conflict.
I think this is also why women gossip more and do it in a much more toxic manner: they don’t have the same social culture of ribbing on each other, necessitating more and harsher gossip.
Worth considering the first iPhone wasn't released until 2007. I think you had a very unique sample of the population: women who used internet forums pre-smartphone ubiquity.
This echoes my experience. My site (of which the forum was the most active part) was most active circa 2003-2012 FWIW.
Our male:female ratio was 2:1.
(Which was honestly really high for those days, particularly the early 2000's)
Our ratio of problems with male users to female users was probably more like 20:1.
Overall it was a positive community. There were memorable exceptions involving problems with female members, both online and offline, but they were notable partly for being such anomalies.
Additionally, many female members expressed to me that the "sparring" nature of the forums tended to be a real turnoff. They preferred to use the other features of the site.
I thought the same thing but after witness several times how extremely cruel women gossip can be to a third person (usually another woman) I realized that they just are the same.
I'd argue that the time period plays a more important role there than the gender, considering the kind of mobs I've seen on Tumblr and communities for TV shows (Steven Universe/Adventure Time/Gravity Falls comes to mind).
the internet was plenty toxic in the 90ies also, but you had a much thicker skin then and you simply blocked the kid in your personal settings.
it became problematic when you had to discuss to block/censor the offender centrally. before you never did that, central services refused to engage in such pleads and wars.
I am a member of a forum similar to the one described by the parent poster and I would under no circumstances link it here specifically and explicitly because of the behavior regularly and explicitly exhibited on HN, including and especially in your post.
"Citations needed" posts about anecdotal experience make good people leave because it turns a discussion into adversarial disproof.
Your post kills the kinds of communities that are better when fostered.
As someone who occasionally has run-ins with mods, I have to remark that moderation as of late has been quite welcoming to "dissenting" opinion, exceptionally so given current events.
Thank you, dang, you have shepherded a glimmering institution among a sea of rough.
The effects it’s had are far reaching. The Arab spring, right wing extremism, anti vaxxers, the rise of Bernie Sanders just off the top of my head. Seems quite serious to me
Are we sure the civil war isn’t being caused by sychophants like PG himself cozying up to the alt-right while maintaining considerable power over online discourse?
Maybe these are the """hard questions"""[0] that need to be asked, as opposed to calling for a return to the Jim Crow era.
Perhaps if the queen of Hacker News chose to be clear about his beliefs his minions wouldn’t need to scurry to claim "he doesn’t actually believe this"
It's unfortunate you're getting censored for criticizing Dear Leader.
Yet another reminder of just how creepy the cult of personality HN has around Paul Graham is. Even on an article discussing him, you can't say anything critical without being downvoted and flagged.
I’ve been here for quite a while, and I’ve learned more from this community (which included developers across the planet) than I’ve learned from any other community online.
I’ve known PG’s biases and dogwhistles for a while ("What you can’t say" is a FOGHORN of a dogwhistle), but the political landscape has changed.
When PG is expressing open regret for opening this forum, despite dang doing most of the work, he’s signaling that the discussion of this forum isn’t going in the direction he wants. This has been the most civil forum on the surface web for a long time. And that says a lot.
you certainly can criticize pg's arguments and not get downvoted (i've done it in the past), but any ad hominems will, and should, quickly be downvoted.
if you think you have some real knowledge to drop, make a considered criticism instead of a snide remark.
The outrage seems to be like a drug. Nothing generates engagement quite like it, even if it's toxic in the long-term. So all social media platforms that embrace it grow bigger until they become near-monopolies, and all that don't so far have had a hard time growing userbases, making money, and generally fade into irrelevance.
It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.