Do you know the Monty Python line "God would see through a cheap ploy like that?" People would see through that and rip it to shreds the same way.
Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
I'm racking my brains and Google and can't seem to pull up which Monty Python sketch or movie that one comes from. Give a hint?
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
Wasn't the "cheap ploy" tried long ago with a week of Erlang? It probably didn't work as intended then either, but I'm curious if it's just the scale of HN that has changed, or if it's something else, that makes such an experiment seem even more out of the question now.
I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.
Maybe politics keep popping up because it's a conversation that needs to happen?
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
It definitely needs to happen. From my perspective the question is whether it needs to happen here on HN. The answer is yes and no, for the reasons I linked to above.
There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.
In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].
My working theory of the eigentweet is that it's more internal than people "wanting to target this audience." I don't think it requires much if any outside influence or explicit bad faith. (I'm a moderator on a non-American political subreddit, so most of my opinions below come from my own observations and musings.)
Instead, the decay of social media happens as the platform transitions from a place where one talks with people to a place where one talks at people.
If I reply to your political thoughts by telling you off, I'm probably not trying to convince you to change your mind. Instead, I'm performing for the attention (and upvotes / retweets / kind comments) of like-minded peers.
That's obviously alienating for the person who gets attacked, but this kind of performance is also self-radicalizing. The validating reinforcement preferentially goes to the strongest attacks or defenses, favouring rhetoric (as you noted) rather than substance.
One of the few things that suppresses this cycle is exactly what HN does reasonably well: have the community be about something else, diluting political content such that there's less often a chain-reaction.
Its usually when there is a fundamental difference between ideas where no compromise can be made. For example, I think cities should ban personal car use while others think this is a horrible idea. We could go on and on repeating these same conversations but its not particularly useful or interesting.
Maybe, maybe not. If the goal of both people in that discussion is to convert the other to their point of view, then yes, often times these discussions are not worth having. But we're not having private conversations here. The views of both sides can educate others who are participating in the discussion or even merely observing it. Sometimes it is good to watch a discussion on a topic you feel passionate about play out without participating. While you still might get irritated by those with opposing views, it's easier to digest what they are writing/saying when it's not directed to you individually. This helps with understanding why they have a differing view and in some cases, might even help you see a weakness in your own position that you never realized was there.
> Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
Due to rightwingers often feeling unwelcome elsewhere a lot go to those places, meaning both communities think they need more leftists to balance things out.
Frankly, their election fraud thread - which has hundreds of comments demonstrating both extreme misunderstanding of statistics and the voting process, coupled with a willingness to make or support incredible claims without any substantive evidence or knowledge of the subject matter - says a lot about that community, in my view.
Way way back in the day there used to be a sortof rate-limiting function of sorts where if too many people showed up and tried to talk politics, we'd post lots of stories about...arc, or lisp or something?
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
Nothing is stopping anyone from posting more of the kind of content they would rather see, as opposed to complaining about the content they would rather see less of.
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
It's the same algorithm, but it only considers upvotes by users who registered before (checking the code...) December 13, 2008. That's long ago—only (checking the data...) 1.5% of HN accounts existed back then. Yet the "classic" frontpage is not that different from the main frontpage. This was the main conclusion when pg launched the feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271, and again in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513.
What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.
It's an interesting result - it only counts upvotes by users from before December 2008 who are still active on the site
After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.
That's a good point. But there are a lot of users from 2008 still active on the site. It would be interesting to see how the attrition rate has changed over time, but I've never looked into that.
My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.
as has become more and more obvious over recent years in particular, technology and politics are intrinsically linked. Most obvious was always when topics like Urbit come up on HN. People's political and social views influence the technologies they built, be it clubhouse, or bitcoin or Parler. Even if the designers themselves may not even be aware of it.
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
