6 ms·

Sure, you can be annoyed with my tone or even not like me personally. But, down-voting me just for one of those reasons - that's just a form of suppression / ce

by ap22213 11y ago

Sure, you can be annoyed with my tone or even not like me personally. But, down-voting me just for one of those reasons - that's just a form of suppression / censorship. But, on the other hand, I know I violated the guidelines, so I took a risk. Just trying to prove a point.

derefr 11y ago
Well, yeah; that's what downvoting means: "I want to protect everyone else from wasting their time reading this." It certainly is suppression; and everyone who wants to be here has signed up for suppression. Calling it censorship, though, makes it sound like you think of HN as your blog. HN is a forum; a downvote is the virtual equivalent of what happens in a real public forum when people—as a group—decide to walk away from someone so they can talk without that person's viewpoint interrupting them. It's not censorship; the person is still free to talk. It's a decision to not listen, and a persistent notice posted that the person is—for people whose tastes agree with those that walked away—not worth one's time listening to. You can say anything you like by responding to an HN comment as a quote on your own blog. Anyone trying to deny you that would be attempting censorship. Everything else, though, is just the reaction of a community-as-organism to something that community doesn't like. It's no more censorship than a single person ignoring you and walking away is.
- ap22213 11y ago
  Interesting perspective. If that's the current common view, then in a way I feel really outdated. I clearly haven't been paying attention and honestly haven't been aware that 'down-voting' has changed in meaning over the past 10 years or so. Thanks for pointing that out. It's good to learn new things. Although I feel kind of aged at the moment, it also makes me feel good knowing that I can now suppress people much more liberally and not [care if their content was meant to be constructive or not]. Who knew? edit from: give a shit
  - zipppy 11y ago
    Who says that people "don't give a shit"? People disagreeing with your opinions, and down-voting your posts, is not necessarily a sign that things have changed or that the down-voters are cruel. Unpopular posts have been around a long time.
  - derefr 11y ago
    I'm not sure if it's the majority view, but it's certainly held by a decent percentage of people. I think the change happened gradually; people saw what happened as the result of espousing populist "everyone has a voice and a downvote is only for trolling" policies, on sites like Slashdot and Digg and early pre-subreddits Reddit: a reversion-to-the-societal-mean of cat pictures and other "shallow content", and the complete inability to have a discussion on a topic of any controversy. The reaction, as seen originally in MetaFilter and SomethingAwful, and lately in post-subreddits Reddit, Tumblr, Discourse, Slack, etc., is that attempting to create a community that contains people with diametrically-opposed viewpoints is silly, and the fundamental verb of community-building is moderation: banning people who don't fit in, so that what's left is a pleasant place to have a conversation without anyone needing to expend any effort in tolerating anyone else. The group who believes in the early, populist systems, calls the second wave of systems "echo chambers"—but engaging with that idea at an object-level is silly, because I really believe there's a fundamental difference between the environment in which the two kinds of forums were built. The first wave of forums were built from the ideas of Usenet, IRC, and ISP-hosted chatrooms: open-access "places" that served as Schelling points for anyone interested in a topic. There was no real possibility for moderation, and the sheer scale of the problem (the possibility of a 10000:1 user-to-moderator ratio) made "community-building" impossible. Also, it was, for many people, the only place online where they could express themselves—for anyone who wasn't enough of a wizard to put together HTML and a web-server, the shiny "POST" button on a forum somewhere was the only way to get their opinion out there. The second wave of forums is being built in an environment where everyone has their own blog (or Twitter/Facebook feed), people can asymmetrically "follow" one-another's blogs in numerous ways and "unfollow" when they lose interest, and people each use many small forums to engage in their interests, where frequently these blog posts are shared (this being the usual way people's personal blogs get discovered.) In this newer system, each forum is less like a "place", and more like a "group"—a circle of friends that happen to share a common interest, but who also share values that allow them to get along even when not talking about that interest. People bounce around between many small group-forums (HN being one of those) until they find a few forums compatible with their values, and then stay active in all of them, fully comfortable with the idea of participating in several non-overlapping spheres that could be connected and mixed together, but that aren't, for social rather than topical reasons. One more interesting aspect of the newer Internet is that, when engaged in these group-forums, people naturally lean toward developing "faces": different presentations of aspects of themselves, tuned to the interests and values of the group. I would never talk about e.g. my weekends spent with my girlfriend with my online D&D group, because they're all single so it'd just annoy them. What I do on the weekend is an aspect of me, but it's not an aspect of "that guy that posts in that Slack team." And so on for each group-forum we engage with. I can understand missing the old "place culture" of the Internet—the heady days where a forum was just everybody that happened to like something or be somewhere, where both heavy arguments and friendships could spring up. But I think I prefer the current culture: the one thing it's done for me, personally, is to remove some "perennial arguments" from most of the places I visit. Having a community means being able to have a culture, with cultural mores like "we know we don't agree about X, and at this point more ink spilled on the subject is just wasted"—and being able to teach that culture even to new members who weren't there for the original arguments. There's much less to roll my eyes at on the new Internet (though there is the whole concept of "hate-blogging", where people build communities based on a shared distaste for something, and then sometimes things leak out of those communities and it's quite painful.) It's also much simpler to make "real" friends (as opposed to acquaintances), since joining a group-forum is less like joining a society (which tells you nothing about how likely anyone there is to like you), and more like joining a club (where, if you liked the club enough to join, this greatly increases your chances you'll like the people in the club enough to become personal friends.)

by ap22213 11y ago

derefr 11y ago

Well, yeah; that's what downvoting means: "I want to protect everyone else from wasting their time reading this." It certainly is suppression; and everyone who wants to be here has signed up for suppression. Calling it censorship, though, makes it sound like you think of HN as your blog. HN is a forum; a downvote is the virtual equivalent of what happens in a real public forum when people—as a group—decide to walk away from someone so they can talk without that person's viewpoint interrupting them. It's not censorship; the person is still free to talk. It's a decision to not listen, and a persistent notice posted that the person is—for people whose tastes agree with those that walked away—not worth one's time listening to. You can say anything you like by responding to an HN comment as a quote on your own blog. Anyone trying to deny you that would be attempting censorship. Everything else, though, is just the reaction of a community-as-organism to something that community doesn't like. It's no more censorship than a single person ignoring you and walking away is.

ap22213 11y ago
Interesting perspective. If that's the current common view, then in a way I feel really outdated. I clearly haven't been paying attention and honestly haven't been aware that 'down-voting' has changed in meaning over the past 10 years or so. Thanks for pointing that out. It's good to learn new things. Although I feel kind of aged at the moment, it also makes me feel good knowing that I can now suppress people much more liberally and not [care if their content was meant to be constructive or not]. Who knew? edit from: give a shit
- zipppy 11y ago
  Who says that people "don't give a shit"? People disagreeing with your opinions, and down-voting your posts, is not necessarily a sign that things have changed or that the down-voters are cruel. Unpopular posts have been around a long time.
- derefr 11y ago
  I'm not sure if it's the majority view, but it's certainly held by a decent percentage of people. I think the change happened gradually; people saw what happened as the result of espousing populist "everyone has a voice and a downvote is only for trolling" policies, on sites like Slashdot and Digg and early pre-subreddits Reddit: a reversion-to-the-societal-mean of cat pictures and other "shallow content", and the complete inability to have a discussion on a topic of any controversy. The reaction, as seen originally in MetaFilter and SomethingAwful, and lately in post-subreddits Reddit, Tumblr, Discourse, Slack, etc., is that attempting to create a community that contains people with diametrically-opposed viewpoints is silly, and the fundamental verb of community-building is moderation: banning people who don't fit in, so that what's left is a pleasant place to have a conversation without anyone needing to expend any effort in tolerating anyone else. The group who believes in the early, populist systems, calls the second wave of systems "echo chambers"—but engaging with that idea at an object-level is silly, because I really believe there's a fundamental difference between the environment in which the two kinds of forums were built. The first wave of forums were built from the ideas of Usenet, IRC, and ISP-hosted chatrooms: open-access "places" that served as Schelling points for anyone interested in a topic. There was no real possibility for moderation, and the sheer scale of the problem (the possibility of a 10000:1 user-to-moderator ratio) made "community-building" impossible. Also, it was, for many people, the only place online where they could express themselves—for anyone who wasn't enough of a wizard to put together HTML and a web-server, the shiny "POST" button on a forum somewhere was the only way to get their opinion out there. The second wave of forums is being built in an environment where everyone has their own blog (or Twitter/Facebook feed), people can asymmetrically "follow" one-another's blogs in numerous ways and "unfollow" when they lose interest, and people each use many small forums to engage in their interests, where frequently these blog posts are shared (this being the usual way people's personal blogs get discovered.) In this newer system, each forum is less like a "place", and more like a "group"—a circle of friends that happen to share a common interest, but who also share values that allow them to get along even when not talking about that interest. People bounce around between many small group-forums (HN being one of those) until they find a few forums compatible with their values, and then stay active in all of them, fully comfortable with the idea of participating in several non-overlapping spheres that could be connected and mixed together, but that aren't, for social rather than topical reasons. One more interesting aspect of the newer Internet is that, when engaged in these group-forums, people naturally lean toward developing "faces": different presentations of aspects of themselves, tuned to the interests and values of the group. I would never talk about e.g. my weekends spent with my girlfriend with my online D&D group, because they're all single so it'd just annoy them. What I do on the weekend is an aspect of me, but it's not an aspect of "that guy that posts in that Slack team." And so on for each group-forum we engage with. I can understand missing the old "place culture" of the Internet—the heady days where a forum was just everybody that happened to like something or be somewhere, where both heavy arguments and friendships could spring up. But I think I prefer the current culture: the one thing it's done for me, personally, is to remove some "perennial arguments" from most of the places I visit. Having a community means being able to have a culture, with cultural mores like "we know we don't agree about X, and at this point more ink spilled on the subject is just wasted"—and being able to teach that culture even to new members who weren't there for the original arguments. There's much less to roll my eyes at on the new Internet (though there is the whole concept of "hate-blogging", where people build communities based on a shared distaste for something, and then sometimes things leak out of those communities and it's quite painful.) It's also much simpler to make "real" friends (as opposed to acquaintances), since joining a group-forum is less like joining a society (which tells you nothing about how likely anyone there is to like you), and more like joining a club (where, if you liked the club enough to join, this greatly increases your chances you'll like the people in the club enough to become personal friends.)