4 ms·

Honest question - what is the point of this comment? While I understand that HN has quite a population of .NET platform devs these days, traditionally this sor

Honest question - what is the point of this comment? While I understand that HN has quite a population of .NET platform devs these days, traditionally this sort of noisy comments would be quickly rendered transparent (this one even claims to justify itself relative to a "language shootout"....only it's just a page talking about Go best practices, so it is off the mark). And the "Internet Geek Points™" thing is just nonsensical, and has become another defensive .NET talking point (e.g. "We're not trend chasers...now let me tell you how we also incorporate all trends"). I would have ignored it, but the above "language partisan" comment, having utterly nothing of value to add to the comments, or this story, and being completely out of context, has been floating on the top, betraying a pretty profound twist in the saga of HN.

zongitsrinzler 11y ago
Look at the username ;)
fauigerzigerk 11y ago
Combine a momentum oriented society with an up/down vote button on everything and this is what you get. Voting based on insightfulness or relevance simply cannot work when only a small minority can ever be expected to stick to it. We are being conditioned on picking a side and then boosting that side no matter what. Voting up a comment that is in disagreement with your own opinion makes it look like you are losing the debate if being upvoted is generally associated with being right. So most people won't do it. I believe the only way to prevent this in a community is to force people to use only words to express opinions. In my view, voting has no place in debates. And yes it means that we're not going to get our debates filtered and ranked according to insightfulness. But at least we're not getting any false signals based on perverse incentives either.
- bhauer 11y ago
  > I believe the only way to prevent this in a community is to force people to use only words to express opinions. In my view, voting has no place in debates. And yes it means that we're not going to get our debates filtered and ranked according to insightfulness. But at least we're not getting any false signals based on perverse incentives either. And yet, I just upvoted your comment because it seemed much easier than typing a reply to say that your comment was of interest to me and I enjoyed reading it. But now I've said that as well. I like having the flexibility to do both, but I recognize the compelling arguments you've made about the problems with having voting available everywhere. On HN in particular, I feel the downvote capability should be further constrained than it is presently (I think it opens at 500 karma presently).
  - infogulch 11y ago
    Perhaps the downvote button should be changed to a flag (essentially how I use it) which might discourage using it for disagreement. I only downvote a comment when it is abusive, belligerent, blatantly condescending, or clearly nonsensical and unwilling to actually converse. Ideally upvote would only be used for well-stated well-reasoned arguments with a plausible basis, regardless of the actual position, but I sometimes find myself upvoting a comment because I agree with it's conclusion. I think the agree-upvote is lamentable, but unavoidable in general. Some UI changes might be able to fix the disagree-downvote (i.e. change to 'flag'), but I feel that the agree-upvote is too much a part of human nature to have an easy fix.
frogfuzion 11y ago
I believe the author's tone is what is getting you here. They really should have phrased the comment like "I'm really happy with a C# .NET backend because of a,b,c. What advantages would Go have over this backend to make it worthwhile for me to investigate?" This would have been a more useful comment. People invest time in their languages so it's easy to subtly inject emotions into comments that come off snarky and unproductive. Then other supporters of the language just defensively click the up arrow. There was a lot of this in the WASM articles where they were saying it will kill off Javascript.
- osweiller 11y ago
  Even though such a question would be more useful, I'm glad they didn't go that route as it would be dishonest: Too often we see the "why should I learn this?" questions that are really transparent "Why I haven't and won't bother -- my mind is firmly made up -- and here's how I pretend that I'm just being open minded in critiquing it" posts. Many of us are happy in our niche, and learning new things is often a PITA. We're happy with what we do and how we do it, with the tools and things that we're used to. And that's okay. The truth is that the language evolution is something that we can mostly just ignore, and if eventually something is truly dominant for a use case, we can easily adopt it with no real handicap over people who ground with it from the ugly beginnings (and many of those advantages will percolate to other platforms anyways. node.js is just layers and layers of compromises and problems, but it had a profound impact on other platforms, and truly changed the web serving game). And that's okay. But traditionally if someone posts resources for a particular language, it is bad form to engage in language wars, gloating, holier than thou (which the whole scarequote "maybe it isn't `trendy'" sorts of posts really are), etc, in the discussions. They're boring, we've had them literally thousands of times, and they are a distraction from discussing the actual contents of the post. I've noticed this particularly afflicts Go discussions. Python, Rust, D, Swift...all can be discussed rationally and productively. But if Go appears, it seems to be just threatening enough that it draws out people concerned about things they don't know.
  - geodel 11y ago
    > I've noticed this particularly afflicts Go discussions. Python, Rust, D, Swift...all can be discussed rationally and productively. But if Go appears, it seems to be just threatening enough that it draws out people concerned about things they don't know. I totally agree with that. Apart from Swift which is by fiat, Go is the only language in top 15 or so which is used for serious work by developers who are not PL enthusiasts/theorists. This is putting serious, though I think unfair, demands on Go developers to justify their choice. So users of languages as diverse Haskell, Elixir, Java, Rust, Scala and many more keep beating Go with their favorite feature of preferred language. Somehow Rust specially stands out as its users/developers seems 100 times more interested in Go related discussions than vice versa. It is similar to politics saying: "You may not be interested in politics but it doesn't means politics is not interested in you"
douche 11y ago
Probably this should have gone underneath the comment that's next down the page (echelon's "I'm so conflicted by Go...") instead of top-level. It was late.

zongitsrinzler 11y ago

Look at the username ;)

fauigerzigerk 11y ago

Combine a momentum oriented society with an up/down vote button on everything and this is what you get. Voting based on insightfulness or relevance simply cannot work when only a small minority can ever be expected to stick to it. We are being conditioned on picking a side and then boosting that side no matter what. Voting up a comment that is in disagreement with your own opinion makes it look like you are losing the debate if being upvoted is generally associated with being right. So most people won't do it. I believe the only way to prevent this in a community is to force people to use only words to express opinions. In my view, voting has no place in debates. And yes it means that we're not going to get our debates filtered and ranked according to insightfulness. But at least we're not getting any false signals based on perverse incentives either.

bhauer 11y ago
> I believe the only way to prevent this in a community is to force people to use only words to express opinions. In my view, voting has no place in debates. And yes it means that we're not going to get our debates filtered and ranked according to insightfulness. But at least we're not getting any false signals based on perverse incentives either. And yet, I just upvoted your comment because it seemed much easier than typing a reply to say that your comment was of interest to me and I enjoyed reading it. But now I've said that as well. I like having the flexibility to do both, but I recognize the compelling arguments you've made about the problems with having voting available everywhere. On HN in particular, I feel the downvote capability should be further constrained than it is presently (I think it opens at 500 karma presently).
- infogulch 11y ago
  Perhaps the downvote button should be changed to a flag (essentially how I use it) which might discourage using it for disagreement. I only downvote a comment when it is abusive, belligerent, blatantly condescending, or clearly nonsensical and unwilling to actually converse. Ideally upvote would only be used for well-stated well-reasoned arguments with a plausible basis, regardless of the actual position, but I sometimes find myself upvoting a comment because I agree with it's conclusion. I think the agree-upvote is lamentable, but unavoidable in general. Some UI changes might be able to fix the disagree-downvote (i.e. change to 'flag'), but I feel that the agree-upvote is too much a part of human nature to have an easy fix.

frogfuzion 11y ago

I believe the author's tone is what is getting you here. They really should have phrased the comment like "I'm really happy with a C# .NET backend because of a,b,c. What advantages would Go have over this backend to make it worthwhile for me to investigate?" This would have been a more useful comment. People invest time in their languages so it's easy to subtly inject emotions into comments that come off snarky and unproductive. Then other supporters of the language just defensively click the up arrow. There was a lot of this in the WASM articles where they were saying it will kill off Javascript.

osweiller 11y ago
Even though such a question would be more useful, I'm glad they didn't go that route as it would be dishonest: Too often we see the "why should I learn this?" questions that are really transparent "Why I haven't and won't bother -- my mind is firmly made up -- and here's how I pretend that I'm just being open minded in critiquing it" posts. Many of us are happy in our niche, and learning new things is often a PITA. We're happy with what we do and how we do it, with the tools and things that we're used to. And that's okay. The truth is that the language evolution is something that we can mostly just ignore, and if eventually something is truly dominant for a use case, we can easily adopt it with no real handicap over people who ground with it from the ugly beginnings (and many of those advantages will percolate to other platforms anyways. node.js is just layers and layers of compromises and problems, but it had a profound impact on other platforms, and truly changed the web serving game). And that's okay. But traditionally if someone posts resources for a particular language, it is bad form to engage in language wars, gloating, holier than thou (which the whole scarequote "maybe it isn't `trendy'" sorts of posts really are), etc, in the discussions. They're boring, we've had them literally thousands of times, and they are a distraction from discussing the actual contents of the post. I've noticed this particularly afflicts Go discussions. Python, Rust, D, Swift...all can be discussed rationally and productively. But if Go appears, it seems to be just threatening enough that it draws out people concerned about things they don't know.
- geodel 11y ago
  > I've noticed this particularly afflicts Go discussions. Python, Rust, D, Swift...all can be discussed rationally and productively. But if Go appears, it seems to be just threatening enough that it draws out people concerned about things they don't know. I totally agree with that. Apart from Swift which is by fiat, Go is the only language in top 15 or so which is used for serious work by developers who are not PL enthusiasts/theorists. This is putting serious, though I think unfair, demands on Go developers to justify their choice. So users of languages as diverse Haskell, Elixir, Java, Rust, Scala and many more keep beating Go with their favorite feature of preferred language. Somehow Rust specially stands out as its users/developers seems 100 times more interested in Go related discussions than vice versa. It is similar to politics saying: "You may not be interested in politics but it doesn't means politics is not interested in you"

douche 11y ago

Probably this should have gone underneath the comment that's next down the page (echelon's "I'm so conflicted by Go...") instead of top-level. It was late.