27 ms·

Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should b

by eddieh 10y ago

Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. While HN does stay civil, I think it is too limited in general. Don't get me wrong, the reason I use HN is because the discussion hasn't devolved into /. or reddit. However, HN would do well to encourage dissent. I also get that HN, being mostly about tech startups, has different priorities than me personally. I am forever in search of a place online to have good discussions and debate with a respectful community. The comment sections on news sites are rarely the place — even for very respectable publications. I'm fully in favor of NPR's move and other sites should follow.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. Can you give some examples where someone criticized Musk and was downvoted?
- eddieh 10y ago
  Sure, let me dig some up. [edit, adding a link to a comment] Here is one (th13's reply was downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 (This is more tedious than I thought, I'll see if I can dig up some more. Looks like in the future I should make note of these as I see them.) [edit, adding a second link to a comment] You may need to follow the 'parent' link to see the telltale gray of the downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 (Seriously, this is tedious. I know there are more, but I won't dig up anymore unless I'm pressured to do so.)
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I know that on HN, we shouldn't downvote unless something doesn't add to the discourse, but I'm pretty sure th13 is just factually wrong, his arguments are weak, and it really doesn't add much to the discourse (e.g.: An hyperloop is going to be a regrettable experience for everyone involved. I think the fact that it's difficult to find examples of this is proof that there's not as much of a slant as you think there is.
    - eddieh 10y ago
      Not difficult, just tedious. My being lazy and wanting to do something productive isn't proof of anything. Also, there isn't really an advantage to digging them up, since it is clear you'll just refute whatever I dig up.
      - pavel_lishin 10y ago
        Well, I might disagree with whatever you dig up; I can only really refute it if I present a good argument against it, which maybe I wouldn't be able to for some comments.
        andrewprock 10y ago
        Making other people do the legwork so that you can idly critique them is a classic gish-gallop tactic, and does not add to the discussion.
        pavel_lishin 10y ago
        What about asking other people to do the legwork to show some proof of their assertions?
- gruyere 10y ago
  Trying to bring up gender equality issues, which is a genuine problem in our industry, also has a similar response. There are a variety of 'taboo' subjects that will get you grayed out and gone in no time at all.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
jsmthrowaway 10y ago
The anti-dissent phenomenon is amplified by the greying of comments, which continues to be a bad idea all these years later. The literal message and incentive there is: leave a comment that gets upvotes or it will get progressively harder to read until nobody can actually read it. So now you have to care about what you say, because it will be completely removed from the site by natural voting if you don't toe a certain line, meaning folks cannot objectively review your comment on its merits alone unless they go out of their way to highlight it. The absence of a showgrey even though showdead exists is an interesting thing that somewhat describes intent behind the feature, too. Greying is one of the key factors in the anti-dissent, party-line mode here, which I've noticed as well. It was weird to pull scores and then implicitly put them back with greying, so you can at least tell if a comment is <= 0. One difference from Reddit is that Reddit explicitly suggests[0] that you not downvote to register disagreement, whereas HN does not take a stand and pg clarified that he's fine with it a long time ago[1]. So that ties together voting and agreement, which then ties together greying and agreement, which helps gives rise to the anti-dissent environment you're observing. I'd love to see some analysis on whether a grey comment is more likely to be downvoted, as well, because I'm almost positive it is. Once someone hits me with a 0, which is discernible as slightly greyer by itself, that comment is almost guaranteed to end up very negative. My opinions often diverge from HN and I am rewarded with barely-visible commentary very often, so I've been trained over time to resent voting rather than wish to contribute here, which I don't think is the spirit nor the intent of the greying feature. I don't think HN wants to be an echo chamber, to be clear, it's just that the quirks of the system create incentives that give rise to it. The last thing on planet Earth that I care about is my karma score, but I do care that what I say matters, and I cannot really talk about it because it sounds like complaining about downvoting. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette#wiki_in_regard_to_voting https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette#wiki_in_regard_to_vo... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- minimaxir 10y ago
  > I'd love to see some analysis on whether a grey comment is more likely to be downvoted Two years ago I did an analysis of HN comment scores (back when they were publicly accessible). There are far fewer comments with -1 score than with 0 score: http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_points.png http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_po...
bradleyankrom 10y ago
Re HN: also anything that can be coerced into a political discussion will devolve quickly. Conservative views typically wind up grayed, even when they are substantive arguments.
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  This is because it is de facto HN policy to be OK with downvoting to register disagreement. pg put that one down and it hasn't changed.
  - bradleyankrom 10y ago
    I've noticed flagging being used similarly, too. The argument that downvoting should be used to register disagreement falls apart when you consider that only users with enough (>= 500, I think?) karma have disagreement privileges.
    - lake99 10y ago
      I think the 500 limit is justified as a means to discourage vote-brigading. Age of the account, by itself, is not a good enough indicator, because a person might create hundreds of accounts to be used for brigading at a later date. But, yes, both downvoting and flagging can and have been abused here, despite measures to prevent them.
    - marcoperaza 10y ago
      Flagging is extremely effective in taking content off the front page. I understand the intention, to quickly kill spam and avoid flame war topics, but it's extremely powerful in even preventing discussion on issues and it is probably a greater contribution to groupthink than downvoting comments is. Agenda setting, controlling which topics are discussed at all, is way more powerful than controlling the range of views expressed on those topics.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        I think you can "vouch" for posts and submissions now to counter the flagging. Of course, that assumes you will catch them before they fall off the front page or get auto-deleted.
losteverything 10y ago
Our HN can decline 5 x more and it would still be wonderful. With out ever seeing, talking to, meeting any HNer I am connected with smarter, curiouser, open minded (er) people than I work with everyday.
- marcos123 10y ago
  Really? To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness. For example, anyone who questions the long term safety of genetically modifying organisms and eating them, will always be downvoted to oblivion.
  - maxsilver 10y ago
    > To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness. Absolutely true. But is HN more closed minded than the folks you see everyday? Personally, the HN community is more open minded than 95% of the people I personally interact with daily -- even after including what you've just mentioned.
  - tetrep 10y ago
    It's probably because doubting things isn't very useful. I can question the long term safety of walking up stairs, but unless I can provide an argument such that rational people are convinced they should also be concerned, I wouldn't be surprised at downvotes. Not to knock the Anti-GMO argument[0], but it's similar to other conspiracy arguments. I can make so many rational arguments against it, but I know from the outset if I see a comment that says "Well of course the Hyper Loop isn't going to work, it was designed by Lizard people in order to keep us complacent!" I know that I will never convince that person to see what I would consider a rational viewpoint. It's a lost cause. And as I user of HN, I would consider such comments to be noise, and I would downvote them. Edit: I have the unpopular opinion (at least on HN) of not liking the "right to be forgotten", not to tangent too much, but I think that the ability to substantially change as a person is an important concept of human development, and that by allowing people to willfully scrub their actions from the record, they encourage the myth that people can't change, and that we're always how we currently are. And that, I think, trains people to be less forgiving. It's harder to forgive when you don't think someone can change. [0]: although I do disagree with it (even beyond the screaming naturalistic fallacies)
giancarlostoro 10y ago
> e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be different if to downvote you had to respond to a post.
- aaronblohowiak 10y ago
  Lobsters gets this right where you have to provide a reason from a drop down when downvoting
- adrusi 10y ago
  But sometimes the point of downvoting is to bury a comment so that it doesn't dominate the discussion. If downvoting required a reply it would achieve the opposite effect.
  - webXL 10y ago
    Only if the replies were visible on a buried comment, or perhaps instead of hiding or automatically collapsing, they could be "moved" to the user's Threads page.
- tkinom 10y ago
  I like stackoverflow type of feedback, comments, vote up/down system. Not perfect, but a lot of thinking go into that part of the website design. But not sure if those ideas for technical focus (with "right" A to the Q) website can be easily applied to more political website such as NPR.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    I like that downvoting on Stackoverflow costs their equivalent of karma.
- 10y ago
supernovae 10y ago
The purpose of community is to express common interests & shared values. Hackernews tends to express a shared value around Elon Musk. That is perfectly fine. It's something that should be respected even if you have differing views. I bet a lot of the reason people down vote you about Elon Musk is that maybe you don't accept him as a "hacker" and don't see the way he's challenging the status quo and pushing technology, cars, transportation and energy systems into the future. Hacking the auto industry, the solar industry, the space industry. What he does very much fits the "Ethos" of what makes hackernews hackernews..
tn13 10y ago
HN has become some kind of left liberal forum these days. Personally I love the negativity of reddit and I enjoy it too. Snarky, sarcastic, vulgar or insulting comments in my opinion are part of discourse too.

by eddieh 10y ago

pavel_lishin 10y ago

> This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. Can you give some examples where someone criticized Musk and was downvoted?

eddieh 10y ago
Sure, let me dig some up. [edit, adding a link to a comment] Here is one (th13's reply was downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 (This is more tedious than I thought, I'll see if I can dig up some more. Looks like in the future I should make note of these as I see them.) [edit, adding a second link to a comment] You may need to follow the 'parent' link to see the telltale gray of the downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 (Seriously, this is tedious. I know there are more, but I won't dig up anymore unless I'm pressured to do so.)
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I know that on HN, we shouldn't downvote unless something doesn't add to the discourse, but I'm pretty sure th13 is just factually wrong, his arguments are weak, and it really doesn't add much to the discourse (e.g.: An hyperloop is going to be a regrettable experience for everyone involved. I think the fact that it's difficult to find examples of this is proof that there's not as much of a slant as you think there is.
  - eddieh 10y ago
    Not difficult, just tedious. My being lazy and wanting to do something productive isn't proof of anything. Also, there isn't really an advantage to digging them up, since it is clear you'll just refute whatever I dig up.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      Well, I might disagree with whatever you dig up; I can only really refute it if I present a good argument against it, which maybe I wouldn't be able to for some comments.
      - andrewprock 10y ago
        Making other people do the legwork so that you can idly critique them is a classic gish-gallop tactic, and does not add to the discussion.
        pavel_lishin 10y ago
        What about asking other people to do the legwork to show some proof of their assertions?
gruyere 10y ago
Trying to bring up gender equality issues, which is a genuine problem in our industry, also has a similar response. There are a variety of 'taboo' subjects that will get you grayed out and gone in no time at all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

jsmthrowaway 10y ago

The anti-dissent phenomenon is amplified by the greying of comments, which continues to be a bad idea all these years later. The literal message and incentive there is: leave a comment that gets upvotes or it will get progressively harder to read until nobody can actually read it. So now you have to care about what you say, because it will be completely removed from the site by natural voting if you don't toe a certain line, meaning folks cannot objectively review your comment on its merits alone unless they go out of their way to highlight it. The absence of a showgrey even though showdead exists is an interesting thing that somewhat describes intent behind the feature, too. Greying is one of the key factors in the anti-dissent, party-line mode here, which I've noticed as well. It was weird to pull scores and then implicitly put them back with greying, so you can at least tell if a comment is <= 0. One difference from Reddit is that Reddit explicitly suggests[0] that you not downvote to register disagreement, whereas HN does not take a stand and pg clarified that he's fine with it a long time ago[1]. So that ties together voting and agreement, which then ties together greying and agreement, which helps gives rise to the anti-dissent environment you're observing. I'd love to see some analysis on whether a grey comment is more likely to be downvoted, as well, because I'm almost positive it is. Once someone hits me with a 0, which is discernible as slightly greyer by itself, that comment is almost guaranteed to end up very negative. My opinions often diverge from HN and I am rewarded with barely-visible commentary very often, so I've been trained over time to resent voting rather than wish to contribute here, which I don't think is the spirit nor the intent of the greying feature. I don't think HN wants to be an echo chamber, to be clear, it's just that the quirks of the system create incentives that give rise to it. The last thing on planet Earth that I care about is my karma score, but I do care that what I say matters, and I cannot really talk about it because it sounds like complaining about downvoting. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette#wiki_in_regard_to_voting https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette#wiki_in_regard_to_vo... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

minimaxir 10y ago
> I'd love to see some analysis on whether a grey comment is more likely to be downvoted Two years ago I did an analysis of HN comment scores (back when they were publicly accessible). There are far fewer comments with -1 score than with 0 score: http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_points.png http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_po...

bradleyankrom 10y ago

Re HN: also anything that can be coerced into a political discussion will devolve quickly. Conservative views typically wind up grayed, even when they are substantive arguments.

jsmthrowaway 10y ago
This is because it is de facto HN policy to be OK with downvoting to register disagreement. pg put that one down and it hasn't changed.
- bradleyankrom 10y ago
  I've noticed flagging being used similarly, too. The argument that downvoting should be used to register disagreement falls apart when you consider that only users with enough (>= 500, I think?) karma have disagreement privileges.
  - lake99 10y ago
    I think the 500 limit is justified as a means to discourage vote-brigading. Age of the account, by itself, is not a good enough indicator, because a person might create hundreds of accounts to be used for brigading at a later date. But, yes, both downvoting and flagging can and have been abused here, despite measures to prevent them.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    Flagging is extremely effective in taking content off the front page. I understand the intention, to quickly kill spam and avoid flame war topics, but it's extremely powerful in even preventing discussion on issues and it is probably a greater contribution to groupthink than downvoting comments is. Agenda setting, controlling which topics are discussed at all, is way more powerful than controlling the range of views expressed on those topics.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      I think you can "vouch" for posts and submissions now to counter the flagging. Of course, that assumes you will catch them before they fall off the front page or get auto-deleted.

losteverything 10y ago

Our HN can decline 5 x more and it would still be wonderful. With out ever seeing, talking to, meeting any HNer I am connected with smarter, curiouser, open minded (er) people than I work with everyday.

marcos123 10y ago
Really? To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness. For example, anyone who questions the long term safety of genetically modifying organisms and eating them, will always be downvoted to oblivion.
- maxsilver 10y ago
  > To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness. Absolutely true. But is HN more closed minded than the folks you see everyday? Personally, the HN community is more open minded than 95% of the people I personally interact with daily -- even after including what you've just mentioned.
- tetrep 10y ago
  It's probably because doubting things isn't very useful. I can question the long term safety of walking up stairs, but unless I can provide an argument such that rational people are convinced they should also be concerned, I wouldn't be surprised at downvotes. Not to knock the Anti-GMO argument[0], but it's similar to other conspiracy arguments. I can make so many rational arguments against it, but I know from the outset if I see a comment that says "Well of course the Hyper Loop isn't going to work, it was designed by Lizard people in order to keep us complacent!" I know that I will never convince that person to see what I would consider a rational viewpoint. It's a lost cause. And as I user of HN, I would consider such comments to be noise, and I would downvote them. Edit: I have the unpopular opinion (at least on HN) of not liking the "right to be forgotten", not to tangent too much, but I think that the ability to substantially change as a person is an important concept of human development, and that by allowing people to willfully scrub their actions from the record, they encourage the myth that people can't change, and that we're always how we currently are. And that, I think, trains people to be less forgiving. It's harder to forgive when you don't think someone can change. [0]: although I do disagree with it (even beyond the screaming naturalistic fallacies)

giancarlostoro 10y ago

> e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be different if to downvote you had to respond to a post.

aaronblohowiak 10y ago
Lobsters gets this right where you have to provide a reason from a drop down when downvoting
adrusi 10y ago
But sometimes the point of downvoting is to bury a comment so that it doesn't dominate the discussion. If downvoting required a reply it would achieve the opposite effect.
- webXL 10y ago
  Only if the replies were visible on a buried comment, or perhaps instead of hiding or automatically collapsing, they could be "moved" to the user's Threads page.
tkinom 10y ago
I like stackoverflow type of feedback, comments, vote up/down system. Not perfect, but a lot of thinking go into that part of the website design. But not sure if those ideas for technical focus (with "right" A to the Q) website can be easily applied to more political website such as NPR.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  I like that downvoting on Stackoverflow costs their equivalent of karma.
10y ago

supernovae 10y ago

The purpose of community is to express common interests & shared values. Hackernews tends to express a shared value around Elon Musk. That is perfectly fine. It's something that should be respected even if you have differing views. I bet a lot of the reason people down vote you about Elon Musk is that maybe you don't accept him as a "hacker" and don't see the way he's challenging the status quo and pushing technology, cars, transportation and energy systems into the future. Hacking the auto industry, the solar industry, the space industry. What he does very much fits the "Ethos" of what makes hackernews hackernews..

tn13 10y ago

HN has become some kind of left liberal forum these days. Personally I love the negativity of reddit and I enjoy it too. Snarky, sarcastic, vulgar or insulting comments in my opinion are part of discourse too.