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The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The

The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. Or by an algorithm that systematically buries articles and users (whose accounts accrue ranking penalties) that generate any heated debate by challenging the slant. We're not talking trolls. Check out the top comment under SF tech bro: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless’. It was at least generating some good debate, but HN decided to flag and bury it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896 See the dominant and buried comments for 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830 Why was Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems flagged to death? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414 Hell, even this post has been quickly taken off the front page despite having better numbers (70 votes in the last hour) than many items that are there now. Politics and economics points of view are heavily filtered here. Rarely if ever does a challenge to the status quo make the front page. If one does it is then killed, ironically, for inspiring debate!

flexie 10y ago
I agree. I think most people come here for a business / political angle on tech, not just for tech itself. I also often notice that the best discussions disappear really fast here.
- uola 10y ago
  I think (hope) people come here to procrastinate as it is a perfect fit. The groundhog day of Internet forums where every day things reset so you can reiterate your opinion like nothing happened.
joesmo 10y ago
These are all "ego-involving topics" here, to borrow an excellent phrase from the parent comment. I'd say most of the time, predicting HN's reaction to a topic or even a specific comment is easy and almost makes the comments section superfluous at this point for certain topics.
eevilspock 10y ago
Silent downvotes right on schedule! I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym. I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I think it would be solved by requiring a comment with each downvote. The motivations for an upvote are obvious but a downvote should have to explain why, even if it something as simple as "citation needed" or "factually incorrect, here's why." I often get the sense that anonymous and unexplained downvotes carry a sense of "this post is so obviously wrong it defies the need for explanation," which means that nobody learns anything from the exchange. EDIT: I got downvoted for this comment and I have no idea why
  - eevilspock 10y ago
    That would result in too many redundant comments. Many people will down-vote for exactly the same reason. Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".
    - DanBC 10y ago
      > Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data". We never hear complaints about people not distinguishing between "I subjectively like or agree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively sound or rests on good data".
    - 10y ago
someone7x 10y ago
> The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. This is where I have to disagree. I feel the civility comes from swift and brutal downvotes of low effort contributions. If there's a pattern that I see amongst grey/flagged/dead comments is that they are most often off-topic and/or low effort. Not to say that groupthink doesn't exist or come into play, just that it's not the prevailing cause for burying comments. Well to me at least. After all, I'm just a single user that reads arbitrary threads, I have no data to reinforce my opinion.
- whybroke 10y ago
  I agree that vacuous comment are ruthless downvoted as they should be. But observations, even with high grade citations that criticize the libertarian narrative are also regularly down voted to oblivion. Likewise any criticism of Russia gets clobber very quickly no matter how much evidence is offered. [edit] likewise pointing out either of those two problems So yes, poor post are down voted very efficiently but there is still a genuine problem with downvoting to hide information that parties don't want spread.
  - bmelton 10y ago
    I'm trying to figure out how "The city should be building affordable housing" is considered a libertarian ideal, and I can't get there from here. Can you help me understand why you feel that it is? I'm having an equally hard time finding the libertarian angle in the top comments to the other threads you referenced.
    - whybroke 10y ago
      It is not. Although the idea rent control benefits no one and that north American land ownership is unambiguously virtuous both are. Points I have objected to to his account's serious detriment. I can not fathom why you imply I make such claims about affordable housing although, even ridiculously untrue, it cleverly nullifies my complain doesn't it? But whether I personally eat babies or not does not change the problem I have pointed out. There is a problem that I and others have taken the time to point out, and rest assured if one person points it out, far more don't bother. So whether anyone wishes to address the problem or just downvote the complain itself is not really my concern. In the end the site is an advertisement for ycombinator and in practice it's really a question of how they want their organization perceived. I had assumed having NY Times articles that point out Russian interference in Swedish politics swiftly whooshed from the front page does not serve that end.
FT_intern 10y ago
It is unclear whether you are making the argument that HN users flag posts based on political leanings or flag politically controversial topics. The downvotes are most likely due to the negativeness of the post, coupled with an ambiguous argument.
twblalock 10y ago
Civility does not imply that we have to discuss topics that are of interest to you. If you want to discuss those things, you'll have to find some people who want to discuss them -- clearly, the majority here does not, and they have every right to downvote stuff they don't think belongs on the front page.
- markkanof 10y ago
  Not sure if the parent was trying to communicate this or not, but I think the core of the problem is really that alternative view points (ie. comments to discussion threads) get purposely buried, not necessarily the encompassing discussion thread. So sometimes it feels like we are missing out on varied and interesting comments because they aren't inline with the most prevalent viewpoint of the HN community.
jdminhbg 10y ago
Politics is specifically called out as mostly off-topic in the guidelines, and libertarian-leaning political posts are also flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12413342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12413342 HN needs fewer polemics, not more.
pjc50 10y ago
.. and it's back on the front page after a spell in the doghouse?! "Inequality in tech" is a subject that's guaranteed to get flagged into invisibility.
- sctb 10y ago
  > .. and it's back on the front page after a spell in the doghouse?! This post hit the flamewar detector (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20penalty%20dang&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20penalty%20dang&sort...), and we removed the penalty when we noticed.
smsm42 10y ago
There's challenging and there's challenging. If you're starting discussion with "you're amoral white male so here shut up and listen I'll tell you what you have to do to redeem your sorry existence" (I'm not saying you do, it's just an example - but not too far from what I've seen done in other places) - it's a challenge all right, but not one that would lead to a good discussion. Also, experience suggests there are topics that generate almost no useful discussion and very quickly descend into a shoutfest, outgroup shaming and virtue posturing. It is possible that this one discussion on the very topic will not follow the pattern that thousands before it did, but usually the risk is not worth it. Not every debate is good. And so, generating debate by itself is not a virtue.
- oAlbe 10y ago
  > Not every debate is good. True. But why can't we just let not-good debates die on their own, instead of not giving them a chance at all?
  - adiabatty 10y ago
    People want to get in the last word. It takes some level of self-restraint to let people be wrong on the Internet, especially if they're wrong in a way that is plausible and/or popular.
OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
"The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral." Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons.
- type0 10y ago
  > Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons. Therefore there are are many IRC channels where OldSchoolJohnny could find those discussions. Oh wait, did he say "for civil discussion"...
dang 10y ago
I'm late to this thread but this is definitely not factual: > The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. There's a cognitive bias where everybody thinks the slant they disagree with is the one that dominates this site. If you held opposite views, you'd be arguing that HN is dominated by liberals or what have you. Perhaps that's not obvious to you, but it is to us whose job it is to oversee HN as a whole. HN's archives are full of people complaining about this from all sides. The point of view you describe (or, to be fair, caricature) does exist on HN, of course. But the community is politically divided, most claims people make about who dominates it are just a rhetorical device, i.e. to score cheap points in arguments.
- eevilspock 10y ago
  Of course it is not factual. It is an opinion, as is your comment. You are implying that you have no cognitive bias yourself, that it is not possible that your bias prevents you from seeing truth in my point of view. That there are "people complaining about this from all sides" does not make it symmetrical, does not prove that all those sides are equal in standing. That "this community is deeply politically divided" does not mean that divide goes right down the middle. America is deeply politically divided, yet it is overall to the right of much of Europe, such that our left is considered a European center or center-right. In other words, America has an overall slant, and Europe has a different one. Are you not dismissively caricaturing me? It's one thing to agree to disagree, but your dismissiveness is rather astounding, especially given you are the site moderator. Perhaps you are engaging in tit-for-tat dismissiveness, in defense of the site you are responsible for. But still, that doesn't bode well coming from the site's moderator. Do you believe that Y-combinator and HN moderators are representative of society as a whole? Or that somehow they are a non-representative set that is somehow free of slant? Perhaps you believe that if HN users, or its moderators, were predominantly women, or African Americans, or Latino Americans, that HN moderation, content and comments would be much the same? You must believe this if you believe HN has no slant. I certainly don't.

flexie 10y ago

I agree. I think most people come here for a business / political angle on tech, not just for tech itself. I also often notice that the best discussions disappear really fast here.

uola 10y ago
I think (hope) people come here to procrastinate as it is a perfect fit. The groundhog day of Internet forums where every day things reset so you can reiterate your opinion like nothing happened.

joesmo 10y ago

These are all "ego-involving topics" here, to borrow an excellent phrase from the parent comment. I'd say most of the time, predicting HN's reaction to a topic or even a specific comment is easy and almost makes the comments section superfluous at this point for certain topics.

eevilspock 10y ago

Silent downvotes right on schedule! I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym. I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I think it would be solved by requiring a comment with each downvote. The motivations for an upvote are obvious but a downvote should have to explain why, even if it something as simple as "citation needed" or "factually incorrect, here's why." I often get the sense that anonymous and unexplained downvotes carry a sense of "this post is so obviously wrong it defies the need for explanation," which means that nobody learns anything from the exchange. EDIT: I got downvoted for this comment and I have no idea why
- eevilspock 10y ago
  That would result in too many redundant comments. Many people will down-vote for exactly the same reason. Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data". We never hear complaints about people not distinguishing between "I subjectively like or agree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively sound or rests on good data".
  - 10y ago

someone7x 10y ago

> The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. This is where I have to disagree. I feel the civility comes from swift and brutal downvotes of low effort contributions. If there's a pattern that I see amongst grey/flagged/dead comments is that they are most often off-topic and/or low effort. Not to say that groupthink doesn't exist or come into play, just that it's not the prevailing cause for burying comments. Well to me at least. After all, I'm just a single user that reads arbitrary threads, I have no data to reinforce my opinion.

whybroke 10y ago
I agree that vacuous comment are ruthless downvoted as they should be. But observations, even with high grade citations that criticize the libertarian narrative are also regularly down voted to oblivion. Likewise any criticism of Russia gets clobber very quickly no matter how much evidence is offered. [edit] likewise pointing out either of those two problems So yes, poor post are down voted very efficiently but there is still a genuine problem with downvoting to hide information that parties don't want spread.
- bmelton 10y ago
  I'm trying to figure out how "The city should be building affordable housing" is considered a libertarian ideal, and I can't get there from here. Can you help me understand why you feel that it is? I'm having an equally hard time finding the libertarian angle in the top comments to the other threads you referenced.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    It is not. Although the idea rent control benefits no one and that north American land ownership is unambiguously virtuous both are. Points I have objected to to his account's serious detriment. I can not fathom why you imply I make such claims about affordable housing although, even ridiculously untrue, it cleverly nullifies my complain doesn't it? But whether I personally eat babies or not does not change the problem I have pointed out. There is a problem that I and others have taken the time to point out, and rest assured if one person points it out, far more don't bother. So whether anyone wishes to address the problem or just downvote the complain itself is not really my concern. In the end the site is an advertisement for ycombinator and in practice it's really a question of how they want their organization perceived. I had assumed having NY Times articles that point out Russian interference in Swedish politics swiftly whooshed from the front page does not serve that end.

FT_intern 10y ago

It is unclear whether you are making the argument that HN users flag posts based on political leanings or flag politically controversial topics. The downvotes are most likely due to the negativeness of the post, coupled with an ambiguous argument.

twblalock 10y ago

Civility does not imply that we have to discuss topics that are of interest to you. If you want to discuss those things, you'll have to find some people who want to discuss them -- clearly, the majority here does not, and they have every right to downvote stuff they don't think belongs on the front page.

markkanof 10y ago
Not sure if the parent was trying to communicate this or not, but I think the core of the problem is really that alternative view points (ie. comments to discussion threads) get purposely buried, not necessarily the encompassing discussion thread. So sometimes it feels like we are missing out on varied and interesting comments because they aren't inline with the most prevalent viewpoint of the HN community.

jdminhbg 10y ago

Politics is specifically called out as mostly off-topic in the guidelines, and libertarian-leaning political posts are also flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12413342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12413342 HN needs fewer polemics, not more.

pjc50 10y ago

.. and it's back on the front page after a spell in the doghouse?! "Inequality in tech" is a subject that's guaranteed to get flagged into invisibility.

sctb 10y ago
> .. and it's back on the front page after a spell in the doghouse?! This post hit the flamewar detector (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20penalty%20dang&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20penalty%20dang&sort...), and we removed the penalty when we noticed.

smsm42 10y ago

There's challenging and there's challenging. If you're starting discussion with "you're amoral white male so here shut up and listen I'll tell you what you have to do to redeem your sorry existence" (I'm not saying you do, it's just an example - but not too far from what I've seen done in other places) - it's a challenge all right, but not one that would lead to a good discussion. Also, experience suggests there are topics that generate almost no useful discussion and very quickly descend into a shoutfest, outgroup shaming and virtue posturing. It is possible that this one discussion on the very topic will not follow the pattern that thousands before it did, but usually the risk is not worth it. Not every debate is good. And so, generating debate by itself is not a virtue.

oAlbe 10y ago
> Not every debate is good. True. But why can't we just let not-good debates die on their own, instead of not giving them a chance at all?
- adiabatty 10y ago
  People want to get in the last word. It takes some level of self-restraint to let people be wrong on the Internet, especially if they're wrong in a way that is plausible and/or popular.

OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago

"The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral." Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons.

type0 10y ago
> Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons. Therefore there are are many IRC channels where OldSchoolJohnny could find those discussions. Oh wait, did he say "for civil discussion"...

dang 10y ago

I'm late to this thread but this is definitely not factual: > The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. There's a cognitive bias where everybody thinks the slant they disagree with is the one that dominates this site. If you held opposite views, you'd be arguing that HN is dominated by liberals or what have you. Perhaps that's not obvious to you, but it is to us whose job it is to oversee HN as a whole. HN's archives are full of people complaining about this from all sides. The point of view you describe (or, to be fair, caricature) does exist on HN, of course. But the community is politically divided, most claims people make about who dominates it are just a rhetorical device, i.e. to score cheap points in arguments.

eevilspock 10y ago
Of course it is not factual. It is an opinion, as is your comment. You are implying that you have no cognitive bias yourself, that it is not possible that your bias prevents you from seeing truth in my point of view. That there are "people complaining about this from all sides" does not make it symmetrical, does not prove that all those sides are equal in standing. That "this community is deeply politically divided" does not mean that divide goes right down the middle. America is deeply politically divided, yet it is overall to the right of much of Europe, such that our left is considered a European center or center-right. In other words, America has an overall slant, and Europe has a different one. Are you not dismissively caricaturing me? It's one thing to agree to disagree, but your dismissiveness is rather astounding, especially given you are the site moderator. Perhaps you are engaging in tit-for-tat dismissiveness, in defense of the site you are responsible for. But still, that doesn't bode well coming from the site's moderator. Do you believe that Y-combinator and HN moderators are representative of society as a whole? Or that somehow they are a non-representative set that is somehow free of slant? Perhaps you believe that if HN users, or its moderators, were predominantly women, or African Americans, or Latino Americans, that HN moderation, content and comments would be much the same? You must believe this if you believe HN has no slant. I certainly don't.