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Side point: and understand if I get trashed here as maybe I am doing what I am about to criticise.... is it just me or are HN comments increasingly glib, politi

Side point: and understand if I get trashed here as maybe I am doing what I am about to criticise.... is it just me or are HN comments increasingly glib, political and of little informational value? This post is interesitng information with great potential for interesting discussion but the comments so far seem dominated by a style I would not normally expect on HN, something that has been happening over time but seems sharply more common these days. When I came to HN, I did so because it was not Reddit. It was dominated by 2 things; information that I didn't understand (too technical) or 2) something that improved my knowledge about the world and business, the discussions often more so than the post. From this I wonder (assuming people agree...) what can we do to hold the values of old HN discussion/posts, or is this the anthem of progress/popularity I have to accept?

dovdovdov 9y ago
There is no good solution from a service's side, paid community, closed community, they all bring their side effects. Even these voting systems will only surface the popular opinion and not necessarily the right opinion. Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards.
- buro9 9y ago
  > Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards The community of actively participating submitters and commentators is surprisingly small. This is true for nearly all communities. If HN had a really rich ignore feature, it would take a very short time to create a personal ignore list that pruned the glib or polarising political commentators. I would say though, that whilst this has proven to be a good thing on the communities I run, I personally prefer not to use ignore features.
  - dovdovdov 9y ago
    I meant a 'client side' ignore feature. :) Service side content filtering only creates bubbles.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  > There is no good solution from a service's side I can't believe that. Nothing will be perfect but there must be some combination of options that can improve things significantly. Maybe it is volunteer mods. Or HN require new members to pass a 'best use' rules questionnaire before posting (or exiting offenders). Or they run algorithms to find users that vote inline with the spirit of HN and ninja ban people they downvote. I dont profess to know the answer but there must be improving options available. And further someone solving this is a quite important concept (and potentially a great business too), as while here I want a better conversation, the recent US elections showed us what bot armies and paid shills can do, there are probably options that can be employed in the wider internet encourage genuine conversation in general.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  but is there an objectively "right" opinion? Surely that in itself is determined by the group's average opinion.
jnordwick 9y ago
HN often feels to me like like are two intermixed sites: the HN with good deep technical and business discussion and a site of web developers arguing politics.
s_kilk 9y ago
This supposed separation between the technical and the social/political is illusory, and shows a very blinkered and sheltered view of the world. In actuality the technical and the social are deeply enmeshed, the society we live in shapes the tools we have, and the tools we have shape the society we live in. In this case we see a technology being developed and deployed to serve the interests of one group of people with little regard for how it affects the livelihoods of the other group. This is an ideological act, and (contrary to the whinging of so many technological determinists) an ideological deployment of technology. If you've detected a change in the tone around here it's possible that more and more techies are waking up to the fact that politics is more than just dinner-party conversation and affiliation signalling. For more on the topic I'd recommend picking up some Andrew Feenberg, his book "Transforming Technology" in particular.
- mseebach 9y ago
  I don't think the issue it with "political", but rather with "glib [...] and of little informational value". There's a comment in this thread saying "Welcome to late stage capitalism, folks" with a follow up asserting slavery. Both are dead, but presumably weren't when GP wrote their side point, and anecdotally that kind of commentary feels like it's in the ascendency.
  - s_kilk 9y ago
    > I don't think the issue it with "political", but rather with "glib [...] and of little informational value". Full agreement on that one, but those labels are sometimes applied unfairly to any comment which doesn't toe the valley-culture-technological-determinism line too :)
- dawnbreez 9y ago
  I believe that politics is a cancer. It demands attention, refuses to relinquish control of conversations it becomes a part of, and only very rarely does it contribute anything beyond a lot of yelling back and forth. Once you have brought up Politics, you can rest assured that friends will become enemies, and the conversation will never turn back to the topic at hand. I understand the urge to bring politics in; the world around us seems to be falling apart because of political schemes. I simply do not care. If you really want to throw fits about capitalism and communism, or throw up a pithy quip about Trump et al., do so in a separate thread, possibly an Ask HN ("Who's your favorite liar?"). I'm going to go enjoy the fact that someone's working on mass-producing a powered exoskeleton.
partisan 9y ago
Agreed. See the current #1 and post about the FBI agents who stole BTC from a Silk Road wallet for a more extreme example of trash posting on HN.
- fhood 9y ago
  Yeah, but any post that involves bitcoin, the FBI/CIA/NSA/DOD and the darknet is bound to bring people out of the woodwork. The most interesting articles tend to have more...thoughtful comments.
barry-cotter 9y ago
Everything dies or turns to shit in the end.
simonsarris 9y ago
I've been on HN for 7-8 years and there is a difference in the last two years. I've seen a lot more one line comments with sarcastic, jokey, snarky, or flippant content. Some were always made, but they were very consistently downvoted years ago. The solution I think is to implore those with downvote powers to do a lot more downvoting. In a way it is all custodial duty that cannot be automated. It can feel mean to downvoted a lot, but there are no shortage of sites where peanut gallery comments are the norm, and I think we should continue to discourage them here as much as possible. Note: I do not think political or contentious comments are a problem, only the glib. The guy that replied to you with: "Everything dies or turns to shit in the end." is a good example of what to downvote.
- elorant 9y ago
  It would be better just to add an ability to flag comments and moderators could take further action. Enhancing downvote ability while it could work in this context it could wreak havoc in heated arguments.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    I don't think it's even a case of enhancing anything. It's more to encourage users that do have the feature to actually use it and guidance on when. That would be enough. I know I hesitate to downvote anything that isn't obviously a troll or blatantly destructive. But that's too low a standard if we want to keep the comment quality from slipping.
  - GolfXrayTango 9y ago
    Could HN let comments be tagged, let users confirm tags and viewers filter (to either hide or deemphasize) comments by tags and personalized confirmation thresholds? That would enable users to remove the junk on their own and would be more scalable than a moderation team as well as making HN comments an interesting ML dataset.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    You can flag comments. Click the timestamp of the comment and then you have the option to. Not sure why it's hidden away, though.
telchar 9y ago
This concerns me as well. I would downvote such comments if I could but I don't have downvote powers yet, and don't know how to get them. Can anyone shed light on that?
- fhood 9y ago
  I think the threshold is 500 points/karma/whatever?
fhood 9y ago
Flippancy, and sarcasm bother me far less than when people form very strong opinions and feel the need to express them based on the title of the article alone.
ericd 9y ago
I've also noticed a huge spike in really hardcore anti-capitalism comments. I'm all for UBI and adding other strong social safety net features, but I'm seeing more anger/revolutionary sentiment. Maybe it's just a reflection of a shift in population sentiment, but it seems almost like we're getting brigaded by some group.
- dang 9y ago
  I haven't seen signs that it's brigading, and since the same trends are showing up everywhere else, I think the default hypothesis is more likely: it's a macro change in social sentiment or segments thereof. HN isn't immune from any of that.
  - ericd 9y ago
    Thanks for the insight!
minikites 9y ago
I've been on Hacker News for a while now and it's always been Reddit with a thesaurus, this feeling isn't that new as I see it.
ggggtez 9y ago
The problem is that creating spoof accounts are an unlimited resource, but moderators are limited. They should fix this by preventing new sign ups. When the culture returns to something that people like, open a limited number of sign ups per month (perhaps you need to be "vetted" by an active account to sign up). The problem is purely that of endless summer, and websites just copying broken social commenting features and systems from each other instead of setting up the incentive structure correctly.

dovdovdov 9y ago

There is no good solution from a service's side, paid community, closed community, they all bring their side effects. Even these voting systems will only surface the popular opinion and not necessarily the right opinion. Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards.

buro9 9y ago
> Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards The community of actively participating submitters and commentators is surprisingly small. This is true for nearly all communities. If HN had a really rich ignore feature, it would take a very short time to create a personal ignore list that pruned the glib or polarising political commentators. I would say though, that whilst this has proven to be a good thing on the communities I run, I personally prefer not to use ignore features.
- dovdovdov 9y ago
  I meant a 'client side' ignore feature. :) Service side content filtering only creates bubbles.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
> There is no good solution from a service's side I can't believe that. Nothing will be perfect but there must be some combination of options that can improve things significantly. Maybe it is volunteer mods. Or HN require new members to pass a 'best use' rules questionnaire before posting (or exiting offenders). Or they run algorithms to find users that vote inline with the spirit of HN and ninja ban people they downvote. I dont profess to know the answer but there must be improving options available. And further someone solving this is a quite important concept (and potentially a great business too), as while here I want a better conversation, the recent US elections showed us what bot armies and paid shills can do, there are probably options that can be employed in the wider internet encourage genuine conversation in general.
beaconstudios 9y ago
but is there an objectively "right" opinion? Surely that in itself is determined by the group's average opinion.

jnordwick 9y ago

HN often feels to me like like are two intermixed sites: the HN with good deep technical and business discussion and a site of web developers arguing politics.

s_kilk 9y ago

This supposed separation between the technical and the social/political is illusory, and shows a very blinkered and sheltered view of the world. In actuality the technical and the social are deeply enmeshed, the society we live in shapes the tools we have, and the tools we have shape the society we live in. In this case we see a technology being developed and deployed to serve the interests of one group of people with little regard for how it affects the livelihoods of the other group. This is an ideological act, and (contrary to the whinging of so many technological determinists) an ideological deployment of technology. If you've detected a change in the tone around here it's possible that more and more techies are waking up to the fact that politics is more than just dinner-party conversation and affiliation signalling. For more on the topic I'd recommend picking up some Andrew Feenberg, his book "Transforming Technology" in particular.

mseebach 9y ago
I don't think the issue it with "political", but rather with "glib [...] and of little informational value". There's a comment in this thread saying "Welcome to late stage capitalism, folks" with a follow up asserting slavery. Both are dead, but presumably weren't when GP wrote their side point, and anecdotally that kind of commentary feels like it's in the ascendency.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  > I don't think the issue it with "political", but rather with "glib [...] and of little informational value". Full agreement on that one, but those labels are sometimes applied unfairly to any comment which doesn't toe the valley-culture-technological-determinism line too :)
dawnbreez 9y ago
I believe that politics is a cancer. It demands attention, refuses to relinquish control of conversations it becomes a part of, and only very rarely does it contribute anything beyond a lot of yelling back and forth. Once you have brought up Politics, you can rest assured that friends will become enemies, and the conversation will never turn back to the topic at hand. I understand the urge to bring politics in; the world around us seems to be falling apart because of political schemes. I simply do not care. If you really want to throw fits about capitalism and communism, or throw up a pithy quip about Trump et al., do so in a separate thread, possibly an Ask HN ("Who's your favorite liar?"). I'm going to go enjoy the fact that someone's working on mass-producing a powered exoskeleton.

partisan 9y ago

Agreed. See the current #1 and post about the FBI agents who stole BTC from a Silk Road wallet for a more extreme example of trash posting on HN.

fhood 9y ago
Yeah, but any post that involves bitcoin, the FBI/CIA/NSA/DOD and the darknet is bound to bring people out of the woodwork. The most interesting articles tend to have more...thoughtful comments.

barry-cotter 9y ago

Everything dies or turns to shit in the end.

simonsarris 9y ago

I've been on HN for 7-8 years and there is a difference in the last two years. I've seen a lot more one line comments with sarcastic, jokey, snarky, or flippant content. Some were always made, but they were very consistently downvoted years ago. The solution I think is to implore those with downvote powers to do a lot more downvoting. In a way it is all custodial duty that cannot be automated. It can feel mean to downvoted a lot, but there are no shortage of sites where peanut gallery comments are the norm, and I think we should continue to discourage them here as much as possible. Note: I do not think political or contentious comments are a problem, only the glib. The guy that replied to you with: "Everything dies or turns to shit in the end." is a good example of what to downvote.

elorant 9y ago
It would be better just to add an ability to flag comments and moderators could take further action. Enhancing downvote ability while it could work in this context it could wreak havoc in heated arguments.
- infogulch 9y ago
  I don't think it's even a case of enhancing anything. It's more to encourage users that do have the feature to actually use it and guidance on when. That would be enough. I know I hesitate to downvote anything that isn't obviously a troll or blatantly destructive. But that's too low a standard if we want to keep the comment quality from slipping.
- GolfXrayTango 9y ago
  Could HN let comments be tagged, let users confirm tags and viewers filter (to either hide or deemphasize) comments by tags and personalized confirmation thresholds? That would enable users to remove the junk on their own and would be more scalable than a moderation team as well as making HN comments an interesting ML dataset.
- bllguo 9y ago
  You can flag comments. Click the timestamp of the comment and then you have the option to. Not sure why it's hidden away, though.

telchar 9y ago

This concerns me as well. I would downvote such comments if I could but I don't have downvote powers yet, and don't know how to get them. Can anyone shed light on that?

fhood 9y ago
I think the threshold is 500 points/karma/whatever?

fhood 9y ago

Flippancy, and sarcasm bother me far less than when people form very strong opinions and feel the need to express them based on the title of the article alone.

ericd 9y ago

I've also noticed a huge spike in really hardcore anti-capitalism comments. I'm all for UBI and adding other strong social safety net features, but I'm seeing more anger/revolutionary sentiment. Maybe it's just a reflection of a shift in population sentiment, but it seems almost like we're getting brigaded by some group.

dang 9y ago
I haven't seen signs that it's brigading, and since the same trends are showing up everywhere else, I think the default hypothesis is more likely: it's a macro change in social sentiment or segments thereof. HN isn't immune from any of that.
- ericd 9y ago
  Thanks for the insight!

minikites 9y ago

I've been on Hacker News for a while now and it's always been Reddit with a thesaurus, this feeling isn't that new as I see it.

ggggtez 9y ago

The problem is that creating spoof accounts are an unlimited resource, but moderators are limited. They should fix this by preventing new sign ups. When the culture returns to something that people like, open a limited number of sign ups per month (perhaps you need to be "vetted" by an active account to sign up). The problem is purely that of endless summer, and websites just copying broken social commenting features and systems from each other instead of setting up the incentive structure correctly.