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Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was ho

by gniv 8y ago

Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. They might have an interesting angle on the story, or they might just be saying trivial things with beautiful prose. In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few. That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea. Edit: "molding the discussion" -> "molding every discussion"

isoskeles 8y ago
> a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few Are you saying that internet commenters have a monolith "worldview" that could be referred to as "the worldview of a few"? I'm not saying you're saying this, but that's what I read.
- gniv 8y ago
  > Are you saying that internet commenters have a monolith "worldview" No. I'm saying that each person has a worldview, which is the aggregate of their life experience. If a small set of people drive most discussions, then the discussions are (mostly) a reflection of their perspective only. Maybe these perspectives are diverse enough, but it's hard to know.
mr_spothawk 8y ago
this argument does resonate. i started getting downvoted a lot. since then, i've become much more of a lurker and have remained logged-out. to me it's obvious, and necessarily the case, that the conversation happening is not representative of my views because i'm not sharing them. it's not worth it to me to contribute to the conversation, and get embroiled in an accidental dispute. my views are my own, and i don't need to spend a lot of time sharing them at other people in order to live a satisfied life. the internet, like the real world before it, is not my own space... and to the extent that i exist in it, i'm happier going my own way and not encountering lame-o jerks.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I agree with this. I suspect that any community with “downvoting” or similar would skew more forward outliers, because the prevailing group-think will downvote contrary content and getting downvoted stings, scaring off many who might otherwise add diverse perspectives. But even without voting mechanisms, nasty replies are just as bad or worse, so the general trend of chasing off the people who see things a little differently seems pretty universal to me.
  - jungler 8y ago
    I walked around the problem of replies(on Reddit/HN) by never looking at them. I have a red envelope of 150 or so now. Every once in a while I imagine something anxiety inducing about them, or catch a glimpse(and more often than not a positive one) in the automatic reply emails Reddit likes to send me. Sometimes I will look back at the thread, if I really want to know. But I don't use these platforms to converse, even though I will happily make a reply to an existing thread. They are both too fast and too slow to be conversational. I use comment threads as a writing prompt instead, and by ignoring external feedback I don't experience pain from them, even though some of the time this might result in someone asking me something and never hearing a reply. If my idea is good, someone copies it and I see it in a later thread.
- pelagic_sky 8y ago
  I've gone from being an admin and owner of popular forums back in the early 2000's to just a lurker who 98% of the time will write a response but just delete it before it's posted because I don't need or want the hassle of an internet argument. I'm proud of even posting this. Maybe this is my one post for 2019. :)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - imjustsaying 8y ago
    I also have 100,000 posts scattered about forums from the early 2000's, but very few (less than 1,000) since after 2010. The trend towards downvote groupthink is not an insignificant part of the reason I've dropped content generation.
sverige 8y ago
> The prolific commenters are molding the discussion in their image. ... In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few. The most interesting point to me in TFA was the 99.8 - 0.2 - 0.0003 rate of lurkers, commenters, and prolific commenters. It's the 0.0003% who obsessively comment (or edit or play games or whatever) all day on anything and everything that I don't understand. I actually think 'insane' is not an unfair commentary on their behavior. They very often drown out the 0.2% who participate but not obsessively, and are often rewarded with special recognition and even 'untouchable' status on various sites.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  > that I don't understand. One of the examples in the post, Ninja, reportedly earns $500,000 per month for that twelve hours a day of streaming. So.
cholmon 8y ago
This parallels civic/political engagement in real life. It's tough to get lurkers (like me) to speak up and shift the discussion when the emotional cost of doing so - arguing, being downvoted, getting defensive, being ridiculed - seems to make the effort simply not worthwhile for the individual. Not only on the web, but also in the office, at Thanksgiving dinner, at a cookout, etc.
- gniv 8y ago
  > This parallels civic/political engagement in real life. Indeed it does. And the "insane" label to the engaged is even more apt there.
- clairity 8y ago
  > "It's tough to get lurkers (like me) to speak up and shift the discussion when the emotional cost of doing so..." the 98% works in that case too: there are many people who might benefit from your comments but don't interact in any way, so you sometimes may deem the costs worth it (like now).
- redwards510 8y ago
  This reminds me of when I attempt to send a Snopes link to someone who just forwarded me a chain email. They don't thank you, you get silence or worse.
  - astine 8y ago
    Yeah, people don't like being corrected when they are wrong. I've bumped into that a lot when discussing things on social media. I find that if you can manage to spare someone's ego when correcting them, it helps a lot. Rather than sending a link and saying something like "You're wrong!" If I can give them the opportunity to decide for themselves that they are wrong, by saying something like "Are you sure about that, this guy is saying something different," I often get a better response.
    - jstarfish 8y ago
      There's a rabbinical art to being tactful that unfortunately eludes me. The effort is usually wasted on internet discussions. In more controlled, personal settings my favorite response along that vein is "what factors did you consider that led to your conclusion?" It's a less offensive, more roundabout way of telling someone that their assertion is questionable that also betrays their thought process.
kbuchanan 8y ago
Another possibility is that diversity is simply represented by extremes; that individuals sitting on the polar sides of issues are shaping the conversation. In other words, it's the boring, moderate, stable, center who remains silent.
- gniv 8y ago
  That's probably true, but it might be the end result of a vicious cycle: you don't engage, you don't sharpen the skills required for it, you fall into the easy role.
  - wolco 8y ago
    But when you fall in the middle there is less of a need to comment
inequalitysir 8y ago
Then people talk about inequality. Even in free thing like Reddit only 1% people create value because they get high from it. Inequality comes from nature, wether it's wealth or contribution on Reddit like sites.
- Retra 8y ago
  Small pox came from nature too. But it's effectively gone. So is the Dodo bird, etc..
  - inequalitysir 8y ago
    Your solution is to give Reddit Karma to people for reading so that the equality is maintained between the groups. That's what you propose for wealth inequality.
clairity 8y ago
also, the 0.002% don't represent all of the outlier positions, and even less so, all of the interesting ones. some people (1) have a compulsion to speak, (2) don't feel as much cost from (online) admonishment, and (3) have enough wherewithal to experiment with ideas and presentational approaches. (i'm sure there are other qualities, but these are some). on another tangent, social cohesion requires that a certain number of people incur the social costs of calling out bad behavior. that seemingly tends to be power law too, since the number of people who don't mind the social costs are quite low. even many law enforcement officers (whose very job it is) care a lot about what other people think and won't always act against self interests when necessary.
airstrike 8y ago
A related phenomenon I've been thinking about is the impact of traditional entertainment media (TV, Movies and Music) and the inherent bias in the sample of worldviews that the people who work in those businesses espouse. In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career, and if you assume we are inevitably influenced by their views then we're effectively taking advice from them. This means entertainment shapes the viewer-listener's interpretation of reality to better fit the model of reality to which storytellers subscribe, but I'm pretty sure that's not a desirable outcome in the long run. In a recent interview, Michelle Obama said we only ever tell young people about the good parts of marriage. We hardly ever explain to them that it has its ups and downs, that it isn't "broken" if suddenly the lust isn't there like it was in the beginning. She presented the argument in a much more cogent manner, but in any case, if you believe her to be right, then this seems like a specific (important!) example of this broader trend. There are countless others out there who go on to live perfectly happy lives with perhaps much more useful advice to us, and who would arguably be a better influence overall – you just don't hear about them.
- schoen 8y ago
  Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defence_of_Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defence_of_Poetry ("poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world").
- tokyodude 8y ago
  It certainly feels plausible and yet we have that issue. All our media tells us we should all carry guns and shoot people and yet gun violence is down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-... We have some of the sexyist media around telling us we should all be sleeping around and yet apparently sex is down too. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex... Are we sure it's any different for other topics? Also, as for media and marriage I feel like more media is about bad marriages than good ones. A common theme might be falling in love and getting married but a movie about people already married seems rarely about things going well. Or maybe I just have a selective memory.
winter_blue 8y ago
I don’t know if these people are really “outliers”. Many thought that an extreme outlier would not “win” the 2016 election, but it turned out there were 62 million who supported and loved his extreme outlierism.
- mercer 8y ago
  I'd say this shows how much of an effect 'outliers' can have. I'm not generally a proponent of the 'great man/woman' perspective on history, but I do think that the 'right' outlier at the 'right' time can have a huge effect simply because a large number of people can be affected significantly if they're compatible with this outlier, whether this outlier is out to run a cult/new religion, conquer the world, maintain some paradigm in whatever field they're kings of, and so on. I think this is less because most of us are 'sheeple' and more to do with how we have some (huge) low-level bugs that can be exploited in particular configurations. We care, but our heuristics can steer us wrong. Marketing/PR/propaganda as a way to exploit these things, and the scientific study of these things really kind of scare the crap out of me when it comes to my hope for the future of humanity.
- astine 8y ago
  Or rather 62 million preferred him enough to the alternative to vote for him in the national election. Among that 62 million were probably very many genuine supporters, but I think that a lot of them chose to read what they wanted into his rhetoric. So it's a bit more nuanced than that. On the other hand part of the reason he seemed like such an outlier might be because the consensus he seemed to deviate from was itself driven by outliers.
codazoda 8y ago
You are in the demographic you're talking about. You've posted 5 comments in the past 31 days and more than that the month prior. Yours was the top comment when I looked at the thread and you are therefore driving this discussion with your own worldview of the few. Me too, I suppose.
dang 8y ago
You're right about the title. We've put the insane people back up there. It still amazes me how deeply titles shape discussion. Most of what you read on the internet is by insane people reacting to titles.
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
> That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea. The content is there, by lesser known figures and lurkers alike. It’s just hard to discover. You need to stumble upon it by accident, instead of by a deliberate process like consuming the top upvoted posts.
- gniv 8y ago
  That's a good point. It could be that since we don't know how to scale curation (and use upvotes as a proxy), we exacerbate the problem of lurkers not having their (few) comments discovered. As a counter-example, I find the "editor's picks" comments on some New York Times articles to be high quality and quite diverse. But that model, of course, doesn't scale.
TACIXAT 8y ago
>The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. This is actually why disinformation works so well. Many people are consumers. A handful of people create content. Everyone has an expected behavior in a rather fragile system. If an organized group comes in and acts in a way that is outside of the system norms, they can very much control the dialog. I did a project on this during my Masters. [1] Reddit has an option to display your upvotes and downvotes publicly. About 2% of users have this option enabled. I scraped a random sample that I found from the torrent of all Reddit posts and comments. I looked at pairs from that set that shared common votes and the highest pair was from /r/the_donald. This behavior is what allowed it dominate the front page for so long. When most users are just voting on 1 or 2 things per page, and someone else comes along and votes for every post they see, it can greatly affect what is displayed. When you have a small set of people controlling a conversation, they can manipulate what a huge number of people consume. Social media is an incredibly effective propaganda machine! 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/82ylpv/_/dvdpqme/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/82ylpv/_/d...
czardoz 8y ago
That has always been the case with humanity in general. Think of book authors, there are few of them, but they've been influencing our thinking for hundreds of years. The problem now is, the barrier for entry has become incredibly low (although, this would have been true when the printing press was invented too). I stopped using reddit because of this. I've no idea about the credibility of the authors, their intentions and their motivation. When I'm listening to someone's opinion, I'd like to know more about them, so I can decide for myself how seriously to take it.
- oska 8y ago
  > When I'm listening to someone's opinion, I'd like to know more about them, so I can decide for myself how seriously to take it. This outlook is alien to me. I'm quite the opposite; I'm happy reading and judging anonymous comments purely on the strength of the argument being made there and then (although I don't ignore the background and history of a commenter when that is available to me). Not attacking your point of view; just very interesting to see an approach described so different to mine.
  - brokenmachine 8y ago
    I'm the same, although I have noticed the same usernames on comments here and there on hn - but not on reddit. I only look through the post history of someone if I feel they have a particularly interesting outlook, or if they're batshit crazy and I'm a bit bored.
unknownkadath 8y ago
You make a good point. Perhaps, going forward, putting a (reasonable) word in and encouraging others who do the same should part of our civic responsibility, just like voting and paying taxes have been.
blablabla123 8y ago
I cannot really see anything that wrong with this. I mean most (=all) never post anything on Stackoverflow although on some occasions I strongly encouraged people to do so because they'd otherwise run into problems - sometimes I even posted questions for other people. The point is: the hurdle to contribute or even create is quite high, no matter if it's on the internet or in the "real world". Stackoverflow is not a magic community, they have guidelines otherwise their content won't work so well. Same goes for Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, either you know how these sites work and what is expected or your content gets downvoted and eventually removed. Even HN works like this. So yes, then there is a small percentage of users that took the hurdle to internalize how things work. It's much easier actually when you do it regularly. In fact I used to be Wikipedia contributor but I gave it up because it's time consuming and frustrating. If you're not a frequent user, you can correct orthographic errors, anything else is pointless unless you're a writing genius/journalist. Nobody ever complains how insane they are working 10+ hours a day for an unstable job and oftentimes bad salary.
geezerjay 8y ago
> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. The author's definition of insane is stuff such as having read a lot of books, posting a high mumber of edits in wikipedia, or streaming videogaming for a profit. That's not clickbaity. It's simply wrong. Focusing on the most arguable assertion, the wikipedia user who has on average an edit per 4 minutes for pretty much the last decade. Based on my personal experience, it's very easy to reach that sort of rate due to wikipedia's auto-edit features, as it only takes a single click on a link to submit an edit. For example, you can revert a vandalism submission by clicking the revert link, you can mark an article as stub by clicking on a link, you can add a post to a category by clicking on a link... You can even post a warning on a user page by clicking on a link. Each of these actions count as an edit. This means that if you happen to stumble on a user who posted a joke on a set of articles, in the half minute it takes to revert all vandalism submissions and warn the user to not repeat that you will contribute tens of edits, which can give you easily a rate of 100 edits per minute. Does that count as insane?
- gniv 8y ago
  It is clickbaity. It is also wrong, indeed. But it's used here in the same way a person would say to a friend "You're insane!", when hearing of that person's unusual feat (like making 10000 wikipedia edits in the last month).

by gniv 8y ago

isoskeles 8y ago

> a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few Are you saying that internet commenters have a monolith "worldview" that could be referred to as "the worldview of a few"? I'm not saying you're saying this, but that's what I read.

gniv 8y ago
> Are you saying that internet commenters have a monolith "worldview" No. I'm saying that each person has a worldview, which is the aggregate of their life experience. If a small set of people drive most discussions, then the discussions are (mostly) a reflection of their perspective only. Maybe these perspectives are diverse enough, but it's hard to know.

mr_spothawk 8y ago

this argument does resonate. i started getting downvoted a lot. since then, i've become much more of a lurker and have remained logged-out. to me it's obvious, and necessarily the case, that the conversation happening is not representative of my views because i'm not sharing them. it's not worth it to me to contribute to the conversation, and get embroiled in an accidental dispute. my views are my own, and i don't need to spend a lot of time sharing them at other people in order to live a satisfied life. the internet, like the real world before it, is not my own space... and to the extent that i exist in it, i'm happier going my own way and not encountering lame-o jerks.

burlesona 8y ago
I agree with this. I suspect that any community with “downvoting” or similar would skew more forward outliers, because the prevailing group-think will downvote contrary content and getting downvoted stings, scaring off many who might otherwise add diverse perspectives. But even without voting mechanisms, nasty replies are just as bad or worse, so the general trend of chasing off the people who see things a little differently seems pretty universal to me.
- jungler 8y ago
  I walked around the problem of replies(on Reddit/HN) by never looking at them. I have a red envelope of 150 or so now. Every once in a while I imagine something anxiety inducing about them, or catch a glimpse(and more often than not a positive one) in the automatic reply emails Reddit likes to send me. Sometimes I will look back at the thread, if I really want to know. But I don't use these platforms to converse, even though I will happily make a reply to an existing thread. They are both too fast and too slow to be conversational. I use comment threads as a writing prompt instead, and by ignoring external feedback I don't experience pain from them, even though some of the time this might result in someone asking me something and never hearing a reply. If my idea is good, someone copies it and I see it in a later thread.
pelagic_sky 8y ago
I've gone from being an admin and owner of popular forums back in the early 2000's to just a lurker who 98% of the time will write a response but just delete it before it's posted because I don't need or want the hassle of an internet argument. I'm proud of even posting this. Maybe this is my one post for 2019. :)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- imjustsaying 8y ago
  I also have 100,000 posts scattered about forums from the early 2000's, but very few (less than 1,000) since after 2010. The trend towards downvote groupthink is not an insignificant part of the reason I've dropped content generation.

sverige 8y ago

> The prolific commenters are molding the discussion in their image. ... In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few. The most interesting point to me in TFA was the 99.8 - 0.2 - 0.0003 rate of lurkers, commenters, and prolific commenters. It's the 0.0003% who obsessively comment (or edit or play games or whatever) all day on anything and everything that I don't understand. I actually think 'insane' is not an unfair commentary on their behavior. They very often drown out the 0.2% who participate but not obsessively, and are often rewarded with special recognition and even 'untouchable' status on various sites.

steveklabnik 8y ago
> that I don't understand. One of the examples in the post, Ninja, reportedly earns $500,000 per month for that twelve hours a day of streaming. So.

cholmon 8y ago

This parallels civic/political engagement in real life. It's tough to get lurkers (like me) to speak up and shift the discussion when the emotional cost of doing so - arguing, being downvoted, getting defensive, being ridiculed - seems to make the effort simply not worthwhile for the individual. Not only on the web, but also in the office, at Thanksgiving dinner, at a cookout, etc.

gniv 8y ago
> This parallels civic/political engagement in real life. Indeed it does. And the "insane" label to the engaged is even more apt there.
clairity 8y ago
> "It's tough to get lurkers (like me) to speak up and shift the discussion when the emotional cost of doing so..." the 98% works in that case too: there are many people who might benefit from your comments but don't interact in any way, so you sometimes may deem the costs worth it (like now).
redwards510 8y ago
This reminds me of when I attempt to send a Snopes link to someone who just forwarded me a chain email. They don't thank you, you get silence or worse.
- astine 8y ago
  Yeah, people don't like being corrected when they are wrong. I've bumped into that a lot when discussing things on social media. I find that if you can manage to spare someone's ego when correcting them, it helps a lot. Rather than sending a link and saying something like "You're wrong!" If I can give them the opportunity to decide for themselves that they are wrong, by saying something like "Are you sure about that, this guy is saying something different," I often get a better response.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    There's a rabbinical art to being tactful that unfortunately eludes me. The effort is usually wasted on internet discussions. In more controlled, personal settings my favorite response along that vein is "what factors did you consider that led to your conclusion?" It's a less offensive, more roundabout way of telling someone that their assertion is questionable that also betrays their thought process.

kbuchanan 8y ago

Another possibility is that diversity is simply represented by extremes; that individuals sitting on the polar sides of issues are shaping the conversation. In other words, it's the boring, moderate, stable, center who remains silent.

gniv 8y ago
That's probably true, but it might be the end result of a vicious cycle: you don't engage, you don't sharpen the skills required for it, you fall into the easy role.
- wolco 8y ago
  But when you fall in the middle there is less of a need to comment

inequalitysir 8y ago

Then people talk about inequality. Even in free thing like Reddit only 1% people create value because they get high from it. Inequality comes from nature, wether it's wealth or contribution on Reddit like sites.

Retra 8y ago
Small pox came from nature too. But it's effectively gone. So is the Dodo bird, etc..
- inequalitysir 8y ago
  Your solution is to give Reddit Karma to people for reading so that the equality is maintained between the groups. That's what you propose for wealth inequality.

clairity 8y ago

also, the 0.002% don't represent all of the outlier positions, and even less so, all of the interesting ones. some people (1) have a compulsion to speak, (2) don't feel as much cost from (online) admonishment, and (3) have enough wherewithal to experiment with ideas and presentational approaches. (i'm sure there are other qualities, but these are some). on another tangent, social cohesion requires that a certain number of people incur the social costs of calling out bad behavior. that seemingly tends to be power law too, since the number of people who don't mind the social costs are quite low. even many law enforcement officers (whose very job it is) care a lot about what other people think and won't always act against self interests when necessary.

airstrike 8y ago

A related phenomenon I've been thinking about is the impact of traditional entertainment media (TV, Movies and Music) and the inherent bias in the sample of worldviews that the people who work in those businesses espouse. In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career, and if you assume we are inevitably influenced by their views then we're effectively taking advice from them. This means entertainment shapes the viewer-listener's interpretation of reality to better fit the model of reality to which storytellers subscribe, but I'm pretty sure that's not a desirable outcome in the long run. In a recent interview, Michelle Obama said we only ever tell young people about the good parts of marriage. We hardly ever explain to them that it has its ups and downs, that it isn't "broken" if suddenly the lust isn't there like it was in the beginning. She presented the argument in a much more cogent manner, but in any case, if you believe her to be right, then this seems like a specific (important!) example of this broader trend. There are countless others out there who go on to live perfectly happy lives with perhaps much more useful advice to us, and who would arguably be a better influence overall – you just don't hear about them.

schoen 8y ago
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defence_of_Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defence_of_Poetry ("poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world").
tokyodude 8y ago
It certainly feels plausible and yet we have that issue. All our media tells us we should all carry guns and shoot people and yet gun violence is down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-... We have some of the sexyist media around telling us we should all be sleeping around and yet apparently sex is down too. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex... Are we sure it's any different for other topics? Also, as for media and marriage I feel like more media is about bad marriages than good ones. A common theme might be falling in love and getting married but a movie about people already married seems rarely about things going well. Or maybe I just have a selective memory.

winter_blue 8y ago

I don’t know if these people are really “outliers”. Many thought that an extreme outlier would not “win” the 2016 election, but it turned out there were 62 million who supported and loved his extreme outlierism.

mercer 8y ago
I'd say this shows how much of an effect 'outliers' can have. I'm not generally a proponent of the 'great man/woman' perspective on history, but I do think that the 'right' outlier at the 'right' time can have a huge effect simply because a large number of people can be affected significantly if they're compatible with this outlier, whether this outlier is out to run a cult/new religion, conquer the world, maintain some paradigm in whatever field they're kings of, and so on. I think this is less because most of us are 'sheeple' and more to do with how we have some (huge) low-level bugs that can be exploited in particular configurations. We care, but our heuristics can steer us wrong. Marketing/PR/propaganda as a way to exploit these things, and the scientific study of these things really kind of scare the crap out of me when it comes to my hope for the future of humanity.
astine 8y ago
Or rather 62 million preferred him enough to the alternative to vote for him in the national election. Among that 62 million were probably very many genuine supporters, but I think that a lot of them chose to read what they wanted into his rhetoric. So it's a bit more nuanced than that. On the other hand part of the reason he seemed like such an outlier might be because the consensus he seemed to deviate from was itself driven by outliers.

codazoda 8y ago

You are in the demographic you're talking about. You've posted 5 comments in the past 31 days and more than that the month prior. Yours was the top comment when I looked at the thread and you are therefore driving this discussion with your own worldview of the few. Me too, I suppose.

dang 8y ago

You're right about the title. We've put the insane people back up there. It still amazes me how deeply titles shape discussion. Most of what you read on the internet is by insane people reacting to titles.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

> That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea. The content is there, by lesser known figures and lurkers alike. It’s just hard to discover. You need to stumble upon it by accident, instead of by a deliberate process like consuming the top upvoted posts.

gniv 8y ago
That's a good point. It could be that since we don't know how to scale curation (and use upvotes as a proxy), we exacerbate the problem of lurkers not having their (few) comments discovered. As a counter-example, I find the "editor's picks" comments on some New York Times articles to be high quality and quite diverse. But that model, of course, doesn't scale.

TACIXAT 8y ago

>The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. This is actually why disinformation works so well. Many people are consumers. A handful of people create content. Everyone has an expected behavior in a rather fragile system. If an organized group comes in and acts in a way that is outside of the system norms, they can very much control the dialog. I did a project on this during my Masters. [1] Reddit has an option to display your upvotes and downvotes publicly. About 2% of users have this option enabled. I scraped a random sample that I found from the torrent of all Reddit posts and comments. I looked at pairs from that set that shared common votes and the highest pair was from /r/the_donald. This behavior is what allowed it dominate the front page for so long. When most users are just voting on 1 or 2 things per page, and someone else comes along and votes for every post they see, it can greatly affect what is displayed. When you have a small set of people controlling a conversation, they can manipulate what a huge number of people consume. Social media is an incredibly effective propaganda machine! 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/82ylpv/_/dvdpqme/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/82ylpv/_/d...

czardoz 8y ago

That has always been the case with humanity in general. Think of book authors, there are few of them, but they've been influencing our thinking for hundreds of years. The problem now is, the barrier for entry has become incredibly low (although, this would have been true when the printing press was invented too). I stopped using reddit because of this. I've no idea about the credibility of the authors, their intentions and their motivation. When I'm listening to someone's opinion, I'd like to know more about them, so I can decide for myself how seriously to take it.

oska 8y ago
> When I'm listening to someone's opinion, I'd like to know more about them, so I can decide for myself how seriously to take it. This outlook is alien to me. I'm quite the opposite; I'm happy reading and judging anonymous comments purely on the strength of the argument being made there and then (although I don't ignore the background and history of a commenter when that is available to me). Not attacking your point of view; just very interesting to see an approach described so different to mine.
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  I'm the same, although I have noticed the same usernames on comments here and there on hn - but not on reddit. I only look through the post history of someone if I feel they have a particularly interesting outlook, or if they're batshit crazy and I'm a bit bored.

unknownkadath 8y ago

You make a good point. Perhaps, going forward, putting a (reasonable) word in and encouraging others who do the same should part of our civic responsibility, just like voting and paying taxes have been.

blablabla123 8y ago

I cannot really see anything that wrong with this. I mean most (=all) never post anything on Stackoverflow although on some occasions I strongly encouraged people to do so because they'd otherwise run into problems - sometimes I even posted questions for other people. The point is: the hurdle to contribute or even create is quite high, no matter if it's on the internet or in the "real world". Stackoverflow is not a magic community, they have guidelines otherwise their content won't work so well. Same goes for Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, either you know how these sites work and what is expected or your content gets downvoted and eventually removed. Even HN works like this. So yes, then there is a small percentage of users that took the hurdle to internalize how things work. It's much easier actually when you do it regularly. In fact I used to be Wikipedia contributor but I gave it up because it's time consuming and frustrating. If you're not a frequent user, you can correct orthographic errors, anything else is pointless unless you're a writing genius/journalist. Nobody ever complains how insane they are working 10+ hours a day for an unstable job and oftentimes bad salary.

geezerjay 8y ago

> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. The author's definition of insane is stuff such as having read a lot of books, posting a high mumber of edits in wikipedia, or streaming videogaming for a profit. That's not clickbaity. It's simply wrong. Focusing on the most arguable assertion, the wikipedia user who has on average an edit per 4 minutes for pretty much the last decade. Based on my personal experience, it's very easy to reach that sort of rate due to wikipedia's auto-edit features, as it only takes a single click on a link to submit an edit. For example, you can revert a vandalism submission by clicking the revert link, you can mark an article as stub by clicking on a link, you can add a post to a category by clicking on a link... You can even post a warning on a user page by clicking on a link. Each of these actions count as an edit. This means that if you happen to stumble on a user who posted a joke on a set of articles, in the half minute it takes to revert all vandalism submissions and warn the user to not repeat that you will contribute tens of edits, which can give you easily a rate of 100 edits per minute. Does that count as insane?

gniv 8y ago
It is clickbaity. It is also wrong, indeed. But it's used here in the same way a person would say to a friend "You're insane!", when hearing of that person's unusual feat (like making 10000 wikipedia edits in the last month).