8 ms·

It's pretty interesting to see the increase lately of comments defending various companies. Not saying there's a conspiracy but it's a bit weird

wtracy 7y ago
Hacker News has always been like this. The site is specifically targeted at people associated with venture-capital-funded startups. A very large percentage of those people are former FAANG employees, employees of companies trying to get acquired by FAANG, or employees of companies doing exactly the same things that FAANG are getting criticized for. (Some are all three!) I doubt any of them are getting paid to AstroTurf, but they know what side their bread is getting buttered on.
- dang 7y ago
  > The site is specifically targeted at people associated with venture-capital-funded startups. Quite un-so! HN is targeted at one group only: the intellectually curious. So curiosity—keeping HN interesting—is the only thing we care about and optimize for. As for VC-funded startups, since only about 10% of HN users are located in Silicon Valley, the number working for such startups is certainly far less than that. 50% of HN users are outside the US. This community is orders of magnitude more diverse than your image of it here. People work for many different employers. Are their views impacted by their work experience? Of course they are—for every user here. There's nothing sinister about that. If someone posts a view that's wrong, others will correct it. As long as they do so thoughtfully, that's great. The cycle of life on HN.
  - dlivingston 7y ago
    20% of Americans on HN are localized to the Valley? That seems insanely high. Can you cite references?
    - wtracy 7y ago
      I would imagine that dang has access to HN's internal metrics which probably aren't public. Also, when dang contradicts me about HN, that means I'm wrong, lol.
    - dang 7y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521
      - dlivingston 7y ago
        I stand corrected. Thanks!
        dang 7y ago
        Yours is the first comment I've seen that expressed surprise it's so high. The most widespread perception is that HN users are largely based in SV. That has led to a lot of misunderstandings.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    Sorry Dang, but I have to cast immense doubt on your claim that 50% of users on HN are from outside of the US considering how frequently America-centric topics tend to rise to the top of the HN front page. Namely the frequent battles of free speech which seem to fall down American ideological lines. Is it 50% of registered users or 50% of active commentators? And I think the image HN has been trying to cultivate is vastly different from the image of what HN actually is, at least from some of the other sites and circles I post on. The rather negative reaction to the Katie Bouman news as well as the summer programming for women incident show that somewhere down the line there is a serious breakdown in what culture HN is trying to create.
    - dang 7y ago
      Doubt as you like, but I put a lot of work into measuring it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 was over a year ago, but I'd be surprised if it has changed much since then. I'll take another look soon. I'm glad you have a sense of the culture HN is trying to cultivate. Even getting just that across is astonishingly hard. By far the likeliest default is that nobody has any sense of it. Does it fall short? Sure. The question is how much is possible on the internet—specifically on a large, public, optionally-anonymous internet forum, the bucket HN falls in. We're happy to do our utmost, but only along the axis of the possible. We can't come close to delivering everything people imagine and demand. Your comment doesn't allow for the constraints we're up against, how few degrees of freedom we have, or how close we come to getting crushed between the gears. HN is a large enough population sample (5M readers a month) that it is divided wherever society is divided. That means you're inevitably going to see posts which represent the worst of society relative to your own views. Societies, actually, because whether you doubt it or not, HN is a highly international site. People post here relative to their respective local norms, but mostly in mutual ignorance of that fact. This accentuates how bad the worst posts seem. So yes you see awful posts, but it doesn't follow that they're representative either of the community or the culture. Jumping to that conclusion is an error nearly everyone makes, because painful impressions (such as nasty comments) are vastly more memorable than pleasurable ones (such as sensible comments). This has been studied and there's a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect. The phenomenon was established about news coverage (https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199793471-e-011 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...), but internet comments are no different. What are these "other sites and circles" you mention that do so much better culturally than HN does? Are they public forums where anybody can create an account? Are they optionally anonymous? How large are they? In other words, do they face the same problems that we do? If so, and they're better than we are at solving them, please point us there so we can learn from them. Nothing would make me happier. Usually, though, when people make this claim, they're talking about much smaller communities and/or ones that are not fully open.
- jstanley 7y ago
  Causation could run in either direction here. It's not necessarily the case that people sympathise with companies because they're involved with running them. It might be that they involve themselves with running companies because they sympathise with them.
duxup 7y ago
Is it really an increase, or are you just seeing it?
dang 7y ago
Saying you're not saying there's a conspiracy is a way of saying there's a conspiracy. There's a site guideline against this: the one that asks you not to post insinuations of astroturfing without evidence. Experience has shown that these are imaginary the overwhelming majority of the time, and meanwhile the "cure" poisons the community more than the alleged disease does. So please don't do that on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html There's a vast history about this for anyone who wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
bubblewrap 7y ago
This site used to be called "startup news", it is run by a startup accelerator. Many people here maybe have or hope to have their own company one day. It seems normal to me to defend the concept of companies. Personally I think blaming big companies is just lazy thinking that prepares the path to socialism. Of course companies, or the economy in general, aren't perfect. People are still trying to figure out how to do things better. That's normal. There is no need to assume evil greed behind everything.

wtracy 7y ago

Hacker News has always been like this. The site is specifically targeted at people associated with venture-capital-funded startups. A very large percentage of those people are former FAANG employees, employees of companies trying to get acquired by FAANG, or employees of companies doing exactly the same things that FAANG are getting criticized for. (Some are all three!) I doubt any of them are getting paid to AstroTurf, but they know what side their bread is getting buttered on.

dang 7y ago
> The site is specifically targeted at people associated with venture-capital-funded startups. Quite un-so! HN is targeted at one group only: the intellectually curious. So curiosity—keeping HN interesting—is the only thing we care about and optimize for. As for VC-funded startups, since only about 10% of HN users are located in Silicon Valley, the number working for such startups is certainly far less than that. 50% of HN users are outside the US. This community is orders of magnitude more diverse than your image of it here. People work for many different employers. Are their views impacted by their work experience? Of course they are—for every user here. There's nothing sinister about that. If someone posts a view that's wrong, others will correct it. As long as they do so thoughtfully, that's great. The cycle of life on HN.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  20% of Americans on HN are localized to the Valley? That seems insanely high. Can you cite references?
  - wtracy 7y ago
    I would imagine that dang has access to HN's internal metrics which probably aren't public. Also, when dang contradicts me about HN, that means I'm wrong, lol.
  - dang 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521
    - dlivingston 7y ago
      I stand corrected. Thanks!
      - dang 7y ago
        Yours is the first comment I've seen that expressed surprise it's so high. The most widespread perception is that HN users are largely based in SV. That has led to a lot of misunderstandings.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  Sorry Dang, but I have to cast immense doubt on your claim that 50% of users on HN are from outside of the US considering how frequently America-centric topics tend to rise to the top of the HN front page. Namely the frequent battles of free speech which seem to fall down American ideological lines. Is it 50% of registered users or 50% of active commentators? And I think the image HN has been trying to cultivate is vastly different from the image of what HN actually is, at least from some of the other sites and circles I post on. The rather negative reaction to the Katie Bouman news as well as the summer programming for women incident show that somewhere down the line there is a serious breakdown in what culture HN is trying to create.
  - dang 7y ago
    Doubt as you like, but I put a lot of work into measuring it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 was over a year ago, but I'd be surprised if it has changed much since then. I'll take another look soon. I'm glad you have a sense of the culture HN is trying to cultivate. Even getting just that across is astonishingly hard. By far the likeliest default is that nobody has any sense of it. Does it fall short? Sure. The question is how much is possible on the internet—specifically on a large, public, optionally-anonymous internet forum, the bucket HN falls in. We're happy to do our utmost, but only along the axis of the possible. We can't come close to delivering everything people imagine and demand. Your comment doesn't allow for the constraints we're up against, how few degrees of freedom we have, or how close we come to getting crushed between the gears. HN is a large enough population sample (5M readers a month) that it is divided wherever society is divided. That means you're inevitably going to see posts which represent the worst of society relative to your own views. Societies, actually, because whether you doubt it or not, HN is a highly international site. People post here relative to their respective local norms, but mostly in mutual ignorance of that fact. This accentuates how bad the worst posts seem. So yes you see awful posts, but it doesn't follow that they're representative either of the community or the culture. Jumping to that conclusion is an error nearly everyone makes, because painful impressions (such as nasty comments) are vastly more memorable than pleasurable ones (such as sensible comments). This has been studied and there's a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect. The phenomenon was established about news coverage (https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199793471-e-011 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...), but internet comments are no different. What are these "other sites and circles" you mention that do so much better culturally than HN does? Are they public forums where anybody can create an account? Are they optionally anonymous? How large are they? In other words, do they face the same problems that we do? If so, and they're better than we are at solving them, please point us there so we can learn from them. Nothing would make me happier. Usually, though, when people make this claim, they're talking about much smaller communities and/or ones that are not fully open.
jstanley 7y ago
Causation could run in either direction here. It's not necessarily the case that people sympathise with companies because they're involved with running them. It might be that they involve themselves with running companies because they sympathise with them.

duxup 7y ago

Is it really an increase, or are you just seeing it?

dang 7y ago

Saying you're not saying there's a conspiracy is a way of saying there's a conspiracy. There's a site guideline against this: the one that asks you not to post insinuations of astroturfing without evidence. Experience has shown that these are imaginary the overwhelming majority of the time, and meanwhile the "cure" poisons the community more than the alleged disease does. So please don't do that on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html There's a vast history about this for anyone who wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

bubblewrap 7y ago

This site used to be called "startup news", it is run by a startup accelerator. Many people here maybe have or hope to have their own company one day. It seems normal to me to defend the concept of companies. Personally I think blaming big companies is just lazy thinking that prepares the path to socialism. Of course companies, or the economy in general, aren't perfect. People are still trying to figure out how to do things better. That's normal. There is no need to assume evil greed behind everything.