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There seem to be articles from citylab (and other 'urbanist' outlets) flooding Hacker News daily. Somehow they all end up on the front page. This article's subm

There seem to be articles from citylab (and other 'urbanist' outlets) flooding Hacker News daily. Somehow they all end up on the front page. This article's submitter (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gmck https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gmck) is a 5-month old account that submits almost entirely just citylab articles. Clearly there are people looking to influence the HN crowd one way, especially with the anti-car narratives. Here's a different narrative about cars that shows the other side: Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life. They don't require you to wait on someone else's schedule, especially given the often inconsistent timing of buses. They work in all weather (such as rain) and in all terrain (such as hills) and are viable for older folks who may not be comfortable riding a bike everywhere. They don't require you to risk sitting down on dirty seats (6-year-old girl stabbed by uncapped needle on bus: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/08/girl-6-injected-needle-hidden-two-bus-seats-9873386/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/08/girl-6-injected-needle-hidden...). They don't require you to expose yourself to violence (40 to 60 teens rob BART train: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-50-to-60-teens-swarm-11094745.php https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...). They let you travel all over the land, including away from cities, and therefore give you a greater degree of freedom than the reach of fixed rails or transit systems that are limited to cities. It seems most of these anti-car articles conveniently ignore the massive benefits we get from fast, private, point-to-point motorized vehicular transport. PS: literally less than 10 seconds after I posted this comment, it was down-voted. No one reads that fast, and this is clearly a spiteful downvote from someone who doesn't want any visible challenge to the prevailing narrative. That's unfortunate and a sign of degradation in discourse within the Hacker News community.

noobermin 7y ago
It is curious they keep submitting from Citylab, but that they reach the front page insinuates people are interested in it. Just because people don't share your sensibilities doesn't mean there is a conspiracy against your point of view.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  That is possible, yes, although it seems improbable to me because almost the same content is repeated all the time. It is also possible submitters/activists employ voting rings to push up these articles. The rapid-fire downvote patterns I've seen in these articles' comment sections is unlike other discussions on HN that involve conflicting viewpoints, which is why I feel something else is happening.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    Look at any story that concerns China or the CCP, you see similar patterns of comments and downvotes. It's tempting to believe the CIA/CCP are waging information warfare on HN of all places but if we are to believe dang it's just because it's political and people knee-jerk respond in kind with their ideology. That is more logical but upsetting to some people because it suggests there are people who massively disagree with them.
  - dang 7y ago
    You're breaking the site guidelines with comments like this. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - throwawaysea 7y ago
      dang - how do you propose we have meta conversations about issues like this? I get that there are site guidelines, but concerns about the community being exploited by organizations (rather than individuals) are legitimate and not frivolous. It's this same concern that has reduced the signal to noise ratio on Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. And clearly, people are not willing to just blindly trust that Facebook or Twitter are perfect in their approach or that they are even attempting to do the right thing. Is there a way to discuss this topic that you wouldn't object to?
      - dang 7y ago
        I hear you. That's a tough one, because the kinds of comments people post as part of such "meta discussions" pour fuel onto the very fires we're trying to contain. And to be honest, I don't know how much more of this kind of discussion I have in me. I spent most of the day writing about it, and it's burning me out. Take a look at these posts and let me know if you still have questions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21198494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21198494 We definitely want HN users to feel like their concerns about possible manipulation are heard and taken care of. At the same time we want HN users not to bully and hound each other out of prejudice—which unfortunately is happening, not on purpose but because the frames through which people interpret others' comments are much too small. When someone else's view is, say, more than a standard deviation away from one's own, people don't think "wow, that's really a different point of view". They think "astroturfer", "shill", "spy", "bot", "troll", and even "communist agent".
umvi 7y ago
Cars are great, especially electric cars.
- megaremote 7y ago
  If you are in the US, are 40,000 deaths a year and over 2 million injured of disabled worth it for the convenience they bring? Not to me. Are those direct deaths going to stop with electric cars? Not while people are in control.
  - drukenemo 7y ago
    Cars also allow for exploration, going through remote roads at you will, traveling to where you like and when you like. The US is enormous and cars are not purely negative there.
    - megaremote 7y ago
      I guess that is worth the death count to you? Not to me.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aidenn0 7y ago
RE: PS: FWIW, a downvote shortly after posting is a common occurence for comments on front page articles. Almost every comment I've had in the past 10 years that eventually hit double-digit points went to zero or -1 within minutes of posting.
- noobermin 7y ago
  It is a curious occurrence but that has happened more than once for me. It's also a good lesson in ettiquette and patience: editing your comment to challenge downvoters almost assures that it will not rise positively again.
- czinck 7y ago
  Supposedly a trick people use on reddit is to downvote all of the other comments on an article when you're making a comment, to give your comment an extra bit of boost, especially early on when there's few upvotes. I would hope the reddit algorithm catches that, and with HN requiring a pretty high karma threshold for downvoting comments should keep people from doing that.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    Isn't it possible that people view the karma threshold as a barrier to entry they can take advantage of? What's to stop some organization from making 100 accounts that accumulate karma and then start engaging in low-signal astroturfing/shilling that is harder to distinguish, especially if others cannot counter them without similarly organizing a group and accumulating karma over time?
timerol 7y ago
I agree with most of your points. However, these articles are mostly focused on removing cars from the ultra high-density areas where they are ineffective. Going from NYC to the Adirondacks for a backpacking trip? Can't beat a car. Going from the Upper West Side to Wall Street? Please don't drive, it makes everything worse for everyone, including yourself. My personal opinion is that the HN crowd likes looking at transit in large cities as a complex optimization problem. There are a ton of variables to play with, and we're currently so far away from anything approaching optimum. Cars downtown give me the same feeling as a 10MB web site that has two paragraphs of content. We can do better than this.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Please don't drive, it makes everything worse for everyone, including yourself. This assumes that people are simply so oblivious that they aren't aware of driving being worse for them. This can happen occasionally, but let me assure you that whenever you see people stuck in traffic, for overwhelming majority of them, being stuck in traffic is preferrable to alternatives. It might not be so to you, but they aren't you. Don't assume stupidity, but rather try to understand why people would rather be stuck in traffic driving a single occupant vehicle than take a public bus. This way, you might learn things that could lead to improving public transit and making them more attractive to all.
  - maxaf 7y ago
    I wish I could upvote you twice! I’m one of the minority of Manhattan residents who use a private car instead of transit. My schedule and routes are unusual enough that transit doesn’t serve me. Even when doing a more traditional UWS->Financial District commute, I often prefer to drive because of the knock-on benefits: I can shop at Eataly and bring home some goodies for the family; I can make stops at a few stores along the way that would otherwise be too far from the standard subway commute route. I don’t enjoy sitting in traffic, but it’s so much easier for me than any other alternative. I pick my travel times to minimize delays for myself (and presumably others) and I’m tired of being labeled an entitled snob, an idiot, or a murderer of cyclists.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Cars were fast, in the sixties and seventies. There was space on roads. I used to enjoy the "freedom of the open road". Miles of twisty roads with just a few roadblocks to navigate around. Even better on a motorbike... Not any more. Now a car is an expensive pain in the ass and aside from in the early hours, roads are pretty much constantly full. Full enough that even a motorcycle isn't quite the fun or freedom it was when I passed my test 40 years ago. Anything that reverses the trend to a car (self-driven or not) being a necessity is good in my book. I'd far rather have an infrastructure that promotes public transport and cycling like the Netherlands does. The sooner we get back to streets safe for children to play in, the better. I won't play tit-for-tat with equally emotive and useless links to stories about people having watches and wallets lifted at lights etc.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Miles of twisty roads with just a few roadblocks to navigate around. Roadblocks? Why were there roadblocks?
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Other drivers. ;)
- noobermin 7y ago
  I am curious, did you perspective regarding the freedom cars grant change when you got older and, if you had children, follow that development? I find that most people use the "for the children" argument online, even though cars hurt everyone who lives in a city, just children disproportionately.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Well, it's difficult to completely separate the two... Mainly the sheer annoyance of increasing delays and gridlock. Which of course correlated with my ageing, as it's increased over the years. The journey to work being an increasingly unpredictable journey, timewise. The fun of the increasingly rare empty road remained, as did like of motorbikes, or the fun of a track day. We use the car less and less, despite the intentional political neglect of public transport. We did a fair few trips with the kids by train. I don't believe they ever got a car journey to school wherever we lived - they walked. Luckily the street they grew up until around 12, was traffic calmed with no through traffic, so they got to play out plenty, kick a ball around the road etc. Other places made that far more difficult. Playing out today on the street _I_ grew up and played on at similar age would be suicide.
iikoolpp 7y ago
Dying from air pollution to own the citylab writers
- baroffoos 7y ago
  How good is becoming disabled because some driver was checking their phone!
iron0013 7y ago
I am not a bot or a shill, but I upvote the articles you're describing whenever I see them, because I'm very interested in public transit and urban planning and enjoy discussing alternatives to automobile-centric cities and lifestyles.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Seconded. This account is linked to my real-life identity; I'm not a bot/shill. I'm a city dweller and these kinds of articles are highly relevant to my interests and my real life advocacy and organizing work. It shouldn't be surprising that lots of tech workers who hang out on this site live in dense cities like SF or NYC, and are interested in how cities can be improved by removing vehicles, which don't scale to high urban densities anyway.
flaviu1 7y ago
Because you're immediately dismissing a whole set of thought with random anecdotes. The only way that policy decisions should be made is with hard data. Policy decisions shouldn't be made on the basis of little girls getting stabbed by needles, just like they're not made on the basis of people getting hit by lightning. Yes, there's circumstances where cars are essential. Dense urban environments are not it. There's a massive set of negative externalities that cars and the mindset that people should never have to walk more than twenty feet between their front door and their destination bring. They've lead to greatly reduced quality of life in these urban areas.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Its funny that people focus on extraordinarily rare situations like sitting on a needle that are so rare that you have to find a news article to show that it can happen but ignore the horrifyingly common occurrence of car crashes which are so common almost everyone has experienced one or knows someone who has and usually has life threatening outcomes.
CarVac 7y ago
The benefits of cars are obvious. Nobody needs an article to point them out, just like how we don't need articles extolling the incredible energy density and wide availability of gasoline. The articles are here to point out the non-obvious downsides of cars, and people upvote them because they find them interesting.
scarejunba 7y ago
The greatest trick the Russian voting rings, Megaphone, and the 50-cent army pulled is convincing us to shadow-box all the time. We never know when they're in action and so we're always seeing a threat. Very clever. This is actually quite interesting to me. We each build up a notion of what the HN community is and what we believe to be its core principles and when we see the 'regulars at our pub' (for want of a better metaphor) suddenly in violent opposition to our views, we immediately conclude it's because it's a bunch of shills. But what about the counterfactual? What if our friends actually violently oppose our views. What would it take to convince ourselves of this? FWIW I think HN is too big to have any sort of unified core principles. It isn't even pro-startup anymore, which is sort of ironic. Here's my hypothesis: Lots of people on HN fully believe the pro-public-transit narrative. You're not downvoted by Chinese voting rings, you're just being disagreed with. Just like when I'm pro-Internet-advertising I'm not downvoted by Big Patreon, I'm just in opposition to the rest of the community. I downvoted you because I hate downvote whining and shill accusation.
guelo 7y ago
From the HN guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data." Also, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  I'll admit I saw this bit in the HN guidelines previously. I finally said something on this topic anyways, because I've seen other commenters also point out the same in other citylab discussions recently, and feel it is a problem in the community. The voting mechanisms here makes discussions less diverse. I'm especially not fond of the feature where downvoted comments are marked 'dead' or have their font color changed to make them less readable. Leaving aside the obvious accessibility concerns, it leads to echo chambers, just with a slower degradation rate than say Twitter or Reddit.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Did you do the thing the guidelines suggested? (Emailing the site admins?) What was the response?
uniformlyrandom 7y ago
I have upvoted op because it is an interesting topic. I upvoted your comment because it is more interesting than the op. I would use occam’s razor to say that the pattern you see is normal. It is a pity we do not see enough posts on problems of public transportation though. All those articles about beauty of public transportation and biking in high-density, nice weather areas are highly misleading.
mberning 7y ago
You hit the nail on the head. There is a large amount of astroturfing that takes place in HN. And the mods carry water for them. I am shocked that you don’t have them looking down their nose at you with their typical aplomb.
- dang 7y ago
  That's not true, and commenters who post glib claims like this have no idea how far the truth goes the opposite way. I've personally spent countless hours working to counteract manipulation and abuse on HN. I've written the subsystems of the HN software that focus on that and catch quite a lot of it which, as a result, you never have to see. From all that work, experience, and data, I've learned how utterly misplaced these cheap claims about astroturfing and manipulation usually are. They mostly have nothing to do with reality. What's going on is that when people encounter views they dislike, they get upset and reach for explanations of abuse, bad faith, manipulation, disingenuousness, etc. as a way to ward them off. People on all sides of every issue do this. It's against the spirit of HN, which is why the guidelines ask users not to. The only claims you've ever made about abuse on HN, unless I'm forgetting something, have been complaints about your ideological opponents. The opposing side makes exactly the same claims about yours. Everyone who thinks this way is sure that HN is secretly dominated by their enemies and the mods are probably in cahoots with them. But they all, of course, have a different picture of which side is dominating—always the one they dislike. In the case of the OP, it's clear that the submitter is here to promote Citylab. But there's no evidence that the voting on these stories has been manipulated. They're just articles that a certain class of (legit) HN users like and tend to vote for. When we notice a submitter with a promotional history, we penalize the account; we want users to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they or a friend or an employer have something to promote. Still, this is the mildest class of bad behavior that we see on HN; such submitters usually haven't got a clue that they're doing anything wrong, and they're doing nothing underhanded behind the scenes.
megaremote 7y ago
> Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life I mean, of course, does anyone deny that. They improve your life over the lives of others. Cars are incredibly bad for society, insanely bad. If someone had come up with the idea of a private car today, they would be rightly lambasted for their idiotic and dangerous idea. 2 tonne chunks of metal hurling down streets at 50mph mere feet away from unprotected people? Insane.
olivermarks 7y ago
There is wild eyed optimism and admiration for EVs and anything self driving on HN. It's probably the demographic rather than any innate hatred of ICE vehicles. The enthusiasm for a loss of privacy and freedom of movement inherent in 'on demand' rented transport does disturb me though - the great joy of owning a vehicle is you can go wherever you want whenever you want.
rayiner 7y ago
I’ll add another angle. Cars enable social mobility, particularly for people of color, who as a group make less money than white and Asian people and are less likely to be able to afford the skyrocketing price of housing near reliable transit. One of the biggest demographic trends of the last couple of decades—more significant than young white people moving back into cities, which Citylab spends a lot of ink writing about—is people of color moving to the suburbs or car-dependent southern cities: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census-great-migration-reversal/21818127 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census.... Here in the DC area, while DC gentrifies and pushes out middle class people and families with kids, the predominantly African American suburbs of PG County are growing. The same thing is happening on the other side of DC in Fairfax county and Arlington county with Hispanic families. For these folks, cars enable a huge increase in quality of life that would be foreclosed otherwise. (My cousin, whose family immigrated here from Bangladesh, grew up in a small apartment in Queens. I remember visiting back in the 1990s and think it looked post-apocalyptic. Now, her parents have a nice house in Long Island. They’d never be able to afford anything like that near a subway station.) I don’t think this is intrinsic to societies generally. There are lots of reasons why housing prices are out of control in US cities, and lots of reasons why people of color are underrepresented in the kinds of professions, such as programming, that enable people to afford housing near transit. But that is what it is. Until we fix those problems, urbanist snobbery will have problematic race and class undertones.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  These people would be better served by building increased mass transit to accommodate them, as car ownership is expensive and beyond the reach of many people who don't have much.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    We’re talking about middle class people. They can afford cars, more than one in fact. What they can’t afford is $1 million+ on a house in DC in a decent school district near good public transit. (Indeed, the “can’t afford cars” urbanist trope applies to almost no one. Even among people who are under the poverty line, 80% have access to a vehicle. Driving is one of the most egalitarian institutions in the US.) Building more mass transit won’t fix the schools, and mostly just seems to facilitate gentrification. It costs billions of dollars to extend the DC Metro these days. That means anywhere remotely desirable that gets a new metro line becomes totally unaffordable for middle class people with families. The structural cost problem has huge knock on effects. If building rail here cost what it does in Europe, you’d be able to build five times as much. If we had five new lines in the last decade, instead of just one, maybe rents near subway metro wouldn’t be skyrocketing. But that’s not the world we live in.
StreamBright 7y ago
>> Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life. The key in this sentence is "that are not ultra high-density". This does not apply to Amsterdam. Also, you are comparing one of the worst public transportation systems (SF) to once of the best transportation systems (Amsterdam) making sound like just because public transportation sucks in SF your only real alternative is a car. I lived in both places and I do not want to commute in SF by car at all. This is one of the reasons I have moved back to Europe, I do not need to own a car here. You are downvoted because your argument is very one sided. I do not mind citylab articles being on HN at all. Just so that we have more numbers your argument about cars: https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/23/how-much-does-your-car-commute-actually-cost https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/23/how-much-does-... I really like not owning a car and going to work without the hassle. I can read on the train or tram or listen to music, even write code if I want to. I occasionally use car sharing services if I want to go outside the city where I could not go easily without a car. I chose when (off peak) and am not in rush. The psychological impact of driving to work every day is just misery. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/lengthy-commutes-take-a-mental-toll.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/lengthy-commu...
epistasis 7y ago
Access to the city, efficiency of transportation, and climate change are the topics that will make me always click on an article that's on the HN front page. As I see it, these are the biggest and most important problems of our day. They are not new, but they are tough and getting worse; in particular they are huge concerns of those who are younger. Even high-income young people are financially screwed compared to middle-income people that brought property in cities a generation ago, and that sort of massive inequality weights heavily on every renter in the Bay Area, even if they are making $250k a year. I think there's probably a big generational shift here, by any chance are you over 50? Talking about sitting down on dirty seats, and exposing yourself to violence are not typical concerns of younger people I talk to, they are usually far more concerned with climate change and ensuring equitable access to the city. Though security on public transit is a huge privilege for men, so I could also perhaps see your concerns coming from a women who's less than 50 as well! Don't mean to box you in. But the big demographics on HN are younger males, so thinking that Citylab articles are astroturf would seem to be missing a huge thrust of the current zeitgeist.
dang 7y ago
You're probably getting additional downvotes because of the bilious bits about how HN is degenerating and being manipulated, none of which is on topic or interesting. Also, adding complaints about downvotes breaks the site guidelines and guarantees more downvotes. Edit: also, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We actually ban accounts that do that, because it destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what this site exists for. There's lots of past explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20primarily%20test&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart?
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  dang - I read through all of your past posts from your link before writing this comment. Respectfully, I do not understand the note about ideological battle. I typically post when I am reasonably informed about a topic and see representation for one viewpoint, but not the one I have. I also do this when existing comments are dominated by a single uniform perspective or feature one perspective repeated many times relative to others (groupthink). I view my postings in such situation as diversifying the information represented in a given discussion. Very commonly, I see these situations with single-viewpoint domination present themselves in topics that are 'political', and perhaps this is because the HN demographic (location, profession, and so on) is relatively homogeneous. And so I end up commenting in such discussions more often. Additionally, I am less interested in some of the purely technical discussions (such as "why is framework X better than framework Y") and more in the economic/cultural/political discussions that take place here. Given time limitations, even though I may lurk on many different topics, I post on those few topics more often. Those discussions are inherently ideological in nature, and taking any position could be considered ideological. I don't understand why the litmus test for being a good HN citizen is "posting on several different topics" since that basically means one cannot participate or contribute without investing time significantly, or by artificially keeping up some balanced spread of contributions. To bring things up a level - we all live our lives and contribute to broader society in specialized ways, since we all have different interests/values/experiences. So why require something more generalized and diffused by way of commenting?
tinyhouse 7y ago
I don't disagree with you that cars have their usage. But it's funny you give links on some very rare incidents about a robbery and girl who got stabbed by a needle, but totally ignore the number of people who die every year from car accidents... (fwi, https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/#targetText=Nearly%201.25%20million%20people%20die,young%20adults%20ages%2015%2D44. https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/#targetT...)
spion 7y ago
1. Most cities are high density enough that cars and bicycles are about the same speed. When you build for cars like in the USA you get very low density and a ton of space wasted on parking. Things could be improved by using multi floor parkings more often, but as someone who has spent 3 months in the bay area, I think the current state is a disaster. 2. Buses in other countries don't have inconsistent timing. I can go out of my place in London to the bus station that is 3 minutes away and then wait for a bus come in 5 minutes or less, consistently. Yes, a bus comes every 5 minutes. No its not the city center. 3. Public transport is not affected by weather. Cycling is also possible in most rainy weather with the right equipment. The cases where cars are really needed are very rare compared to typical day-to-day use. There are still some, but not nearly enough to warrant actually getting a car, for a vast majority of people 4. Your anti-anti-car rants ignore the drawbacks of the widespread overuse of cars. For example, buildings taking 2-3 times the space due to parkings needing to accommodate so many cars, together with huge roads accommodating the crazy number of cars further increase of distance between things, making walking and cycling an even less viable option. Add to that pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly development (no sidewalks to enter the commercial area!) and you end up with a result that is unusable for anything but cars! Not only that, but commute times tend to grow extensively. Do you like driving for 1h or more every single day, during which the only thing you can reasonably do is listen to a podcast? Do you like wasting 10-15% of your waking life on driving a car? I know I don't. I'd rather do a much less stressful activity, like sitting in a train for 30-40 minutes while reading or doing some light work. (maybe with the addition of 5-10-minutes of walking and cycling on both ends) The sad thing is that people take that self-inflicted state into account to judge how viable other modes of transportation are. Well yes, they clearly aren't once you've built things for cars. But why not read about how it can be successfully viable, in other countries?

noobermin 7y ago

It is curious they keep submitting from Citylab, but that they reach the front page insinuates people are interested in it. Just because people don't share your sensibilities doesn't mean there is a conspiracy against your point of view.

throwawaysea 7y ago
That is possible, yes, although it seems improbable to me because almost the same content is repeated all the time. It is also possible submitters/activists employ voting rings to push up these articles. The rapid-fire downvote patterns I've seen in these articles' comment sections is unlike other discussions on HN that involve conflicting viewpoints, which is why I feel something else is happening.
- noobermin 7y ago
  Look at any story that concerns China or the CCP, you see similar patterns of comments and downvotes. It's tempting to believe the CIA/CCP are waging information warfare on HN of all places but if we are to believe dang it's just because it's political and people knee-jerk respond in kind with their ideology. That is more logical but upsetting to some people because it suggests there are people who massively disagree with them.
- dang 7y ago
  You're breaking the site guidelines with comments like this. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    dang - how do you propose we have meta conversations about issues like this? I get that there are site guidelines, but concerns about the community being exploited by organizations (rather than individuals) are legitimate and not frivolous. It's this same concern that has reduced the signal to noise ratio on Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. And clearly, people are not willing to just blindly trust that Facebook or Twitter are perfect in their approach or that they are even attempting to do the right thing. Is there a way to discuss this topic that you wouldn't object to?
    - dang 7y ago
      I hear you. That's a tough one, because the kinds of comments people post as part of such "meta discussions" pour fuel onto the very fires we're trying to contain. And to be honest, I don't know how much more of this kind of discussion I have in me. I spent most of the day writing about it, and it's burning me out. Take a look at these posts and let me know if you still have questions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21189152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21198494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21198494 We definitely want HN users to feel like their concerns about possible manipulation are heard and taken care of. At the same time we want HN users not to bully and hound each other out of prejudice—which unfortunately is happening, not on purpose but because the frames through which people interpret others' comments are much too small. When someone else's view is, say, more than a standard deviation away from one's own, people don't think "wow, that's really a different point of view". They think "astroturfer", "shill", "spy", "bot", "troll", and even "communist agent".

umvi 7y ago

Cars are great, especially electric cars.

megaremote 7y ago
If you are in the US, are 40,000 deaths a year and over 2 million injured of disabled worth it for the convenience they bring? Not to me. Are those direct deaths going to stop with electric cars? Not while people are in control.
- drukenemo 7y ago
  Cars also allow for exploration, going through remote roads at you will, traveling to where you like and when you like. The US is enormous and cars are not purely negative there.
  - megaremote 7y ago
    I guess that is worth the death count to you? Not to me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

aidenn0 7y ago

RE: PS: FWIW, a downvote shortly after posting is a common occurence for comments on front page articles. Almost every comment I've had in the past 10 years that eventually hit double-digit points went to zero or -1 within minutes of posting.

noobermin 7y ago
It is a curious occurrence but that has happened more than once for me. It's also a good lesson in ettiquette and patience: editing your comment to challenge downvoters almost assures that it will not rise positively again.
czinck 7y ago
Supposedly a trick people use on reddit is to downvote all of the other comments on an article when you're making a comment, to give your comment an extra bit of boost, especially early on when there's few upvotes. I would hope the reddit algorithm catches that, and with HN requiring a pretty high karma threshold for downvoting comments should keep people from doing that.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  Isn't it possible that people view the karma threshold as a barrier to entry they can take advantage of? What's to stop some organization from making 100 accounts that accumulate karma and then start engaging in low-signal astroturfing/shilling that is harder to distinguish, especially if others cannot counter them without similarly organizing a group and accumulating karma over time?

timerol 7y ago

I agree with most of your points. However, these articles are mostly focused on removing cars from the ultra high-density areas where they are ineffective. Going from NYC to the Adirondacks for a backpacking trip? Can't beat a car. Going from the Upper West Side to Wall Street? Please don't drive, it makes everything worse for everyone, including yourself. My personal opinion is that the HN crowd likes looking at transit in large cities as a complex optimization problem. There are a ton of variables to play with, and we're currently so far away from anything approaching optimum. Cars downtown give me the same feeling as a 10MB web site that has two paragraphs of content. We can do better than this.

xyzzyz 7y ago
Please don't drive, it makes everything worse for everyone, including yourself. This assumes that people are simply so oblivious that they aren't aware of driving being worse for them. This can happen occasionally, but let me assure you that whenever you see people stuck in traffic, for overwhelming majority of them, being stuck in traffic is preferrable to alternatives. It might not be so to you, but they aren't you. Don't assume stupidity, but rather try to understand why people would rather be stuck in traffic driving a single occupant vehicle than take a public bus. This way, you might learn things that could lead to improving public transit and making them more attractive to all.
- maxaf 7y ago
  I wish I could upvote you twice! I’m one of the minority of Manhattan residents who use a private car instead of transit. My schedule and routes are unusual enough that transit doesn’t serve me. Even when doing a more traditional UWS->Financial District commute, I often prefer to drive because of the knock-on benefits: I can shop at Eataly and bring home some goodies for the family; I can make stops at a few stores along the way that would otherwise be too far from the standard subway commute route. I don’t enjoy sitting in traffic, but it’s so much easier for me than any other alternative. I pick my travel times to minimize delays for myself (and presumably others) and I’m tired of being labeled an entitled snob, an idiot, or a murderer of cyclists.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Cars were fast, in the sixties and seventies. There was space on roads. I used to enjoy the "freedom of the open road". Miles of twisty roads with just a few roadblocks to navigate around. Even better on a motorbike... Not any more. Now a car is an expensive pain in the ass and aside from in the early hours, roads are pretty much constantly full. Full enough that even a motorcycle isn't quite the fun or freedom it was when I passed my test 40 years ago. Anything that reverses the trend to a car (self-driven or not) being a necessity is good in my book. I'd far rather have an infrastructure that promotes public transport and cycling like the Netherlands does. The sooner we get back to streets safe for children to play in, the better. I won't play tit-for-tat with equally emotive and useless links to stories about people having watches and wallets lifted at lights etc.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> Miles of twisty roads with just a few roadblocks to navigate around. Roadblocks? Why were there roadblocks?
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Other drivers. ;)
noobermin 7y ago
I am curious, did you perspective regarding the freedom cars grant change when you got older and, if you had children, follow that development? I find that most people use the "for the children" argument online, even though cars hurt everyone who lives in a city, just children disproportionately.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Well, it's difficult to completely separate the two... Mainly the sheer annoyance of increasing delays and gridlock. Which of course correlated with my ageing, as it's increased over the years. The journey to work being an increasingly unpredictable journey, timewise. The fun of the increasingly rare empty road remained, as did like of motorbikes, or the fun of a track day. We use the car less and less, despite the intentional political neglect of public transport. We did a fair few trips with the kids by train. I don't believe they ever got a car journey to school wherever we lived - they walked. Luckily the street they grew up until around 12, was traffic calmed with no through traffic, so they got to play out plenty, kick a ball around the road etc. Other places made that far more difficult. Playing out today on the street _I_ grew up and played on at similar age would be suicide.

iikoolpp 7y ago

Dying from air pollution to own the citylab writers

baroffoos 7y ago
How good is becoming disabled because some driver was checking their phone!

iron0013 7y ago

I am not a bot or a shill, but I upvote the articles you're describing whenever I see them, because I'm very interested in public transit and urban planning and enjoy discussing alternatives to automobile-centric cities and lifestyles.

CydeWeys 7y ago
Seconded. This account is linked to my real-life identity; I'm not a bot/shill. I'm a city dweller and these kinds of articles are highly relevant to my interests and my real life advocacy and organizing work. It shouldn't be surprising that lots of tech workers who hang out on this site live in dense cities like SF or NYC, and are interested in how cities can be improved by removing vehicles, which don't scale to high urban densities anyway.

flaviu1 7y ago

Because you're immediately dismissing a whole set of thought with random anecdotes. The only way that policy decisions should be made is with hard data. Policy decisions shouldn't be made on the basis of little girls getting stabbed by needles, just like they're not made on the basis of people getting hit by lightning. Yes, there's circumstances where cars are essential. Dense urban environments are not it. There's a massive set of negative externalities that cars and the mindset that people should never have to walk more than twenty feet between their front door and their destination bring. They've lead to greatly reduced quality of life in these urban areas.

baroffoos 7y ago
Its funny that people focus on extraordinarily rare situations like sitting on a needle that are so rare that you have to find a news article to show that it can happen but ignore the horrifyingly common occurrence of car crashes which are so common almost everyone has experienced one or knows someone who has and usually has life threatening outcomes.

CarVac 7y ago

The benefits of cars are obvious. Nobody needs an article to point them out, just like how we don't need articles extolling the incredible energy density and wide availability of gasoline. The articles are here to point out the non-obvious downsides of cars, and people upvote them because they find them interesting.

scarejunba 7y ago

The greatest trick the Russian voting rings, Megaphone, and the 50-cent army pulled is convincing us to shadow-box all the time. We never know when they're in action and so we're always seeing a threat. Very clever. This is actually quite interesting to me. We each build up a notion of what the HN community is and what we believe to be its core principles and when we see the 'regulars at our pub' (for want of a better metaphor) suddenly in violent opposition to our views, we immediately conclude it's because it's a bunch of shills. But what about the counterfactual? What if our friends actually violently oppose our views. What would it take to convince ourselves of this? FWIW I think HN is too big to have any sort of unified core principles. It isn't even pro-startup anymore, which is sort of ironic. Here's my hypothesis: Lots of people on HN fully believe the pro-public-transit narrative. You're not downvoted by Chinese voting rings, you're just being disagreed with. Just like when I'm pro-Internet-advertising I'm not downvoted by Big Patreon, I'm just in opposition to the rest of the community. I downvoted you because I hate downvote whining and shill accusation.

guelo 7y ago

From the HN guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data." Also, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

throwawaysea 7y ago
I'll admit I saw this bit in the HN guidelines previously. I finally said something on this topic anyways, because I've seen other commenters also point out the same in other citylab discussions recently, and feel it is a problem in the community. The voting mechanisms here makes discussions less diverse. I'm especially not fond of the feature where downvoted comments are marked 'dead' or have their font color changed to make them less readable. Leaving aside the obvious accessibility concerns, it leads to echo chambers, just with a slower degradation rate than say Twitter or Reddit.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Did you do the thing the guidelines suggested? (Emailing the site admins?) What was the response?

uniformlyrandom 7y ago

I have upvoted op because it is an interesting topic. I upvoted your comment because it is more interesting than the op. I would use occam’s razor to say that the pattern you see is normal. It is a pity we do not see enough posts on problems of public transportation though. All those articles about beauty of public transportation and biking in high-density, nice weather areas are highly misleading.

mberning 7y ago

You hit the nail on the head. There is a large amount of astroturfing that takes place in HN. And the mods carry water for them. I am shocked that you don’t have them looking down their nose at you with their typical aplomb.

dang 7y ago
That's not true, and commenters who post glib claims like this have no idea how far the truth goes the opposite way. I've personally spent countless hours working to counteract manipulation and abuse on HN. I've written the subsystems of the HN software that focus on that and catch quite a lot of it which, as a result, you never have to see. From all that work, experience, and data, I've learned how utterly misplaced these cheap claims about astroturfing and manipulation usually are. They mostly have nothing to do with reality. What's going on is that when people encounter views they dislike, they get upset and reach for explanations of abuse, bad faith, manipulation, disingenuousness, etc. as a way to ward them off. People on all sides of every issue do this. It's against the spirit of HN, which is why the guidelines ask users not to. The only claims you've ever made about abuse on HN, unless I'm forgetting something, have been complaints about your ideological opponents. The opposing side makes exactly the same claims about yours. Everyone who thinks this way is sure that HN is secretly dominated by their enemies and the mods are probably in cahoots with them. But they all, of course, have a different picture of which side is dominating—always the one they dislike. In the case of the OP, it's clear that the submitter is here to promote Citylab. But there's no evidence that the voting on these stories has been manipulated. They're just articles that a certain class of (legit) HN users like and tend to vote for. When we notice a submitter with a promotional history, we penalize the account; we want users to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they or a friend or an employer have something to promote. Still, this is the mildest class of bad behavior that we see on HN; such submitters usually haven't got a clue that they're doing anything wrong, and they're doing nothing underhanded behind the scenes.

megaremote 7y ago

> Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life I mean, of course, does anyone deny that. They improve your life over the lives of others. Cars are incredibly bad for society, insanely bad. If someone had come up with the idea of a private car today, they would be rightly lambasted for their idiotic and dangerous idea. 2 tonne chunks of metal hurling down streets at 50mph mere feet away from unprotected people? Insane.

olivermarks 7y ago

There is wild eyed optimism and admiration for EVs and anything self driving on HN. It's probably the demographic rather than any innate hatred of ICE vehicles. The enthusiasm for a loss of privacy and freedom of movement inherent in 'on demand' rented transport does disturb me though - the great joy of owning a vehicle is you can go wherever you want whenever you want.

rayiner 7y ago

I’ll add another angle. Cars enable social mobility, particularly for people of color, who as a group make less money than white and Asian people and are less likely to be able to afford the skyrocketing price of housing near reliable transit. One of the biggest demographic trends of the last couple of decades—more significant than young white people moving back into cities, which Citylab spends a lot of ink writing about—is people of color moving to the suburbs or car-dependent southern cities: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census-great-migration-reversal/21818127 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census.... Here in the DC area, while DC gentrifies and pushes out middle class people and families with kids, the predominantly African American suburbs of PG County are growing. The same thing is happening on the other side of DC in Fairfax county and Arlington county with Hispanic families. For these folks, cars enable a huge increase in quality of life that would be foreclosed otherwise. (My cousin, whose family immigrated here from Bangladesh, grew up in a small apartment in Queens. I remember visiting back in the 1990s and think it looked post-apocalyptic. Now, her parents have a nice house in Long Island. They’d never be able to afford anything like that near a subway station.) I don’t think this is intrinsic to societies generally. There are lots of reasons why housing prices are out of control in US cities, and lots of reasons why people of color are underrepresented in the kinds of professions, such as programming, that enable people to afford housing near transit. But that is what it is. Until we fix those problems, urbanist snobbery will have problematic race and class undertones.

CydeWeys 7y ago
These people would be better served by building increased mass transit to accommodate them, as car ownership is expensive and beyond the reach of many people who don't have much.
- rayiner 7y ago
  We’re talking about middle class people. They can afford cars, more than one in fact. What they can’t afford is $1 million+ on a house in DC in a decent school district near good public transit. (Indeed, the “can’t afford cars” urbanist trope applies to almost no one. Even among people who are under the poverty line, 80% have access to a vehicle. Driving is one of the most egalitarian institutions in the US.) Building more mass transit won’t fix the schools, and mostly just seems to facilitate gentrification. It costs billions of dollars to extend the DC Metro these days. That means anywhere remotely desirable that gets a new metro line becomes totally unaffordable for middle class people with families. The structural cost problem has huge knock on effects. If building rail here cost what it does in Europe, you’d be able to build five times as much. If we had five new lines in the last decade, instead of just one, maybe rents near subway metro wouldn’t be skyrocketing. But that’s not the world we live in.

StreamBright 7y ago

>> Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life. The key in this sentence is "that are not ultra high-density". This does not apply to Amsterdam. Also, you are comparing one of the worst public transportation systems (SF) to once of the best transportation systems (Amsterdam) making sound like just because public transportation sucks in SF your only real alternative is a car. I lived in both places and I do not want to commute in SF by car at all. This is one of the reasons I have moved back to Europe, I do not need to own a car here. You are downvoted because your argument is very one sided. I do not mind citylab articles being on HN at all. Just so that we have more numbers your argument about cars: https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/23/how-much-does-your-car-commute-actually-cost https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/23/how-much-does-... I really like not owning a car and going to work without the hassle. I can read on the train or tram or listen to music, even write code if I want to. I occasionally use car sharing services if I want to go outside the city where I could not go easily without a car. I chose when (off peak) and am not in rush. The psychological impact of driving to work every day is just misery. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/lengthy-commutes-take-a-mental-toll.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/lengthy-commu...

epistasis 7y ago

Access to the city, efficiency of transportation, and climate change are the topics that will make me always click on an article that's on the HN front page. As I see it, these are the biggest and most important problems of our day. They are not new, but they are tough and getting worse; in particular they are huge concerns of those who are younger. Even high-income young people are financially screwed compared to middle-income people that brought property in cities a generation ago, and that sort of massive inequality weights heavily on every renter in the Bay Area, even if they are making $250k a year. I think there's probably a big generational shift here, by any chance are you over 50? Talking about sitting down on dirty seats, and exposing yourself to violence are not typical concerns of younger people I talk to, they are usually far more concerned with climate change and ensuring equitable access to the city. Though security on public transit is a huge privilege for men, so I could also perhaps see your concerns coming from a women who's less than 50 as well! Don't mean to box you in. But the big demographics on HN are younger males, so thinking that Citylab articles are astroturf would seem to be missing a huge thrust of the current zeitgeist.

dang 7y ago

You're probably getting additional downvotes because of the bilious bits about how HN is degenerating and being manipulated, none of which is on topic or interesting. Also, adding complaints about downvotes breaks the site guidelines and guarantees more downvotes. Edit: also, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We actually ban accounts that do that, because it destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what this site exists for. There's lots of past explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20primarily%20test&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart?

throwawaysea 7y ago
dang - I read through all of your past posts from your link before writing this comment. Respectfully, I do not understand the note about ideological battle. I typically post when I am reasonably informed about a topic and see representation for one viewpoint, but not the one I have. I also do this when existing comments are dominated by a single uniform perspective or feature one perspective repeated many times relative to others (groupthink). I view my postings in such situation as diversifying the information represented in a given discussion. Very commonly, I see these situations with single-viewpoint domination present themselves in topics that are 'political', and perhaps this is because the HN demographic (location, profession, and so on) is relatively homogeneous. And so I end up commenting in such discussions more often. Additionally, I am less interested in some of the purely technical discussions (such as "why is framework X better than framework Y") and more in the economic/cultural/political discussions that take place here. Given time limitations, even though I may lurk on many different topics, I post on those few topics more often. Those discussions are inherently ideological in nature, and taking any position could be considered ideological. I don't understand why the litmus test for being a good HN citizen is "posting on several different topics" since that basically means one cannot participate or contribute without investing time significantly, or by artificially keeping up some balanced spread of contributions. To bring things up a level - we all live our lives and contribute to broader society in specialized ways, since we all have different interests/values/experiences. So why require something more generalized and diffused by way of commenting?

tinyhouse 7y ago

I don't disagree with you that cars have their usage. But it's funny you give links on some very rare incidents about a robbery and girl who got stabbed by a needle, but totally ignore the number of people who die every year from car accidents... (fwi, https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/#targetText=Nearly%201.25%20million%20people%20die,young%20adults%20ages%2015%2D44. https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/#targetT...)

spion 7y ago

1. Most cities are high density enough that cars and bicycles are about the same speed. When you build for cars like in the USA you get very low density and a ton of space wasted on parking. Things could be improved by using multi floor parkings more often, but as someone who has spent 3 months in the bay area, I think the current state is a disaster. 2. Buses in other countries don't have inconsistent timing. I can go out of my place in London to the bus station that is 3 minutes away and then wait for a bus come in 5 minutes or less, consistently. Yes, a bus comes every 5 minutes. No its not the city center. 3. Public transport is not affected by weather. Cycling is also possible in most rainy weather with the right equipment. The cases where cars are really needed are very rare compared to typical day-to-day use. There are still some, but not nearly enough to warrant actually getting a car, for a vast majority of people 4. Your anti-anti-car rants ignore the drawbacks of the widespread overuse of cars. For example, buildings taking 2-3 times the space due to parkings needing to accommodate so many cars, together with huge roads accommodating the crazy number of cars further increase of distance between things, making walking and cycling an even less viable option. Add to that pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly development (no sidewalks to enter the commercial area!) and you end up with a result that is unusable for anything but cars! Not only that, but commute times tend to grow extensively. Do you like driving for 1h or more every single day, during which the only thing you can reasonably do is listen to a podcast? Do you like wasting 10-15% of your waking life on driving a car? I know I don't. I'd rather do a much less stressful activity, like sitting in a train for 30-40 minutes while reading or doing some light work. (maybe with the addition of 5-10-minutes of walking and cycling on both ends) The sad thing is that people take that self-inflicted state into account to judge how viable other modes of transportation are. Well yes, they clearly aren't once you've built things for cars. But why not read about how it can be successfully viable, in other countries?