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Just look at HN comment threads: Any truth that's inconvenient for the majority in the respective thread will be brainlessly downvoted. Killing the messenger is

• undecisive 7y ago
  That's a natural consequence of the human condition, coupled with a libertarian outlook when creating moderation tools. A downvote can never be presumed to mean "this is objectively wrong", always "this is subjectively objectionable" A good exercise in knowing thyself, examining your own prejudices and improving the world around you because of that critical introspection. Unfortunately, this process must be repeated near-constantly to bring about perfection, and few people have the time for that (or are willing to make the time for that)
• Ma8ee 7y ago
  Could you give me some examples?
  • bluntfang 7y ago
    Gender issues and workplace diversity.
    • sincerely 7y ago
      "Gender issues" and "workplace diversity" are vague topics, not "truths" or even specific ideas we can discuss.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • ctdonath 7y ago
        We all know what truths and specific ideas those terms encompass. Stating them brings a flurry of downvotes. Even pointing in their general direction gets downvoted.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • deleted 7y ago
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        • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
          People claiming that their ideas about those areas are "truths" can lead to a lot of downvotes, yes. Those people then claim that others are "suppressing the truth". They never seem to even consider the idea that their "truths" may in fact be mistaken.
          • coffee123 7y ago
            no even a raw fact, like pointing out the lack of female geniuses throughout history, leads to a flurry of anger and downvotes. For example, is it ok to point out the scientific research shows certain races have average lower IQ and smaller brains?
            • SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
              Well if you're pointing out these stats, I have to question your motive, because they're pretty piss-poor stats to try and point out because of the context they exist in that explain the observation. Both of the things yous listed have very good contextual explanations, Science being a boys club, IQ tests having cultural bias', interbreeding with Neanderthal and Denisovans after the exit from Africa. Basically those stats are BS that are used to push a narrative supported by the people in society that are such losers they don't have anything to actually be proud of so make up BS to feel better about how bad they are at being a human.
              • 7y ago
  • 666lumberjack 7y ago
    Pointing out the environmental impact of having biological children is always unpopular here. A lot of HN-ers are pretty attached to the 'three kids and a white picket fence' lifescript. Interestingly advocates of veganism (which has a similarly massive impact on your carbon footprint) are much more welcome, but I guess for most people the drive to reproduce is more inherent that the desire to eat meat.
    • verylittlemeat 7y ago
      If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem. Those comments are unpopular because most people can see they're just smug self righteous twitter tier mic drops.
      • 666lumberjack 7y ago
        Maybe I wasn't clear; I'm not talking about comments on random threads about climate change suggesting it could be solved easily if people just didn't have kids. I don't think it's unreasonable, though, to suggest not having biological children if someone asks how they could lower their carbon footprint.
      • firethief 7y ago
        > If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem. I don't see how this is compatible with the observed reality that individuals make choices that are not best for society (whether due to rational self-interest/incomplete information/behavioral factors).
        • rdiddly 7y ago
          I suppose you could say there's room for that under redefining the problem, like "The real problem is that people refuse to employ known solutions to those problems."
  • buboard 7y ago
    Just turn on showdead in your settings. I also see very often comments that have died for no apparent reason (they are not inflammatory).
    • Jamwinner 7y ago
      I find anything critisizing SV or YC company gets immediate downvotes, as do most critical of china, israel, and saudi arabia (or any company funded by them, lookin at you softbank). While there are more Indian, UK, and Canadian commenters who will actually argue, they seldom downvote. Oddly, most americans will go above and beyond to disparge their own nation more than any other (free speech is empowering!). More people lately seem to downvote out of disagreement rather than to keep a thread in check. I thing requiring a comment to downvote would be a huge step forward in the quality of discourse. This is not to pass judgement on any subset on the HN or general communities. Just apparent trends that have I have noticed. I could very well be victim to my own (american) bias.
      • balfirevic 7y ago
        > More people lately seem to downvote out of disagreement rather than to keep a thread in check. Downvoting out of disagreement has always been endorsed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 You may disagree that it is a good choice, but it is not new phenomenon.
    • Kye 7y ago
      That typically means they're shadowbanned. I can usually figure out why by a quick look at their comment history. Even people who like to toss bombs throw the occasional dud.
  • mistermann 7y ago
    Advocating for Nationalism is a typical example. Or restrictive immigration policies. These seem to be considered by many to be synonymous with racism.
    • Ma8ee 7y ago
      Can you give some examples where those "truths" have been downvoted?
      • mistermann 7y ago
        Unironically, my very comment above (as well as others in this thread, the topic of which is heresy!) is gathering downvotes as we speak, despite it being technically correct. Normally this would bother me, but this time I find it pleasing because it illustrates the point. My intuition is suggesting to me that your inclusion of "truths" in quotation marks suggests you are primed to expect me to reply with some things that I believe to be true, but that are false. Obviously I am speculating, but I find thinking about the nature of communication in fine detail to be extremely interesting. Also, pardon the delay in reply as I'm quite sure my account is flagged and rate-limited for participating in flame wars, or more specifically, holding incorrect beliefs in flame wars. I believe this latter point because it takes two to tango in a flame war, and if you pay attention when warnings are handed out for such offenses here on HN, you may notice a pattern of the person receiving the warning is the one who holds the heretical view, despite many people being participants. I say this mostly as just an interesting aside, but I believe it does to some degree fairly illustrate the possibility of bias that exists on HN, including at the moderation level. Since the degree to which my speculation is true is not knowable, casual dismissals must not be based on pure logic, but rather a mixture of conscious logic and subconscious heuristics. Sometimes what's so easy to see in others, is near impossible to see in ourselves - such is the nature of the human mind. As for some examples of what I'm talking about: Here is a person taking the definition of Fascism and applying it to Nationalism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21504768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21504768 Here is a person who seems to believe they can both read minds and predict the future (but apparently can not defend the facts they have learned during those exercises): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501182 Here is a person who believes that it is impossible to love one nation more than others. Knowing such a thing would also require mind reading abilities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501200 More mind reading, and the stating of opinions as if they were facts (this is very common): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500900 I mean, on one hand this is just people being people, nothing to lose any sleep over. On the other hand, this isn't /r/politics - is it asking too much that we strive for a higher standard of thinking and discourse here on HN? And furthermore, it might be worth considering if this sort of behavior might be counter-productive to the speaker's goals in more way than one.
  • spumoni 7y ago
    Anything seen to be advocating specifically for the benefit of white people is often seen as heresy around here, though there are pockets of positive sentiment.
    • coffee123 7y ago
      yeah you are only allowed to fight for the benefit of jews (richest ethnic group) and people brought by big business to lower salaries
  • cm2012 7y ago
    Saying anything positive about online advertising is a ticket to downvotes.
  • swebs 7y ago
    Try posting Rushton and Jensen and see what happens.
• bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Downvoting is the correct reaction to heresy. For every Darwin or Galileo there are many thousands of kooks. Downvoting doesn't silence people -- you can still see them at the bottom of the page in grey or worst case by turning showdead on.
  • mistermann 7y ago
    > Downvoting is the correct reaction to heresy. Even if it's correct? I feel like I must be misunderstanding you. > Downvoting doesn't silence people It can get you flagged by the mods for "starting flamewars", which limits your ability to post.
    • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      If I understand brianlarsen correctly, the point is that if you downvote 10,000 heresies, one will be correct[1]. The others will just be cranks. And the one heresy that will be correct... well, this is HN, not the Royal Society. If the correct heretic is depending on not being downvoted on HN to get the word of the newly-discovered truth out, that's probably not an optimal publication strategy. [1] All numbers made up on the spot.
      • mistermann 7y ago
        > If I understand brianlarsen correctly, the point is that if you downvote 10,000 heresies, one will be correct[1]. The others will just be cranks. > [1] All numbers made up on the spot. This is the (or a) problem, at least as I see it. I'm not proposing that we entertain all sorts of crazy ideas, but I don't think it should be controversial that HN adopts a culture of not saying things that are not true. An example of this is the habitual posting of opinions (often axiomatic beliefs, but not always) in a manner that makes them appear as fact. Reducing the frequency of this would indeed require some effort, but HN is unwilling to even include it in the guidelines. I find that interesting and more than a little ironic considering PG's essay on the matter.
  • sillysaurusx 7y ago
• buboard 7y ago
  that's by design - popularity is not a good judge however. A better system would be to provide upvote/downvote buttons to only a small, random subset of users in each topic.
  • castlecrasher2 7y ago
    or maybe a firing line approach: everyone has upvote/downvote buttons but not everyone's work
  • Ma8ee 7y ago
    How would that improve the situation?
    • buboard 7y ago
      - discourage brigading - discourage mob behavior - prevent particularly biased individuals from skewing every discussion - adds stochastic variety to the biases of the group
      • firethief 7y ago
        I don't see how approximate popularity is better than popularity for the first three factors. It would achieve the 4th in individual threads, but amplifying randomly-selected niche viewpoints in different threads adds up to the same biases across threads (unless the selection of blessed users is thread-independent, in which case the community has a randomly-selected group of first-class citizens).
• dang 7y ago
  That's true of any large public community, almost by definition. It bothers me too, and I have to remind myself not to fret too much over things on HN that are true of humans in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22humans%20in%20general%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... The only way you could get different phenomena is with a small, closed community that would therefore be able to have locally different properties. Just like you need a closed system if you want different entropy. Actually, this has an interesting consequence along the lines of PG's essay: when a novel/heretical idea does begin to be seen as true, this will probably happen first in small communities, not large ones. Moreover the small community probably needs to be elite somehow, or it won't have the standing to deliver the bit flip (heretical -> serious) to the larger community.
  • lisper 7y ago
    > The only way you could get different phenomena is with a small, closed community that would therefore be able to have locally different properties. I run a private discussion group about quantum mechanics. It consists of only a few dozen physicists, and the exact same dynamic happens there. I observed the same phenomenon in the 90s with an internal discussion group at JPL. It was anonymized in the hopes that this would encourage people to speak freely and honestly. The actual effect was that it turned into 4chan. It was quite shocking to me at the time. Being small and closed doesn't help.
    • dang 7y ago
      My claim is that it's necessary, not sufficient. I definitely agree it's not the latter.
      • lisper 7y ago
        I respectfully disagree. I don't think being small and private is necessary to prevent unpopular opinions from being shouted down. But it is a very difficult problem because there are some kinds of opinions that IMO should be shouted down (flat-eartherism, holocaust denial). The tricky part is distinguishing those from crazy-sounding ideas that potentially have merit. It's a hard problem, but I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity.
• amznthrowaway4 7y ago
  If PG actually meant a single word of his essay, he'd fire Dan Gackle and he'd radically change how HN moderation works. But, as per usual, Paul Graham is full of shit. He is interested in challenging other people, but he is absolutely and totally unwilling to be challenged in any material way. And heaven forbid you challenge any aspect of one of his most highly valued portfolio companies... lol... you'll be banned right out of this place. because Paul Graham absolutely LOVES declaring some things heres and he LOVES to suppress speech. He just wants to be the one who declares what is heretical and what is not.
• nitwit005 7y ago
  I'll slightly disagree, and say that the optimum comment (in terms of receiving supportive comments and not being downvoted to oblivion) seems to be against the grain, but not pushing it too far. I assume this is because those comments sometimes get people from both ends of the "debate" supporting them, or at least not voting them down.
• Aeolun 7y ago
  Is this where someone brings up the Dropbox comment again?