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> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. Th

> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them. A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly fine. They spent their whole day working hard, come home, and now you want to force them to spend their night studying and discovering new ideas? That may be the internet you want but it's not what people want. The internet can be for more than one thing.

saagarjha 7y ago
> Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct. This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people agree with, every time a popular story about them shows up. (Thankfully, usually only a couple of these appear in most discussions, and usually people don't spam this.) > Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
- danem 7y ago
  > Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is important to keep an open mind and read widely and voraciously.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Right. I think Hacker News does pretty well for itself, and it shows: the users that accumulate karma the fastest usually have insightful comments, which is rarely true elsewhere.
    - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
      No. Exactly like reddit, it awards people that have the most popular comments. Some people are more insightful than most, but its the exact same system as reddit
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Well, of course, that's tautologically true. The difference is that the most popular comments are more often to be insightful, and the people with the most karma have it because they post insightful things, rather than the type of comment I mentioned above. (Believe me, I would know if people were spamming those; there are only a handful of people that accumulate karma faster than I do, and they all do it "fairly".)
        Aeolun 7y ago
        HN suffers from fanboy’ism just as much, if not more, than elsewhere. Though I’ll admit there’s many more critical comments as well.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        I consider both kinds of comments to be low-quality, and yes Hacker News has both. But the really nice comments aren’t just straightforward praise or criticism.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      Eh. If I post something taking shots at Europeans before America wakes up (3-4am CST) I usually get down voted for a few hours before American commenters come on and exchange fire with the Euros. Your upboats are time sensitive.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Such comments are rarely insightful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Filter bubbles aren't inherently bad. For example, Google bubbling up news from my city makes sense, but if it were to show me small news from every single city on the planet, that would be insane. Similarly, I enjoy it when it gives me some article about Animal Crossing that I've been playing lately, but doesn't show me any sports news that I have zero interest in. There are just so many different interests out there that it's simply impossible to follow every single one, so having news bubbles absolutely makes sense. When people talk negatively about bubbles, they generally focus on the couple cases where being in a bubble is harmful, such as when it comes to science, politics and so on, but ignore all the other times where a bubble is good.
  - basch 7y ago
    Filter bubbles are bad when they serve to only confirm your bias. Do you read politics you agree with or disagree with? I make an effort to click more on things I think I'll disagree with.
basch 7y ago
It is harder to find things on google than it used to be. The noise to signal ratio has increased considerably.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I wonder how much it would increase/decrease if we filtered out all blogging software.
  - ajmurmann 7y ago
    I haven't found individual blogs to typically be the problem but commercial websites that focus on things like how-tos. This is especially true if I'm just looking for an answer to a question. I frequently just end up searching Reddit or better a specific subreddit.
    - basch 7y ago
      Even reviews. Searching best TV brings CNET, techradar, digitaltrends, Tom's hardware rank above rtings. Almost every one of those sites has the same paragraph of mumbo jumbo next to a TV name. It's become an art. There's nothing wrong with the CNET or digitaltrends roundups, but they also don't really add to the conversation or offer any unique insight, do they cut clutter better than their competitors? Hell 3 of my top 10 are futureplc results (Tom's hardware, techradar, whathifi.) The same company has seod its way to 3/10 results for that search. There's obviously a level of notoriety beyond just quality. I don't need the same article 3 times under 3 logos.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    The big issue is various how to sites and republishers. If I could filter out ~100 particular domains, my search experience would be much improved.
scythe 7y ago
>Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. Hacker News is, in the most charitable interpretation, an act of charity by pg and YC to attempt to provide a forum for a specific subculture. It's obvious from the goal of the project: "things that hackers would find interesting". But what most people get from the Internet is not a product of someone with effectively unlimited funds (and legendary software engineering ability) building a website to support their community. They get to choose between eyeball-extraction megasites or clunky off-the-shelf vBulletin or Wordpress clones run by underqualified volunteers. It certainly is nice to be among the target audience of Hacker News -- but what if I weren't?
patcon 7y ago
I feel for you in empathizing for people's ability to just have what they want, but... I worry about it too. (I say all this with compassion and a non-confrontational tone.) > The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) might be? Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints. And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space. Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. (search terms: optimal foraging strategies, radius of perception, levy walk, agent-based modeling, in the vein of [1]) Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction. imho, we DO need to consider "forcing" (as a collective) changes in that infrastructure, or else our hitherto evolved psychology might just as well see us destroyed. So in the end, what people "want" is maybe not the highest principle to hold, because what we individually "want" might be tuned for a dying reality, and a prior foraging landscape. Heh, anyhow... perhaps this is just a mad-cap rant from a technologist and failed biochemist <3 [1]: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10135146 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10135146

saagarjha 7y ago

> Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct. This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people agree with, every time a popular story about them shows up. (Thankfully, usually only a couple of these appear in most discussions, and usually people don't spam this.) > Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.

danem 7y ago
> Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is important to keep an open mind and read widely and voraciously.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Right. I think Hacker News does pretty well for itself, and it shows: the users that accumulate karma the fastest usually have insightful comments, which is rarely true elsewhere.
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    No. Exactly like reddit, it awards people that have the most popular comments. Some people are more insightful than most, but its the exact same system as reddit
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Well, of course, that's tautologically true. The difference is that the most popular comments are more often to be insightful, and the people with the most karma have it because they post insightful things, rather than the type of comment I mentioned above. (Believe me, I would know if people were spamming those; there are only a handful of people that accumulate karma faster than I do, and they all do it "fairly".)
      - Aeolun 7y ago
        HN suffers from fanboy’ism just as much, if not more, than elsewhere. Though I’ll admit there’s many more critical comments as well.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        I consider both kinds of comments to be low-quality, and yes Hacker News has both. But the really nice comments aren’t just straightforward praise or criticism.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Eh. If I post something taking shots at Europeans before America wakes up (3-4am CST) I usually get down voted for a few hours before American commenters come on and exchange fire with the Euros. Your upboats are time sensitive.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Such comments are rarely insightful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ehsankia 7y ago
Filter bubbles aren't inherently bad. For example, Google bubbling up news from my city makes sense, but if it were to show me small news from every single city on the planet, that would be insane. Similarly, I enjoy it when it gives me some article about Animal Crossing that I've been playing lately, but doesn't show me any sports news that I have zero interest in. There are just so many different interests out there that it's simply impossible to follow every single one, so having news bubbles absolutely makes sense. When people talk negatively about bubbles, they generally focus on the couple cases where being in a bubble is harmful, such as when it comes to science, politics and so on, but ignore all the other times where a bubble is good.
- basch 7y ago
  Filter bubbles are bad when they serve to only confirm your bias. Do you read politics you agree with or disagree with? I make an effort to click more on things I think I'll disagree with.

basch 7y ago

It is harder to find things on google than it used to be. The noise to signal ratio has increased considerably.

Aeolun 7y ago
I wonder how much it would increase/decrease if we filtered out all blogging software.
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  I haven't found individual blogs to typically be the problem but commercial websites that focus on things like how-tos. This is especially true if I'm just looking for an answer to a question. I frequently just end up searching Reddit or better a specific subreddit.
  - basch 7y ago
    Even reviews. Searching best TV brings CNET, techradar, digitaltrends, Tom's hardware rank above rtings. Almost every one of those sites has the same paragraph of mumbo jumbo next to a TV name. It's become an art. There's nothing wrong with the CNET or digitaltrends roundups, but they also don't really add to the conversation or offer any unique insight, do they cut clutter better than their competitors? Hell 3 of my top 10 are futureplc results (Tom's hardware, techradar, whathifi.) The same company has seod its way to 3/10 results for that search. There's obviously a level of notoriety beyond just quality. I don't need the same article 3 times under 3 logos.
- scarmig 7y ago
  The big issue is various how to sites and republishers. If I could filter out ~100 particular domains, my search experience would be much improved.

scythe 7y ago

>Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. Hacker News is, in the most charitable interpretation, an act of charity by pg and YC to attempt to provide a forum for a specific subculture. It's obvious from the goal of the project: "things that hackers would find interesting". But what most people get from the Internet is not a product of someone with effectively unlimited funds (and legendary software engineering ability) building a website to support their community. They get to choose between eyeball-extraction megasites or clunky off-the-shelf vBulletin or Wordpress clones run by underqualified volunteers. It certainly is nice to be among the target audience of Hacker News -- but what if I weren't?

patcon 7y ago

I feel for you in empathizing for people's ability to just have what they want, but... I worry about it too. (I say all this with compassion and a non-confrontational tone.) > The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) might be? Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints. And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space. Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. (search terms: optimal foraging strategies, radius of perception, levy walk, agent-based modeling, in the vein of [1]) Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction. imho, we DO need to consider "forcing" (as a collective) changes in that infrastructure, or else our hitherto evolved psychology might just as well see us destroyed. So in the end, what people "want" is maybe not the highest principle to hold, because what we individually "want" might be tuned for a dying reality, and a prior foraging landscape. Heh, anyhow... perhaps this is just a mad-cap rant from a technologist and failed biochemist <3 [1]: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10135146 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10135146