4 ms·

I was shocked to see the other post that was “flagged.” The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Al

I was shocked to see the other post that was “flagged.” The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance.

afterburner 6y ago
Maybe, although they might just be trying to keep the site apolitical. It's just that, given the circumstances, staying apolitical can almost seem like a deeply biased thing to do. But having rowdy political flame wars on a computer-focused site isn't super great either... tough choice for moderators I guess!
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  That's me. I can go almost anywhere on the internet for politics. On HN, I want news about hacking.
  - phakding 6y ago
    Yet, you decided to click on a political post and comment on it.
mrkstu 6y ago
I think most of the Chinese Communist Party support is Chinese gov directed, not native to most membership in HN, though there is definitely a subset of those with significant investment in China who would possibly let that influence their moderation.
- dang 6y ago
  I'm afraid that's deeply inaccurate. The truth is that the HN community is much larger than people assume or feel like it is, and much more varied in users' backgrounds. This means that many readers have views that are more than a standard deviation away from whatever you're assuming the norm should be—and unfortunately this creates suspicion, outrage, and accusations of astroturfing/shillage/manipulation/spying. It seems that, up to one standard deviation away from their own views (or sense of the norm), people's response to a different view is "huh, that's interesting". But when you get to two or more deviations away, the responses start to become "that's disingenuous", "who paid you to write this", "you're a communist party shill", and worse. (I'm using 'standard deviation' metaphorically—I haven't measured this. But I bet one could.) In reality, though, there isn't a norm, and there are many more deviations than expected. HN has the look and feel of a cozy forum, not a public square, let alone a network of public squares all over the world. This perception gap between what people expect and what's objectively happening is the source of nearly all the perceptions of astroturfing, shilling, manipulation, brigading, botting, and spying that I've personally investigated on political topics—especially when it comes to accusations of government manipulation. How do I know this? First because I've spent countless hours studying the data and countering abuse and manipulation on HN, and I've basically never found anything that looks state-directed. Of course it's possible that governments are clever enough to fool us whilst leaving no traces in our data (even while posting comments that some users consider obvious propaganda). But we can only go by what we can objectively look at. If we just toss out the need to have evidence or data, all that's left is imagination, which is what dominates internet discussions about these topics. Second, the users that other users make accusations against turn out to be real people, often with long histories on HN, who simply have opposing views. Often those views are because they grew up in a different country or their families come from there or they spent time working there, and so on. I've looked into many of these cases personally, and what I've found is that the accusations were deeply unjust and that the accusers, unintentionally, were behaving like a mob. This is distressing. I don't have to agree with the users being attacked, or support whatever side they may belong to, in order to feel like they don't deserve this. Indeed, I'm sure you and basically every other HN user would agree and feel the same way. Nevertheless, it happens anyway, because these things happen unintentionally and collectively. It's an ugly dynamic, and people have actually been hounded off of Hacker News because of it. This is how we turn ourselves into a community that none of us would want to be part of. The only prophylactic I can see against this is for us as individuals to become more conscious of how these dynamics work, and what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like. I wrote about this extensively when this came up the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495490. There are a lot of links there to past discussions of this topic. On the matter of "what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    First of all, thank you for the detailed response. I will say that from my own experience (by definition anecdotal) on HN that there seems to be a quick, reflexive downvote for anything mildly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, that then sometimes then gets voted back up, sometimes not. Since, by the nature of the platform where anything downvoted becomes less visible, comments so downvoted quickly may never even get the chances to be upvoted back to visibility, unless readers go out of their way to look for and correct the issue. Speculating on why that is, is necessarily low-data in an anonymous setting, but I wish mine had been true, that it was state sponsored. The alternative that HNers are deliberately siding with the Chinese government in relatively large numbers is sad.
panzagl 6y ago
I guess it turns out that Chinese bot farms aren't that progressive on LGBT issues.
dang 6y ago
You guys are assuming that downvotes and flags are only because of political disagreement. That's part of it, but plenty of downvotes and flags are because users feel a comment broke the site guidelines and they're trying to protect the community for substantive discussion. I routinely downvote and flag comments that I agree with politically, because protecting the commons comes first. What good does it do to strike a fiery blow for your cause if you crack the container in the process? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance. The perceptions of 'skew' that you're experiencing are fraught with cognitive bias. Whatever side you're on in any divisive topic, I guarantee you that the opposite side has exactly the opposite perceptions—that is, they strongly believe that HN and its moderators skew the other way. Here's a small sample from a long list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676 Ironically, the reason these commenters have exactly the opposite perceptions is that they have exactly the same cognitive biases. It seems we all have them. In fact, they're so powerful that one can basically infallibly predict someone's political leanings from the complaints they post about HN skewing the opposite way. What are these biases? There are at least three. One is that we are more likely to notice and assign greater weight to things that we dislike. Pain makes a deeper impression than pleasure. A bee sting is more memorable than a field of butterflies. Two or three bee stings and you will be convinced forever that the site is skewed toward bees. I've written about this many times—it's really the dominant dynamic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Unfortunately nobody realizes that it's the dominant dynamic, so nobody questions their own perceptions of skew, so they come into the commons feeling surrounded by enemies, regardless of what's actually going on there. A second bias is that people assume that HN is like the rest of the internet when in fact it has the unusual property of being non-siloed, meaning we're all in one big room together. This has the effect of making a site which is in reality more coexistent feel like instead like it's worse and more conflictual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. A third bias is that we have so little information about each other from small blobs of internet text, so we connect the dots and fill in the blanks to create a picture of who we're dealing with. Unfortunately, because we curve-fit the picture with material drawn from our own imagination, we end up recreating our own demons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... I puzzled over this for years: why do internet commenters have such a perfect ability to push all my buttons and drive me crazy? Eventually I realized: the only person who knows where all my buttons are is me. I'm experiencing other people as an evil-genius button-pushing nemesis because I'm creating that picture of them. Everywhere we encounter opposition or conflict, and lack objective information to check our perceptions, we're prone to recreating and re-experiencing our own shadow. Other people are doing exactly the same. What does this mean? It means that we're a forum of demons experiencing other demons. Thus it's a wonder that this place survives at all, and it may destroy itself before long. The intention on HN, from the beginning, has been to try to stave that fate off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20stave&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... I don't know what to do about this, other than try to clearly explain the dynamics to people. I guess the model is that if enough of us can gain enough awareness of how these biases are at work in ourselves, we can get a little freer, and a little more able to help fellow community members with that same process. At that point maybe one would start to see a social effect. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of this model actually working, as of yet.

afterburner 6y ago

Maybe, although they might just be trying to keep the site apolitical. It's just that, given the circumstances, staying apolitical can almost seem like a deeply biased thing to do. But having rowdy political flame wars on a computer-focused site isn't super great either... tough choice for moderators I guess!

ARandomerDude 6y ago
That's me. I can go almost anywhere on the internet for politics. On HN, I want news about hacking.
- phakding 6y ago
  Yet, you decided to click on a political post and comment on it.

mrkstu 6y ago

I think most of the Chinese Communist Party support is Chinese gov directed, not native to most membership in HN, though there is definitely a subset of those with significant investment in China who would possibly let that influence their moderation.

dang 6y ago
I'm afraid that's deeply inaccurate. The truth is that the HN community is much larger than people assume or feel like it is, and much more varied in users' backgrounds. This means that many readers have views that are more than a standard deviation away from whatever you're assuming the norm should be—and unfortunately this creates suspicion, outrage, and accusations of astroturfing/shillage/manipulation/spying. It seems that, up to one standard deviation away from their own views (or sense of the norm), people's response to a different view is "huh, that's interesting". But when you get to two or more deviations away, the responses start to become "that's disingenuous", "who paid you to write this", "you're a communist party shill", and worse. (I'm using 'standard deviation' metaphorically—I haven't measured this. But I bet one could.) In reality, though, there isn't a norm, and there are many more deviations than expected. HN has the look and feel of a cozy forum, not a public square, let alone a network of public squares all over the world. This perception gap between what people expect and what's objectively happening is the source of nearly all the perceptions of astroturfing, shilling, manipulation, brigading, botting, and spying that I've personally investigated on political topics—especially when it comes to accusations of government manipulation. How do I know this? First because I've spent countless hours studying the data and countering abuse and manipulation on HN, and I've basically never found anything that looks state-directed. Of course it's possible that governments are clever enough to fool us whilst leaving no traces in our data (even while posting comments that some users consider obvious propaganda). But we can only go by what we can objectively look at. If we just toss out the need to have evidence or data, all that's left is imagination, which is what dominates internet discussions about these topics. Second, the users that other users make accusations against turn out to be real people, often with long histories on HN, who simply have opposing views. Often those views are because they grew up in a different country or their families come from there or they spent time working there, and so on. I've looked into many of these cases personally, and what I've found is that the accusations were deeply unjust and that the accusers, unintentionally, were behaving like a mob. This is distressing. I don't have to agree with the users being attacked, or support whatever side they may belong to, in order to feel like they don't deserve this. Indeed, I'm sure you and basically every other HN user would agree and feel the same way. Nevertheless, it happens anyway, because these things happen unintentionally and collectively. It's an ugly dynamic, and people have actually been hounded off of Hacker News because of it. This is how we turn ourselves into a community that none of us would want to be part of. The only prophylactic I can see against this is for us as individuals to become more conscious of how these dynamics work, and what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like. I wrote about this extensively when this came up the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495490. There are a lot of links there to past discussions of this topic. On the matter of "what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  First of all, thank you for the detailed response. I will say that from my own experience (by definition anecdotal) on HN that there seems to be a quick, reflexive downvote for anything mildly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, that then sometimes then gets voted back up, sometimes not. Since, by the nature of the platform where anything downvoted becomes less visible, comments so downvoted quickly may never even get the chances to be upvoted back to visibility, unless readers go out of their way to look for and correct the issue. Speculating on why that is, is necessarily low-data in an anonymous setting, but I wish mine had been true, that it was state sponsored. The alternative that HNers are deliberately siding with the Chinese government in relatively large numbers is sad.

panzagl 6y ago

I guess it turns out that Chinese bot farms aren't that progressive on LGBT issues.

dang 6y ago

You guys are assuming that downvotes and flags are only because of political disagreement. That's part of it, but plenty of downvotes and flags are because users feel a comment broke the site guidelines and they're trying to protect the community for substantive discussion. I routinely downvote and flag comments that I agree with politically, because protecting the commons comes first. What good does it do to strike a fiery blow for your cause if you crack the container in the process? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance. The perceptions of 'skew' that you're experiencing are fraught with cognitive bias. Whatever side you're on in any divisive topic, I guarantee you that the opposite side has exactly the opposite perceptions—that is, they strongly believe that HN and its moderators skew the other way. Here's a small sample from a long list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676 Ironically, the reason these commenters have exactly the opposite perceptions is that they have exactly the same cognitive biases. It seems we all have them. In fact, they're so powerful that one can basically infallibly predict someone's political leanings from the complaints they post about HN skewing the opposite way. What are these biases? There are at least three. One is that we are more likely to notice and assign greater weight to things that we dislike. Pain makes a deeper impression than pleasure. A bee sting is more memorable than a field of butterflies. Two or three bee stings and you will be convinced forever that the site is skewed toward bees. I've written about this many times—it's really the dominant dynamic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Unfortunately nobody realizes that it's the dominant dynamic, so nobody questions their own perceptions of skew, so they come into the commons feeling surrounded by enemies, regardless of what's actually going on there. A second bias is that people assume that HN is like the rest of the internet when in fact it has the unusual property of being non-siloed, meaning we're all in one big room together. This has the effect of making a site which is in reality more coexistent feel like instead like it's worse and more conflictual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. A third bias is that we have so little information about each other from small blobs of internet text, so we connect the dots and fill in the blanks to create a picture of who we're dealing with. Unfortunately, because we curve-fit the picture with material drawn from our own imagination, we end up recreating our own demons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... I puzzled over this for years: why do internet commenters have such a perfect ability to push all my buttons and drive me crazy? Eventually I realized: the only person who knows where all my buttons are is me. I'm experiencing other people as an evil-genius button-pushing nemesis because I'm creating that picture of them. Everywhere we encounter opposition or conflict, and lack objective information to check our perceptions, we're prone to recreating and re-experiencing our own shadow. Other people are doing exactly the same. What does this mean? It means that we're a forum of demons experiencing other demons. Thus it's a wonder that this place survives at all, and it may destroy itself before long. The intention on HN, from the beginning, has been to try to stave that fate off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20stave&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... I don't know what to do about this, other than try to clearly explain the dynamics to people. I guess the model is that if enough of us can gain enough awareness of how these biases are at work in ourselves, we can get a little freer, and a little more able to help fellow community members with that same process. At that point maybe one would start to see a social effect. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of this model actually working, as of yet.