7 ms·

The key to getting good discussions is to not have a profit motive coupled to eyeballs. HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth. Large newspapers had s

by dsr_ 6y ago

The key to getting good discussions is to not have a profit motive coupled to eyeballs. HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth. Large newspapers had strict firewalls between advertising, journalism and opinion -- but smaller papers had to fold to pressure from advertisers. Subscription services need eyeballs badly -- but they need paying eyeballs, which means that they need to offer more than just outrage -- but if they don't show at least some of their content for free, they can't grow.

saagarjha 6y ago
> HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth. Nit: Hacker News shows job ads, and is interested in attracting new users. Just not like your typical VC-funded social media website.
- mraza007 6y ago
  I think that’s beauty of hackernews
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
That is plainly insufficient. There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. Privacy, anything google, amazon, or Uber, gender and racial politics, Facebook, etc. There's more going on here than the profit motive. The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.
- xtracto 6y ago
  Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction. The fact that often the most voted comments on hacker news are the most extreme (saying something is completely wrong) shows that we love correcting people and will discount a good conversation in place of some virtual approval.
  - hiccuphippo 6y ago
    Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?
    - clairity 6y ago
      you should vote however you think will foster good discussion, and that sounds like as good a reason as any. another would be voting based on how you think the posts should be ordered from best to worst, regardless of agreement with individual posts.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        'voting' doesn't foster good discussion it harms it.
        frank2 6y ago
        There are many discussion sites without voting, and yet you are here.
        clairity 6y ago
        sure, voting can sometimes hinder discussions by collapsing the many dimensions of judgement and value into a single binary, with loads of information loss on the way, but indistinct pronouncements like that are exactly why mechanisms like voting are implemented in the first place, to weed out shallow submissions to give space to more considered ones.
        Gibbon1 6y ago
        The trouble is normal people are turned off by being downvoted and never post another considered comment.
        clairity 6y ago
- lifeformed 6y ago
  > There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. That doesn't feel like a huge issue here. I see tough topics brought up often and them being passionately discussed, but it generally goes quite civilily. I would not say there is lack of nuance at all - I learn a lot from reading people's counterpoints. I mean, it's not perfect, but compared to other online discussion areas, it doesn't feel like a total waste of time to get into a nuanced discussion here.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    I'm not saying it's relatively terrible here compared to the rest of the internet. I'm more thinking about the stridence of typical discussions, say, pre-1980. Simply, there was not a context where the typical person could go to have or witness aggressive partisan argumentation, be it about a company, a political system, whatever. Certainly, very, very few people could cause their statements to be broadcast to more than a handful of folks. Whereas your humble correspondent has probably gotten hundreds of impressions on these modest thoughts he has posted here. Another thing that wasn't present was the space for those views to feed back on themselves and become more intense, more passionate, and more aggressive. That doesn't mean everything about the world was better back then. But this one thing was different. I think it remains to be seen how much all this really matters. We probably won't know until they're writing the history books about this time.
    - Reelin 6y ago
      Sure it's uncharted territory and we've run into some issues but it's not all downsides. One upside of such easy communication is the unprecedented availability of knowledge. Discussions on topics for which HN has a significant number of users who are experts are almost always incredibly insightful. The same mechanism that allows for broadcasting a view to a much larger number of people is also what facilitates that outcome. It does so by allowing us to fit more people into the same context (in a functional manner) than ever before. Historically the best a room with more than ~15 people or so could do was to host a lecture of some sort. Now we occasionally manage to achieve productive and insightful discourse involving hundreds of people simultaneously. (The dynamics are a bit different of course but that's not the point.)
- puranjay 6y ago
  As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nearly irresistible urge to "correct" them, knowing fully well that my arguments will have no impact. Here's the thing: before the internet and social media, you simply didn't encounter that many patently false arguments in your day to day life. Everything you read or saw was produced by journalists and writers (not bloggers) who had access to their parent organization's resources. Political bias aside, if a TIME or NYT editor let something go to print, it meant that it had gone through at least some basic fact check. But that's not true online. Anyone can write anything, facts be damned. And worse, in your social media feed, a carefully researched article occupies the same space as some random guy's harebrained conspiracy theories. We can't limit the amount of "wrongness" online. Best we can do is learn to live with it
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    It’s no longer true at those media organizations either, if it ever was.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I can't speak for Time, which has gone through a lot of ownership travails recently (albeit not as dire as Newsweek), but there are certainly still magazines and newspapers that do fact-checking. Some have full-time fact checking departments; the New Yorker in specific and Condé Nast publications in general are historically known for that. Newspapers may not employ people with the title of "fact checker" (although the New York Times has at least one staff reporter who does, in fact, have that title, Linda Qiu), but it's something that's generally the job of the editorial staff to do fact-checking. Sure, newspapers fail at this occasionally, especially with articles that get rushed due to timeliness -- and unless it's a big long-form investigative journalism piece, it's quite likely only what editors consider the major elements have been vetted. (The old saw "if the paper got this small detail wrong, how can I trust them on the big claims they're making" largely has it backward: the big claims are the ones they want receipts for, whereas the small details are more likely to get passed through without due checking. This is, at the least, what I was told by a newspaper editor many years ago!)
alexbanks 6y ago
I don't think YC really has "good discussions" as much as "A large group of people that already agree on most topics, communicating about those topics." And this site breeds just as much outrage as the next. This is a pretty textbook look into a very unreflective echo chamber.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  And, I would add, you can't have any significant discussion about topics which this group of people disagree on. For example, you can't say: * The "free market," even suitably regulated, is not a good allocator of resources. * Anything about the actual accomplishments of the Soviet Union or China, such as the USSR going from a purely agrarian society to putting a rocket in space in under 50 years, even while criticizing them for their failures (Uyghur concentration camps, etc.) * Capitalism is not the best economic system, because it leaves too many people behind. I could go further, but then I'd be accused of "nationalistic flamebait."
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    I think you can say those things and rightly expect to be challenged. Downvotes are what they are. For me the discussion is more interesting than Internet points. There's also a polite way to say something and a more provocative way to express the same idea. HN doesn't value snark the same way other forums do.
  - dang 6y ago
    People say things in buckets 1 and 3 all the time. You've got a stronger point in bucket 2 - that one is a lot harder. The trouble with 1 and 3 is that people often want to make big generic ideological arguments about capitalism or whatever, and the medium of a large, public internet forum is simply not capable of sustaining interesting threads about that. They inevitably become predictable and nasty, the two things we most seek to avoid here. So I spend a lot of time asking people not to do that, as you know. But that's not because of an ideological disagreement, either at the moderator level or at the community level. It's at the level of the medium itself. McLuhan was right. It's still possible to say things in more specific contexts though.
bhargav 6y ago
I don’t really think you can maintain a social media company at scale without having revenue to pay the people that maintain it. HN doesn’t have ads because they are running HN at a deficit to get eyeballs on YC. Granted, to my knowledge, they haven’t suppressed any threads in their competitors; kudos.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 6y ago
The best conversations I had on the internet predate the like/upvote button. As soon as conversation became about scoring points and not engaging with an individual in a discussion it went to hell.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  There is also the era before smartphones vs after smartphones.
zubairq 6y ago
HN does care about growth as it does have moderators and methods to make sure that it is engaging with the right audience for Y combinator. And the profit motive is there, as a pipeline into YCombinator, you can see from many of the well integrated ads. Just because it is done so well, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Having been someone who has benefitted hugely from this I have no problem with it however
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806806. (Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)

by dsr_ 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

> HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth. Nit: Hacker News shows job ads, and is interested in attracting new users. Just not like your typical VC-funded social media website.

mraza007 6y ago
I think that’s beauty of hackernews

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

That is plainly insufficient. There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. Privacy, anything google, amazon, or Uber, gender and racial politics, Facebook, etc. There's more going on here than the profit motive. The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.

xtracto 6y ago
Using the fact that CmdrTaco commented in that twitter thread, i want to bring into comment slashdot moderation system. I always thought it was better than simple upvote/downvote because the "tags" (insightful, interesting, flamebait,troll) enticed you to think twice about the modding, preventing knee-jerk nodding reaction. The fact that often the most voted comments on hacker news are the most extreme (saying something is completely wrong) shows that we love correcting people and will discount a good conversation in place of some virtual approval.
- hiccuphippo 6y ago
  Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?
  - clairity 6y ago
    you should vote however you think will foster good discussion, and that sounds like as good a reason as any. another would be voting based on how you think the posts should be ordered from best to worst, regardless of agreement with individual posts.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      'voting' doesn't foster good discussion it harms it.
      - frank2 6y ago
        There are many discussion sites without voting, and yet you are here.
      - clairity 6y ago
        sure, voting can sometimes hinder discussions by collapsing the many dimensions of judgement and value into a single binary, with loads of information loss on the way, but indistinct pronouncements like that are exactly why mechanisms like voting are implemented in the first place, to weed out shallow submissions to give space to more considered ones.
        Gibbon1 6y ago
        The trouble is normal people are turned off by being downvoted and never post another considered comment.
        clairity 6y ago
lifeformed 6y ago
> There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. That doesn't feel like a huge issue here. I see tough topics brought up often and them being passionately discussed, but it generally goes quite civilily. I would not say there is lack of nuance at all - I learn a lot from reading people's counterpoints. I mean, it's not perfect, but compared to other online discussion areas, it doesn't feel like a total waste of time to get into a nuanced discussion here.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I'm not saying it's relatively terrible here compared to the rest of the internet. I'm more thinking about the stridence of typical discussions, say, pre-1980. Simply, there was not a context where the typical person could go to have or witness aggressive partisan argumentation, be it about a company, a political system, whatever. Certainly, very, very few people could cause their statements to be broadcast to more than a handful of folks. Whereas your humble correspondent has probably gotten hundreds of impressions on these modest thoughts he has posted here. Another thing that wasn't present was the space for those views to feed back on themselves and become more intense, more passionate, and more aggressive. That doesn't mean everything about the world was better back then. But this one thing was different. I think it remains to be seen how much all this really matters. We probably won't know until they're writing the history books about this time.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    Sure it's uncharted territory and we've run into some issues but it's not all downsides. One upside of such easy communication is the unprecedented availability of knowledge. Discussions on topics for which HN has a significant number of users who are experts are almost always incredibly insightful. The same mechanism that allows for broadcasting a view to a much larger number of people is also what facilitates that outcome. It does so by allowing us to fit more people into the same context (in a functional manner) than ever before. Historically the best a room with more than ~15 people or so could do was to host a lecture of some sort. Now we occasionally manage to achieve productive and insightful discourse involving hundreds of people simultaneously. (The dynamics are a bit different of course but that's not the point.)
puranjay 6y ago
As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nearly irresistible urge to "correct" them, knowing fully well that my arguments will have no impact. Here's the thing: before the internet and social media, you simply didn't encounter that many patently false arguments in your day to day life. Everything you read or saw was produced by journalists and writers (not bloggers) who had access to their parent organization's resources. Political bias aside, if a TIME or NYT editor let something go to print, it meant that it had gone through at least some basic fact check. But that's not true online. Anyone can write anything, facts be damned. And worse, in your social media feed, a carefully researched article occupies the same space as some random guy's harebrained conspiracy theories. We can't limit the amount of "wrongness" online. Best we can do is learn to live with it
- vxNsr 6y ago
  It’s no longer true at those media organizations either, if it ever was.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I can't speak for Time, which has gone through a lot of ownership travails recently (albeit not as dire as Newsweek), but there are certainly still magazines and newspapers that do fact-checking. Some have full-time fact checking departments; the New Yorker in specific and Condé Nast publications in general are historically known for that. Newspapers may not employ people with the title of "fact checker" (although the New York Times has at least one staff reporter who does, in fact, have that title, Linda Qiu), but it's something that's generally the job of the editorial staff to do fact-checking. Sure, newspapers fail at this occasionally, especially with articles that get rushed due to timeliness -- and unless it's a big long-form investigative journalism piece, it's quite likely only what editors consider the major elements have been vetted. (The old saw "if the paper got this small detail wrong, how can I trust them on the big claims they're making" largely has it backward: the big claims are the ones they want receipts for, whereas the small details are more likely to get passed through without due checking. This is, at the least, what I was told by a newspaper editor many years ago!)

alexbanks 6y ago

I don't think YC really has "good discussions" as much as "A large group of people that already agree on most topics, communicating about those topics." And this site breeds just as much outrage as the next. This is a pretty textbook look into a very unreflective echo chamber.

pmiller2 6y ago
And, I would add, you can't have any significant discussion about topics which this group of people disagree on. For example, you can't say: * The "free market," even suitably regulated, is not a good allocator of resources. * Anything about the actual accomplishments of the Soviet Union or China, such as the USSR going from a purely agrarian society to putting a rocket in space in under 50 years, even while criticizing them for their failures (Uyghur concentration camps, etc.) * Capitalism is not the best economic system, because it leaves too many people behind. I could go further, but then I'd be accused of "nationalistic flamebait."
- aww_dang 6y ago
  I think you can say those things and rightly expect to be challenged. Downvotes are what they are. For me the discussion is more interesting than Internet points. There's also a polite way to say something and a more provocative way to express the same idea. HN doesn't value snark the same way other forums do.
- dang 6y ago
  People say things in buckets 1 and 3 all the time. You've got a stronger point in bucket 2 - that one is a lot harder. The trouble with 1 and 3 is that people often want to make big generic ideological arguments about capitalism or whatever, and the medium of a large, public internet forum is simply not capable of sustaining interesting threads about that. They inevitably become predictable and nasty, the two things we most seek to avoid here. So I spend a lot of time asking people not to do that, as you know. But that's not because of an ideological disagreement, either at the moderator level or at the community level. It's at the level of the medium itself. McLuhan was right. It's still possible to say things in more specific contexts though.

bhargav 6y ago

I don’t really think you can maintain a social media company at scale without having revenue to pay the people that maintain it. HN doesn’t have ads because they are running HN at a deficit to get eyeballs on YC. Granted, to my knowledge, they haven’t suppressed any threads in their competitors; kudos.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 6y ago

The best conversations I had on the internet predate the like/upvote button. As soon as conversation became about scoring points and not engaging with an individual in a discussion it went to hell.

Gibbon1 6y ago
There is also the era before smartphones vs after smartphones.

zubairq 6y ago

HN does care about growth as it does have moderators and methods to make sure that it is engaging with the right audience for Y combinator. And the profit motive is there, as a pipeline into YCombinator, you can see from many of the well integrated ads. Just because it is done so well, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Having been someone who has benefitted hugely from this I have no problem with it however

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806806. (Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)