4 ms·

The only visible comment is... not good. How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments? As good as HN can be for discussion,

The only visible comment is... not good. How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments? As good as HN can be for discussion, many/most? political threads (especially pandemic or protest related lately) devolve very quickly. Tough problem. Kudos for shipping.

asddubs 6y ago
i don't think it's possible without heavy moderation, even more so than on non-political forums
kaczordon 6y ago
Agreed, it's the community that makes it useful. I mainly made this for my friends to use, was curious what HN users would think, although didn't expect such a toxic comment so soon...[edit] I'm leaving that comment up for a bit as it illustrates the problem I think. Perhaps a minimum word count with a valid word filter would help push people in the right direction or gamification, something like the tribunal(https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal) from League of Legends to ban toxic members.
- afarrell 6y ago
  The answer really is community. For example, look at churches. Note that finding a non-personally-exhausting way to prevent a community from fracturing into a toxic mess of infighting is a problem. For example, look at churches.
  - 6keZbCECT2uB 6y ago
    lobste.rs attempts to do this by somewhat requiring people to have connections before they can register. Even if that's not your long term goal, it might be a good place to start to avoid broken windows.
    - kaczordon 6y ago
      I like this idea, constructing the community is the difficult part which this approach would seem to partly solve for.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  HN has built-in community sculpting. That comment would be downvoted and possibly even deleted by HN mods. How about a requirement to post support for the comment. I.e., reasoning behind the statement with links to sources, kind of like Wikipedia. We do it as a convention on HN, but maybe making it a requirement is appropriate for polarized topics: "My opinion is xyz because abc and you can clearly see that abc is proven by this quote: 'my quote from the below linked article' From: www.thebelowlink.com/intelligentreasoning.html
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    That comment would be ...possibly even deleted by HN mods. This assertion runs counter to everything I understand about how HN moderation operates. I don't believe the HN mods do any such thing.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- mistermann 6y ago
  I don't know how one would accomplish this from a manpower perspective until you are able to get some sort of a critical mass of devoted users (or could implement some ML analysis + afford[1] to pay a moderator, at least at the start), but I've been thinking for a long time whether a new forum with strict epistemic and logical standards might be able to spawn a completely novel culture on the internet, one where people are "highly conscious" at all times and therefore not prone to the normal heuristic flaws that exist in large quantities on every single other forum...things like mind reading, future predicting, speculation stated as fact (and "truthy" as true), binary (vs trinary) logic, elementary logical flaws, transparently incorrect representations of reality, silly hyperbole, and so forth and so on. It would likely be a ton of work to initially coax people into such a higher state of consciousness, and keep them there, but I think it would be extremely interesting to see if such a thing is even possible at any sort of scale. And, if accomplished even to a degree, what kind of novel ideas and perspectives on human existence might come out of such a forum. I struggle to see how we turn this increasingly crazy ship around if someone doesn't come up with some sort of a novel approach to counteract what is happening to people's minds in this mass-communication world that's been unleashed on humanity with no time for us to evolve accordingly. [1] For the right person/platform, I bet you'd be able to crowdsource funding for such an initiative if you were able to sufficiently communicate the problem and proposed solution/goals. I'd certainly be willing to contribute what I could via Patreon or something like that. EDIT - See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412461 Crowdsourcing various ideas about various techniques to crack this nut would be a good idea.
adventured 6y ago
It's not possible to sustain in this climate. If the parent is going to bother messing with an aggregator of this nature in today's particularly belligerent political atmosphere, they should capitulate and make it narrow. Plausibly build one for each major group (ie one for Democrats and Republicans). Swim with the echo chambers, if you want your product to be successful. You can be aspirational about creating a calm, well behaved political environment online that brings everyone together in reasoned discussion, and your product is guaranteed to fail. The relative absence of politics in HN discussions is one of the key reasons it still works so well as a community with so much diversity of thought. Especially as things have changed increasingly in the past decade, as political vitriol has gotten worse by the year. I can hear the retort: yeah but that's just giving in to everything that's wrong today, you should resist! Un huh, good luck with that. It's a nice sentiment and it will not work out. It's like waving your fists furiously at a tsunami wave as it drowns and breaks you. It will overwhelm your best efforts and you will suffer immensely for it.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments? Make friends with someone who sees the world very differently from you and has a very different political ideology from yours whom you, nonetheless, sincerely respect. Both of you start seeding comments manually to model what a well-thought out comment looks like, regardless of ideology, so that it doesn't become a space de facto signaling "Republicans (or Democrats) only." or similar.

asddubs 6y ago

i don't think it's possible without heavy moderation, even more so than on non-political forums

kaczordon 6y ago

Agreed, it's the community that makes it useful. I mainly made this for my friends to use, was curious what HN users would think, although didn't expect such a toxic comment so soon...[edit] I'm leaving that comment up for a bit as it illustrates the problem I think. Perhaps a minimum word count with a valid word filter would help push people in the right direction or gamification, something like the tribunal(https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tribunal) from League of Legends to ban toxic members.

afarrell 6y ago
The answer really is community. For example, look at churches. Note that finding a non-personally-exhausting way to prevent a community from fracturing into a toxic mess of infighting is a problem. For example, look at churches.
- 6keZbCECT2uB 6y ago
  lobste.rs attempts to do this by somewhat requiring people to have connections before they can register. Even if that's not your long term goal, it might be a good place to start to avoid broken windows.
  - kaczordon 6y ago
    I like this idea, constructing the community is the difficult part which this approach would seem to partly solve for.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
HN has built-in community sculpting. That comment would be downvoted and possibly even deleted by HN mods. How about a requirement to post support for the comment. I.e., reasoning behind the statement with links to sources, kind of like Wikipedia. We do it as a convention on HN, but maybe making it a requirement is appropriate for polarized topics: "My opinion is xyz because abc and you can clearly see that abc is proven by this quote: 'my quote from the below linked article' From: www.thebelowlink.com/intelligentreasoning.html
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  That comment would be ...possibly even deleted by HN mods. This assertion runs counter to everything I understand about how HN moderation operates. I don't believe the HN mods do any such thing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mistermann 6y ago
I don't know how one would accomplish this from a manpower perspective until you are able to get some sort of a critical mass of devoted users (or could implement some ML analysis + afford[1] to pay a moderator, at least at the start), but I've been thinking for a long time whether a new forum with strict epistemic and logical standards might be able to spawn a completely novel culture on the internet, one where people are "highly conscious" at all times and therefore not prone to the normal heuristic flaws that exist in large quantities on every single other forum...things like mind reading, future predicting, speculation stated as fact (and "truthy" as true), binary (vs trinary) logic, elementary logical flaws, transparently incorrect representations of reality, silly hyperbole, and so forth and so on. It would likely be a ton of work to initially coax people into such a higher state of consciousness, and keep them there, but I think it would be extremely interesting to see if such a thing is even possible at any sort of scale. And, if accomplished even to a degree, what kind of novel ideas and perspectives on human existence might come out of such a forum. I struggle to see how we turn this increasingly crazy ship around if someone doesn't come up with some sort of a novel approach to counteract what is happening to people's minds in this mass-communication world that's been unleashed on humanity with no time for us to evolve accordingly. [1] For the right person/platform, I bet you'd be able to crowdsource funding for such an initiative if you were able to sufficiently communicate the problem and proposed solution/goals. I'd certainly be willing to contribute what I could via Patreon or something like that. EDIT - See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412461 Crowdsourcing various ideas about various techniques to crack this nut would be a good idea.

adventured 6y ago

It's not possible to sustain in this climate. If the parent is going to bother messing with an aggregator of this nature in today's particularly belligerent political atmosphere, they should capitulate and make it narrow. Plausibly build one for each major group (ie one for Democrats and Republicans). Swim with the echo chambers, if you want your product to be successful. You can be aspirational about creating a calm, well behaved political environment online that brings everyone together in reasoned discussion, and your product is guaranteed to fail. The relative absence of politics in HN discussions is one of the key reasons it still works so well as a community with so much diversity of thought. Especially as things have changed increasingly in the past decade, as political vitriol has gotten worse by the year. I can hear the retort: yeah but that's just giving in to everything that's wrong today, you should resist! Un huh, good luck with that. It's a nice sentiment and it will not work out. It's like waving your fists furiously at a tsunami wave as it drowns and breaks you. It will overwhelm your best efforts and you will suffer immensely for it.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

How would one go about seeding a political news site with constructive comments? Make friends with someone who sees the world very differently from you and has a very different political ideology from yours whom you, nonetheless, sincerely respect. Both of you start seeding comments manually to model what a well-thought out comment looks like, regardless of ideology, so that it doesn't become a space de facto signaling "Republicans (or Democrats) only." or similar.