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> and everyone learns from it Do they? > where both sides end up arguing the same philosophical issues over and over again Funny, I would describe HN as the

• MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Do they? If the participants are doing a good job of explaining where they're coming from, then yes. If they're just talking past each other, or worse, angrily insulting each other, then of course the answer is no. At that point it's no longer really a discussion at all, it's the online equivalent of monkeys throwing filth at each other, and it debases all involved. > > where both sides end up arguing the same philosophical issues over and over again > Funny, I would describe HN as the same. Sure, some hot topics will keep coming up until the end of time. Copyleft vs permissive licences, for instance. I think that's fine though, and the ongoing discussion isn't pure retreading, it will evolve over time as the surrounding circumstances change. A discussion forum like HackerNews shouldn't aim to be the equivalent of StackOverflow where there's a single authoritative page for each question, and duplicates are rebuked and shut down. That approach makes sense if you're trying to build a question/answer repository, but a discussion forum is something different. > I don't share the common HN conceit that commenters on HN are better than elsewhere. IMO there's no evidence of that My opinion is no more well grounded than yours, but I disagree. HN discussions very often have input from experts. Anecdotally I think this happens less often on other forums. HN also has uniquely good moderation.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > HN discussions very often have input from experts. Who are predictably downvoted! I think the upvoting/downvoting mechanism by itself makes discussions unnecessarily competitive and hostile. Here's a crazy alternative: make the order of comments random and rotating. Of course you could still have flagging and moderation to remove bad comments, but otherwise get rid of the voting. You could still have nested conversations (though the UI for this is really bad on HN when the conversations become long), but the comments at each level would also be randomly ordered. The theory is that the "best" comments rise to the top and the "worst" to the bottom. In reality, that rarely seems to be the case. It's typically a combination of popularity, controversy, accidental timing (some variation on "first!"), and the existence of replies to the comment.
    • bulleyashah 6y ago
      Let me chime in on the voting issue (or I think what you mean is mob voting issue?) Imagine a discussion on Linux and Torvalds comments on it. But due to randomisation, it doesn't get enough traction. Note that this problem will become bigger the more top level comments you get. This is the same problem with democracies also. Everyone gets to vote but the outcome might not be the best.But the alternative of randomly selecting people to govern also has its problems. Do you know any platforms which have successfully done the randomisation thing?
      • _qulr 6y ago
        > Imagine a discussion on Linux and Torvalds comments on it. This seems like a rarity. The vast majority of HN discussions don't have this situation, and it seems odd if the only purpose of HN voting is to upvote "celebrity" comments. There are much better places to follow the comments of celebrities than on HN. > the alternative of randomly selecting people to govern also has its problems. I strongly believe this is actually the least bad form of government, and vastly superior to elections, which are glorified high school prom royalty pageants. > Do you know any platforms which have successfully done the randomisation thing? No, though I have no idea what "algorithm" Twitter uses to determine the order of replies in a thread. (Probably not totally random.)
        • bulleyashah 6y ago
          I didn't mean celebrity but more like knowledgeable people. A random system, just like random election, does not guarantee best or betterness in any form. It's not important however, because I agree it's unlikely and I do see where you're coming from (I also share your sense of cynicism about democracy). I don't use Twitter that much but I hear that twitter is really toxic. Assuming some part of twitter tweet section is random, does that inspire confidence that such a system might work.
          • _qulr 6y ago
            > I didn't mean celebrity but more like knowledgeable people. That's my point though. A celebrity like Torvalds will likely get upvoted, but in my experience, non-celebrity knowledgeable commenters often get downvoted by people who are much less knowledgeable. > A random system, just like random election, does not guarantee best or betterness in any form. I don't think any system guarantees betterness. :-) But random seems to be at least pretty fair and least subject to abuse. > Assuming some part of twitter tweet section is random, does that inspire confidence that such a system might work. There are different parts of Twitter. The Twitter timeline is definitely not random. It's either reverse chronological or "algorithmic", depending on your settings. But any given tweet can have any number of replies, and I don't know how Twitter determines the order of display of replies to a tweet. But it's overall a very different format from HN, so comparisons are difficult.
• chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > But I don't share the common HN conceit that commenters on HN are better than elsewhere. I think this is better expressed as “people almost everywhere else are terrible.” Its not that HN is better (although the crowd here is learned, intelligent, and generally aspires to professional behavior), its that most places online with more than 20 average daily users are trash. > I could share a little CSS to add dark mode support and a few other tweaks to HN, if anyone is interested. Please