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@dang, > All: this thread got a flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments. Please don't post those! They're really bad for this site. The issue with su

@dang, > All: this thread got a flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments. Please don't post those! They're really bad for this site. The issue with such points isn't that they're wrong, it's that they're not interesting. Nothing predictable and obvious is. We want interesting conversation here, and that comes from curiosity. If you're feeling agitation rather than curiosity, please wait until that polarity flips. > The interesting things in a story like this are any diffs from what one would have expected. >https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... > It's a significant move, so there must be interesting diffs. But sometimes one has to hunt for those, or at least wait for them to occur to one. That sort of waiting is key to getting good HN discussion, which is reflective rather than reflexive. > https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... What "flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments" are you talking about? What would an "obvious" reaction to this news be? I understand if the news was something along the lines "startup incubator for black girls goes live" or something, where you have a divide roughly amongst the line of "let's help the underpriviledged" and "we should see beyond race and gender". But this news? Could you at least point me to some examples?

qntty 5y ago
The ideology of the tech elite is to see themselves as cool, detached, rational observers of the world. So when people feel regular human emotions in response to things, they need some way to deride them for it.
- dang 5y ago
  That's a misunderstanding. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck in predictable ways. People come to HN for relief from that, in the hope of finding something that's a little more interesting. If they come here and see people yelling the same angry, recycled points over and over again, that's obviously not interesting. It isn't because of emotion per se, and the idea that the people operating this site have any sort of anti-emotional ideology is far off base! I don't identify with that any more than I imagine you do.
dang 5y ago
> What "flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments" are you talking about? They're collapsed at the bottom of the page now. Before that, they were the page. Downweighting low-quality generic subthreads is one of the key things moderators do here to try to improve the quality of the threads—which unfortunately tends to go to the lowest common denominator by default. p.s. "@dang" is a no-op. I only saw your question by accident. Please send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
- lvs 5y ago
  Hm, it certainly looks a lot like "improve the quality of the threads" == suppress industry critique.
  - dang 5y ago
    "Industry critique" fills virtually every HN thread. With suppression like that, who needs amplifiers? Most people who see a moderation decision they dislike leap straight to the idea that the moderators secretly hold $VIEW, ignoring (or not noticing) all the moderation decisions going the opposite way. In reality, we just don't care— I don't have words to describe how profoundly we don't care about commenter opinions. All that was sandblasted out of my brain years ago. The weariness that arises at the thought of caring about commenter opinions is enough to make me want to lie on the floor for a week. The only thing I care about is trying to prevent this place from plunging to the bottom of the internet barrel, and that only because it's my job. That's the true answer, by the way, to all the accusations of $BIAS that people fire from all directions every day: existential weariness has destroyed the ability to care. It turns out that's a decent proxy for neutrality. Not perfect, of course, but enough as a first pass filter.
    - raspasov 5y ago
      If it’s not for dang, this place would turn into a 4chan. Thank you, dang!
    - lvs 5y ago

qntty 5y ago

The ideology of the tech elite is to see themselves as cool, detached, rational observers of the world. So when people feel regular human emotions in response to things, they need some way to deride them for it.

dang 5y ago
That's a misunderstanding. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck in predictable ways. People come to HN for relief from that, in the hope of finding something that's a little more interesting. If they come here and see people yelling the same angry, recycled points over and over again, that's obviously not interesting. It isn't because of emotion per se, and the idea that the people operating this site have any sort of anti-emotional ideology is far off base! I don't identify with that any more than I imagine you do.

dang 5y ago

> What "flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments" are you talking about? They're collapsed at the bottom of the page now. Before that, they were the page. Downweighting low-quality generic subthreads is one of the key things moderators do here to try to improve the quality of the threads—which unfortunately tends to go to the lowest common denominator by default. p.s. "@dang" is a no-op. I only saw your question by accident. Please send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

lvs 5y ago
Hm, it certainly looks a lot like "improve the quality of the threads" == suppress industry critique.
- dang 5y ago
  "Industry critique" fills virtually every HN thread. With suppression like that, who needs amplifiers? Most people who see a moderation decision they dislike leap straight to the idea that the moderators secretly hold $VIEW, ignoring (or not noticing) all the moderation decisions going the opposite way. In reality, we just don't care— I don't have words to describe how profoundly we don't care about commenter opinions. All that was sandblasted out of my brain years ago. The weariness that arises at the thought of caring about commenter opinions is enough to make me want to lie on the floor for a week. The only thing I care about is trying to prevent this place from plunging to the bottom of the internet barrel, and that only because it's my job. That's the true answer, by the way, to all the accusations of $BIAS that people fire from all directions every day: existential weariness has destroyed the ability to care. It turns out that's a decent proxy for neutrality. Not perfect, of course, but enough as a first pass filter.
  - raspasov 5y ago
    If it’s not for dang, this place would turn into a 4chan. Thank you, dang!
  - lvs 5y ago