9 ms·

Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok. The only thing that matters is the size of co

by tqi 5y ago

Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok. The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.

anyfoo 5y ago
And competent moderation, essentially editorial guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a community that isn’t too big.)
- tqi 5y ago
  That probably helps here, but I don't think moderation works once you get beyond the point where one moderator can handle everything.
  - airhead969 5y ago
    I guess the issue is keeping moderation consistent (like bar exam grading) coupled with a manageable size of community that handles scaling. I wonder if social media platforms could cluster 10-25 people together into "troops" with a "troop leader" and a "guidance counselor." This way, it's not just a sea of individuals floating along ephemerally disconnected, but brings some tribal belonging and support back that people yearn for.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Slashdot had metamoderation 25 years ago.
      - airhead969 5y ago
        Yes, I was there. :) 23 years ago ;) I meant some sort of mechanism to improve the training/fairness/consistency of moderators rather than merely double-checking them.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        Slashdot died from the incoming content, not the posts, as far as I recall from those days. Digg suffered the same fate. Reddit has so far been kept from it since moderators can only pin a few posts and only have "negative" control of the posts that appear at the top.
      - JohnBooty 5y ago
        Their metamoderation was innovative but ultimately pointless. Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
        airhead969 5y ago
        That's true. If a community platform's moderation were more professional like the example I used of bar exam graders, who grade practice samples and do other calibration exercises, it would improve the signal and tend to reduce biases if the culture were one of strict professionalism.
    - anyfoo 5y ago
      I've since come to believe that to have a high quality medium, you really need not just the editorial guidelines I've mentioned, but also someone who interprets those guidelines in the intended way, and the ability to enforce them properly. That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size. When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me. Curated content wins. Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    HN has basically one moderator. It's just that we've trained an army of downvoters and flaggers that mostly clobber anything "un-HN" almost immediately. There's a community here and it defends itself.
cvwright 5y ago
True, people will always be the root of the problem. But they are also the best part of everything. We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.
- airhead969 5y ago
  Absolutely. I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence. The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that. We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.
zozbot234 5y ago
Most subject-specific forums are actually ok. Because posting there demonstrates that you have something worthwhile to care about. Of course one can troll and flamebait on such forums as well but it takes effort and it's not going to seriously rile people up about anything. Twitter is poles apart from that, it's like being in a different universe.
- airhead969 5y ago
  Yes, that's absolutely right. Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK). On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness. Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.
bosswipe 5y ago
HN has decently big scale. Somehow it works because of heavy handed moderation, manual, crowdsourced and automated. I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.
airhead969 5y ago
I think you're partially right. HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility. Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts. There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this). [1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875
paulpauper 5y ago
HN is not social media. Social media has friends/followers, chats, inboxes, timelines... stuff like that. Social media involves some insularity. This is how so-called fake news spreads, because insular networks do not get outside feedback. .
- johncessna 5y ago
  The rep meter is what makes the difference. I've caught myself posting something only to spam f5 to see if what I was said was accepted or rejected.
- croes 5y ago
  Social media just needs the possibility to share media with other people to be called social media. So HN is social media.
nasalgoat 5y ago
HN is a tiny monoculture community catering to a niche audience. Of course the discourse is okay, there's almost no disagreement.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Wrong!
  - airhead969 5y ago
    OMG, you win the internet for today. Haha. If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Oh my heavens no. There are certain topics that even this site can't discuss in good faith without groupthink, hurt feelings, big egos, and so forth. No, I will not list those topics here to avoid invoking them, but most of them are political. Sometimes they get just as toxic as twitter and reddit, just with less namecalling since that'll get you flagged off with a quickness. On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
  - jerf 5y ago
    "If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all." They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats. You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them. I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.
fernandopj 5y ago
HN is not pursuing 10%/week growth, "engagement" etc. It doesn't care for bots, viral posts, there's a small, definable ruleset and largely enforceable. It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts! No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.
- airhead969 5y ago
  That's definitely true. Without messing up a good thing (HN), I wonder though how similar community platforms could be constructed incrementally better in terms of reasonableness, fairness, ethical/principled/respectful debate, curiosity, quality people, and signal. It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  > No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland. It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place. HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned. HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
  - everdrive 5y ago
    Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations. I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
    - 5y ago
geraneum 5y ago
If they introduce targeted ads or up-votes/interactions could be monetized in HN, even with the the same community, you would start to see the deterioration IMHO. Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!
xfer 5y ago
I think the major ingredient for HN is focus on topics that are interesting to "techinical" people. When you focus on particular set of activities it becomes easier to just say no to a lot of other contents. I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.
rdiddly 5y ago
I don't think that's the only thing going on. Twitter has code written and an ML model trained to actively and intentionally surface material of indeterminate quality that is likely to drive engagement. HN has people using moderation and upvoting to surface material of high quality assuming that drives engagement.
lostlogin 5y ago
Maybe money they raise is for purchasing a Dang? I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can’t imagine how it’s all kept in check here. How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.
yumraj 5y ago
The reason for that is HN is not for direct profit, has a charter, is not afraid to moderate content, via flag, and to bar people, via marking them as dead, and actively hunts spam and trolls. If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.

by tqi 5y ago

anyfoo 5y ago

And competent moderation, essentially editorial guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a community that isn’t too big.)

tqi 5y ago
That probably helps here, but I don't think moderation works once you get beyond the point where one moderator can handle everything.
- airhead969 5y ago
  I guess the issue is keeping moderation consistent (like bar exam grading) coupled with a manageable size of community that handles scaling. I wonder if social media platforms could cluster 10-25 people together into "troops" with a "troop leader" and a "guidance counselor." This way, it's not just a sea of individuals floating along ephemerally disconnected, but brings some tribal belonging and support back that people yearn for.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Slashdot had metamoderation 25 years ago.
    - airhead969 5y ago
      Yes, I was there. :) 23 years ago ;) I meant some sort of mechanism to improve the training/fairness/consistency of moderators rather than merely double-checking them.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Slashdot died from the incoming content, not the posts, as far as I recall from those days. Digg suffered the same fate. Reddit has so far been kept from it since moderators can only pin a few posts and only have "negative" control of the posts that appear at the top.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Their metamoderation was innovative but ultimately pointless. Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
      - airhead969 5y ago
        That's true. If a community platform's moderation were more professional like the example I used of bar exam graders, who grade practice samples and do other calibration exercises, it would improve the signal and tend to reduce biases if the culture were one of strict professionalism.
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    I've since come to believe that to have a high quality medium, you really need not just the editorial guidelines I've mentioned, but also someone who interprets those guidelines in the intended way, and the ability to enforce them properly. That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size. When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me. Curated content wins. Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.
- pjc50 5y ago
  HN has basically one moderator. It's just that we've trained an army of downvoters and flaggers that mostly clobber anything "un-HN" almost immediately. There's a community here and it defends itself.

cvwright 5y ago

True, people will always be the root of the problem. But they are also the best part of everything. We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.

airhead969 5y ago
Absolutely. I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence. The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that. We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.

zozbot234 5y ago

Most subject-specific forums are actually ok. Because posting there demonstrates that you have something worthwhile to care about. Of course one can troll and flamebait on such forums as well but it takes effort and it's not going to seriously rile people up about anything. Twitter is poles apart from that, it's like being in a different universe.

airhead969 5y ago
Yes, that's absolutely right. Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK). On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness. Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.

bosswipe 5y ago

HN has decently big scale. Somehow it works because of heavy handed moderation, manual, crowdsourced and automated. I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.

airhead969 5y ago

I think you're partially right. HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility. Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts. There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this). [1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875

paulpauper 5y ago

HN is not social media. Social media has friends/followers, chats, inboxes, timelines... stuff like that. Social media involves some insularity. This is how so-called fake news spreads, because insular networks do not get outside feedback. .

johncessna 5y ago
The rep meter is what makes the difference. I've caught myself posting something only to spam f5 to see if what I was said was accepted or rejected.
croes 5y ago
Social media just needs the possibility to share media with other people to be called social media. So HN is social media.

nasalgoat 5y ago

HN is a tiny monoculture community catering to a niche audience. Of course the discourse is okay, there's almost no disagreement.

edoceo 5y ago
Wrong!
- airhead969 5y ago
  OMG, you win the internet for today. Haha. If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
Karunamon 5y ago
Oh my heavens no. There are certain topics that even this site can't discuss in good faith without groupthink, hurt feelings, big egos, and so forth. No, I will not list those topics here to avoid invoking them, but most of them are political. Sometimes they get just as toxic as twitter and reddit, just with less namecalling since that'll get you flagged off with a quickness. On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
- jerf 5y ago
  "If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all." They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats. You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them. I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.

fernandopj 5y ago

HN is not pursuing 10%/week growth, "engagement" etc. It doesn't care for bots, viral posts, there's a small, definable ruleset and largely enforceable. It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts! No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.

airhead969 5y ago
That's definitely true. Without messing up a good thing (HN), I wonder though how similar community platforms could be constructed incrementally better in terms of reasonableness, fairness, ethical/principled/respectful debate, curiosity, quality people, and signal. It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
cryptoz 5y ago
> No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland. It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place. HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned. HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
- everdrive 5y ago
  Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations. I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
  - 5y ago

geraneum 5y ago

If they introduce targeted ads or up-votes/interactions could be monetized in HN, even with the the same community, you would start to see the deterioration IMHO. Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!

xfer 5y ago

I think the major ingredient for HN is focus on topics that are interesting to "techinical" people. When you focus on particular set of activities it becomes easier to just say no to a lot of other contents. I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.

rdiddly 5y ago

I don't think that's the only thing going on. Twitter has code written and an ML model trained to actively and intentionally surface material of indeterminate quality that is likely to drive engagement. HN has people using moderation and upvoting to surface material of high quality assuming that drives engagement.

lostlogin 5y ago

Maybe money they raise is for purchasing a Dang? I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can’t imagine how it’s all kept in check here. How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.

yumraj 5y ago

The reason for that is HN is not for direct profit, has a charter, is not afraid to moderate content, via flag, and to bar people, via marking them as dead, and actively hunts spam and trolls. If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.