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Works great at Hacker news. I rarely come across anti-scientific, illogical nonsense.

mtgx 5y ago
HN has moderators. Twitter doesn't, other than their own malgorithm.
littlestymaar 5y ago
You must have missed the comments about how colonization of Mars is going to save our specie … (for instance, the first comment of this post which reached the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600)
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  One of the points of going to Mars is to save our species. One large enough asteroid can wipe us out, along with all high-level life, animals, insects. Being multiplanetary is very important.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Oh, and that take is definitely not an example of “anti-scientific, illogical nonsense” and definitely not group thinking, right? /s BTW, the odds that we wipe ourself out of this planet on our own thanks to global warming are much higher than the odds of a “one every ten million year” event.
    - detaro 5y ago
      Because a comment with lots of replies disagreeing and discussion is an awesome example of groupthink, yes...
jstx1 5y ago
I wouldn't attribute this to the upvoting system - HN is highly moderated and somewhat specialised as a community. This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter. I think this is the answer to the whole conversation about building communities on-line. That is: quality communities don't scale. As I elaborated on here[0], I think the factor that enables high-quality on-line communities is active moderation - and that doesn't scale. The workload grows in proportion to the userbase / discussion volume. So, if we want a high-quality platform "as large and as broad as Twitter", we'll have to do it the hard way, and employ proportionate level of active moderation. On a tangent: looking from this angle, the failure of big on-line platforms is just another example of the modus operandi of big tech companies: they do the easy 80% of the work, ignore the remaining 20% that's hard and most important, and then defend themselves by claiming "scale is hard". Other well-known examples of this phenomenon include counterfeiting problems on Amazon and Google's nonexistent customer support. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917125
wily-coucal 5y ago
The voting system on HN is subject to all the standard misbehavior. It's common to see indisputable statements of fact downvoted into light gray. Turn on 'showdead'. Who downvoted this stuff? We don't know. Who flagged it? We don't know. What can you do about it? Nothing. Talking about the misbehavior is against the rules.
c16 5y ago
HN has a certain userbase, while Twitter caters to the masses. I'm certain this plays a large role in the quality of content, along with upvotes and moderation.

mtgx 5y ago

HN has moderators. Twitter doesn't, other than their own malgorithm.

You must have missed the comments about how colonization of Mars is going to save our specie … (for instance, the first comment of this post which reached the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600)

bufferoverflow 5y ago
One of the points of going to Mars is to save our species. One large enough asteroid can wipe us out, along with all high-level life, animals, insects. Being multiplanetary is very important.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  Oh, and that take is definitely not an example of “anti-scientific, illogical nonsense” and definitely not group thinking, right? /s BTW, the odds that we wipe ourself out of this planet on our own thanks to global warming are much higher than the odds of a “one every ten million year” event.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Because a comment with lots of replies disagreeing and discussion is an awesome example of groupthink, yes...

jstx1 5y ago

I wouldn't attribute this to the upvoting system - HN is highly moderated and somewhat specialised as a community. This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter. I think this is the answer to the whole conversation about building communities on-line. That is: quality communities don't scale. As I elaborated on here[0], I think the factor that enables high-quality on-line communities is active moderation - and that doesn't scale. The workload grows in proportion to the userbase / discussion volume. So, if we want a high-quality platform "as large and as broad as Twitter", we'll have to do it the hard way, and employ proportionate level of active moderation. On a tangent: looking from this angle, the failure of big on-line platforms is just another example of the modus operandi of big tech companies: they do the easy 80% of the work, ignore the remaining 20% that's hard and most important, and then defend themselves by claiming "scale is hard". Other well-known examples of this phenomenon include counterfeiting problems on Amazon and Google's nonexistent customer support. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917125

wily-coucal 5y ago

The voting system on HN is subject to all the standard misbehavior. It's common to see indisputable statements of fact downvoted into light gray. Turn on 'showdead'. Who downvoted this stuff? We don't know. Who flagged it? We don't know. What can you do about it? Nothing. Talking about the misbehavior is against the rules.

c16 5y ago

HN has a certain userbase, while Twitter caters to the masses. I'm certain this plays a large role in the quality of content, along with upvotes and moderation.