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I think the flagging mechanism is rife for abuse. There are clearly more people interested in low information reactions than substantive discussion. If all you

I think the flagging mechanism is rife for abuse. There are clearly more people interested in low information reactions than substantive discussion. If all you act on is reports, you will be biased towards whatever they care about. That is not a good way to moderate for nuance. I’m sure you may have considered this, but I don’t think it’s coming through in the discussion of this important topic which has been mostly hysterical.

dang 5y ago
Reports are not all we act on. We read the threads too. No one can read all of them though. Discussion on this topic has certainly been mixed, but "mostly hysterical" sounds like an exaggeration to me. People's reactions to these things are conditioned by the cognitive bias that causes us to weight the things we dislike much more strongly than the things we agree with (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
- shuckles 5y ago
  I think the fact that no technical document has lasted on the front page but various rumors have is a strong point for my view. An article about internal dissent at Apple has hung on for most of the day, yet almost no comments on it engage with any of the key concepts in the article: what does it mean for an 800 post slack thread to exist? Why does it matter that the security employees don’t seem against the idea on the thread? Similarly, I doubt anyone would be able to reliably match the comments section of any of the dozen articles about this announcement that have reached the front page in the last 8 days with the actual article content. These are all bad signs about the healthiness of discussion.
  - dang 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173134 is #1 on the front page right now. Matthew Green and Alex Stamos both wrote things about this that were on HN's front page for a long time. I'm pretty sure there have been other technical threads as well.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      You're doing a bang up job man. It's very kind of you to continue responding to these folks when they've taken your attention rather off topic from your original comment above. Other people's bad behavior doesn't excuse your own, which also happens to be the Chinese version of the golden rule: 己所不欲，勿施於人 (literally: what you don't want, don't apply to others)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zepto 5y ago
  Mostly hysterical may technically be an exaggeration, but mostly misinformed, and often dis-informative is not. This isn’t just about people weighing things they dislike more strongly. It’s also about groupthink, confirmation bias, and a lack of curiosity. HN doesn’t have an immune system against straight up misinformation.
  - dang 5y ago
    > HN doesn’t have an immune system against straight up misinformation. It certainly doesn't! Misinformation and disinformation are terms du jour, but as far as I can tell they are indistinguishable from old-fashioned people-being-wrong-on-the-internet. If you expect an internet forum to be immune from that...well, that's too much to expect. As far as I can tell (and moderating HN for years has really hammered this home), nearly everyone is wrong about nearly everything. Not only that, but no one (or perhaps we can say for decorum's sake, nearly no one) really cares about the truth. We care about what we like and we want it to win against what we dislike; all the rest is rationalization. Moderating HN has really hammered that one into me as well. Such is human nature, and trying to moderate against it would be futile, not to mention a fast track to burnout. I've tried, and have the scars. And at the same time I completely sympathize with the frustration of watching discourse on a major topic being dominated by shallow, indignant repetition that isn't engaging with the specifics of a situation. From a moderation point of view, when a tsunami of a story washes over HN for a week or more, there's not that much we can do about it. We can prevent it from completely dominating the site; we can ask a few people not to break the site guidelines when we see that happening; that's about it. Pretending we can do much more than that would be like Canute commanding the waves. (Btw, maybe I'm mistaking you for someone else but I have the feeling that your comments have gone, over the years, from frequently breaking the site guidelines to doing a pretty good job of respecting them. If that's true, that's amazing and I appreciate it a ton.) Edit: I could keep adding new paragraphs to this post for almost forever, but here's another factor that moderating HN has hammered into me. It's possible for people to be wrong on both the facts and the arguments and yet for there to be some deeper justice or truth in what they're saying. Oftentimes, conflicts play out like this: someone responds by correcting facts or pointing out flaws in arguments, but they only succeed in provoking an intensified fury and end up drawing it to themselves. That's because they're answering on the level of facts-and-arguments as a way of dismissing, rather than acknowledging, that deeper level of truth or justice that people have strong feelings about. Mostly all this does is increase the amplitude of the conflict. This is very much a co-creation between the conflicting parties—i.e. between the ones who are right (or feel they are) and the other ones who are right (or feel they are). This is the real answer to complaints about groupthink, in my opinion.

dang 5y ago

Reports are not all we act on. We read the threads too. No one can read all of them though. Discussion on this topic has certainly been mixed, but "mostly hysterical" sounds like an exaggeration to me. People's reactions to these things are conditioned by the cognitive bias that causes us to weight the things we dislike much more strongly than the things we agree with (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

shuckles 5y ago
I think the fact that no technical document has lasted on the front page but various rumors have is a strong point for my view. An article about internal dissent at Apple has hung on for most of the day, yet almost no comments on it engage with any of the key concepts in the article: what does it mean for an 800 post slack thread to exist? Why does it matter that the security employees don’t seem against the idea on the thread? Similarly, I doubt anyone would be able to reliably match the comments section of any of the dozen articles about this announcement that have reached the front page in the last 8 days with the actual article content. These are all bad signs about the healthiness of discussion.
- dang 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173134 is #1 on the front page right now. Matthew Green and Alex Stamos both wrote things about this that were on HN's front page for a long time. I'm pretty sure there have been other technical threads as well.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    You're doing a bang up job man. It's very kind of you to continue responding to these folks when they've taken your attention rather off topic from your original comment above. Other people's bad behavior doesn't excuse your own, which also happens to be the Chinese version of the golden rule: 己所不欲，勿施於人 (literally: what you don't want, don't apply to others)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zepto 5y ago
Mostly hysterical may technically be an exaggeration, but mostly misinformed, and often dis-informative is not. This isn’t just about people weighing things they dislike more strongly. It’s also about groupthink, confirmation bias, and a lack of curiosity. HN doesn’t have an immune system against straight up misinformation.
- dang 5y ago
  > HN doesn’t have an immune system against straight up misinformation. It certainly doesn't! Misinformation and disinformation are terms du jour, but as far as I can tell they are indistinguishable from old-fashioned people-being-wrong-on-the-internet. If you expect an internet forum to be immune from that...well, that's too much to expect. As far as I can tell (and moderating HN for years has really hammered this home), nearly everyone is wrong about nearly everything. Not only that, but no one (or perhaps we can say for decorum's sake, nearly no one) really cares about the truth. We care about what we like and we want it to win against what we dislike; all the rest is rationalization. Moderating HN has really hammered that one into me as well. Such is human nature, and trying to moderate against it would be futile, not to mention a fast track to burnout. I've tried, and have the scars. And at the same time I completely sympathize with the frustration of watching discourse on a major topic being dominated by shallow, indignant repetition that isn't engaging with the specifics of a situation. From a moderation point of view, when a tsunami of a story washes over HN for a week or more, there's not that much we can do about it. We can prevent it from completely dominating the site; we can ask a few people not to break the site guidelines when we see that happening; that's about it. Pretending we can do much more than that would be like Canute commanding the waves. (Btw, maybe I'm mistaking you for someone else but I have the feeling that your comments have gone, over the years, from frequently breaking the site guidelines to doing a pretty good job of respecting them. If that's true, that's amazing and I appreciate it a ton.) Edit: I could keep adding new paragraphs to this post for almost forever, but here's another factor that moderating HN has hammered into me. It's possible for people to be wrong on both the facts and the arguments and yet for there to be some deeper justice or truth in what they're saying. Oftentimes, conflicts play out like this: someone responds by correcting facts or pointing out flaws in arguments, but they only succeed in provoking an intensified fury and end up drawing it to themselves. That's because they're answering on the level of facts-and-arguments as a way of dismissing, rather than acknowledging, that deeper level of truth or justice that people have strong feelings about. Mostly all this does is increase the amplitude of the conflict. This is very much a co-creation between the conflicting parties—i.e. between the ones who are right (or feel they are) and the other ones who are right (or feel they are). This is the real answer to complaints about groupthink, in my opinion.