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> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. The way I've started to look at it is that all social media

by danans 5y ago

> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely. Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial. Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.

tessierashpool 5y ago
the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. > but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. > the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to - stop frequenting racist forums, - if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable) isn't it?
  - BrightGlow 5y ago
    I was lurking here last year during the racial justice protests, and before that during the James Damore controversy. I still saw casually racist/sexist posts get upvoted fairly often. A discriminatory argument can be stated well and seem reasonable on its face, but still be discriminatory. It's the kind that moderators here are too lenient against and won't really want to delete as long as there isn't a pattern of it, because it could just be an well-meaning person suffering an error in judgement. I don't know how our world is supposed to move past that, or if it's even possible. I would have probably been a little less disappointed in the state of humanity if some of those posts had been flagged, because there were a lot of them across the whole internet.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    Is being racist against the law? Why would someone tell law enforcement?
    - vadfa 5y ago
      Racism can be considered hate speech, which is illegal in places with no right to free speech such as most countries in Europe. For example: https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime
      - wowaname 5y ago
        I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're correct here.
      - implements 5y ago
        Incitement to racial hatred, done publicly, can be held illegal if it crosses certain thresholds. I don’t think this means Europeans don’t have free speech. Consider both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta...
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks down whenever anyone needs it most. If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's upvoted. But few people really need help answering those questions. If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific question requiring expertise you will get the same naive surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to oblivion by the people who know just enough to be dangerous. If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking about answering your hard question and getting downvoted for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy question. Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF they're talking about contributes minimally if at all. Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I described above.
- danans 5y ago
  > but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions This has the effect, however, of making it clear that the forum itself is mostly racist, rather than masquerading as not being that.
rovolo 5y ago
How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to submit "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." That reads to me like an identity-based forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- psyc 5y ago
  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are primarily networks of personal (or corporate) identities. The centerpiece is the user. HN and Reddit are primarily ranked lists of interesting URLs. I don’t know one user from another, apart from a handful of prolific users, and half the accounts start with “throwaway”. (It wasn’t so in the beginning, but even then there was no reason to go to someone’s user page.)
- danans 5y ago
  I think you are misunderstanding my use of the the phrase "identity-based". What I mean is that the primary entity around which conversation and content revolve on HN is the topic (from URLs or questions), not the individual user's identity. Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.
atlgator 5y ago
Hacker News IS harmful because there's no established standard for what should receive an upvote or downvote (>500 karma can downvote). This leads to people just upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they don't. It's all groupthink. Alternatively, all well thought out comments should receive upvotes (despite personal cognitive dissonance) and inflammatory, trolling, or irrelevant comments should be downvoted. That would support diversity of thought and ideas.
- Avicebron 5y ago
  I'm confused, isn't established standard too nebulous a concept to be "needs to be upvoted", there is just too diverse of an opinion on what what is a "well thought out comment" and one person's "inflammatory" comment could be another person's "well thought out comment", the cognitive dissonance is upstream of all the voting patterns and there can be no set standard except organic, binary up/down voting. I think the ideal is that on average the local maxima (upvote groupthink) eventually is balanced by local minima (downvote groupthink)... but I would like to see how an established standard could be set for what should or shouldn't be upvoted?
  - atlgator 5y ago
    You're right. I was just offering one scenario where it might work, but even then there are people that think they are the sole arbiter of moral thought and speech they disagree with is akin to violence, etc. I didn't want to get into all that. Sufficed to say upvote/downvote is not a great system.
- chrischattin 5y ago
  The was the original "reddiquette" from back in the day. But as you know, it's pretty hard to align incentives, human nature, and that ideal.
mnsc 5y ago
Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions. And I would probably miss the mythical PG if he showed up in a thread. I don't know his handle anyways. Sometimes I'm made aware that a relevant "celebrity" is present in the thread but that's when people act obviously star struck like "oh thank you for that seminal paper back in '15". So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k. Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't know what that signifies and I do not want to know.
- wowaname 5y ago
  >some usernames are green New user. >I do not want to know Too bad :)
- buckyfull 5y ago
  It isn't? It seems to me like it is. We have groups of people discussing issues in these online forums. Isn't that social media? And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users, we do have the upvote/downvote mechanics for posts and comment count per post. Admittedly I quickly scan all posts for these numbers to help me decide where to click. So it seems like what can make social media a positive or a negative in a person's life is pretty complex. What each person brings to their interactions with the media varies a lot and the ways mechanics are used in the different sites and apps vary a lot. So it seems like a lot social is going on here on this site. The social group here is responsible for all of the content, I think? Right? It wouldn't be the same if it were posts selected by an elite group and we were just allowed to comment on them. So I think the article's suggestion to "quit social media" is too simplistic and lacks the nuance it would need to be helpful advice.
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    > And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users It is possible to see someone's profile, posts and comments. I wonder how many users do this to form opinions about others.

by danans 5y ago

tessierashpool 5y ago

the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).

skinkestek 5y ago
> the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. > but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. > the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to - stop frequenting racist forums, - if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable) isn't it?
- BrightGlow 5y ago
  I was lurking here last year during the racial justice protests, and before that during the James Damore controversy. I still saw casually racist/sexist posts get upvoted fairly often. A discriminatory argument can be stated well and seem reasonable on its face, but still be discriminatory. It's the kind that moderators here are too lenient against and won't really want to delete as long as there isn't a pattern of it, because it could just be an well-meaning person suffering an error in judgement. I don't know how our world is supposed to move past that, or if it's even possible. I would have probably been a little less disappointed in the state of humanity if some of those posts had been flagged, because there were a lot of them across the whole internet.
- genewitch 5y ago
  Is being racist against the law? Why would someone tell law enforcement?
  - vadfa 5y ago
    Racism can be considered hate speech, which is illegal in places with no right to free speech such as most countries in Europe. For example: https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime
    - wowaname 5y ago
      I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're correct here.
    - implements 5y ago
      Incitement to racial hatred, done publicly, can be held illegal if it crosses certain thresholds. I don’t think this means Europeans don’t have free speech. Consider both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta...
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks down whenever anyone needs it most. If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's upvoted. But few people really need help answering those questions. If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific question requiring expertise you will get the same naive surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to oblivion by the people who know just enough to be dangerous. If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking about answering your hard question and getting downvoted for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy question. Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF they're talking about contributes minimally if at all. Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I described above.
danans 5y ago
> but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions This has the effect, however, of making it clear that the forum itself is mostly racist, rather than masquerading as not being that.

rovolo 5y ago

How can you distinguish identity-based from topic-based social media? Doesn't your identity influence which topics you're interested in, and don't the topics which interest you form your identity? This forum says in the guidelines to submit "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." That reads to me like an identity-based forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

psyc 5y ago
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are primarily networks of personal (or corporate) identities. The centerpiece is the user. HN and Reddit are primarily ranked lists of interesting URLs. I don’t know one user from another, apart from a handful of prolific users, and half the accounts start with “throwaway”. (It wasn’t so in the beginning, but even then there was no reason to go to someone’s user page.)
danans 5y ago
I think you are misunderstanding my use of the the phrase "identity-based". What I mean is that the primary entity around which conversation and content revolve on HN is the topic (from URLs or questions), not the individual user's identity. Topic based forums are a thing. I'm a member of a paid (gasp!) forum for high-performance building methods.

atlgator 5y ago

Hacker News IS harmful because there's no established standard for what should receive an upvote or downvote (>500 karma can downvote). This leads to people just upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they don't. It's all groupthink. Alternatively, all well thought out comments should receive upvotes (despite personal cognitive dissonance) and inflammatory, trolling, or irrelevant comments should be downvoted. That would support diversity of thought and ideas.

Avicebron 5y ago
I'm confused, isn't established standard too nebulous a concept to be "needs to be upvoted", there is just too diverse of an opinion on what what is a "well thought out comment" and one person's "inflammatory" comment could be another person's "well thought out comment", the cognitive dissonance is upstream of all the voting patterns and there can be no set standard except organic, binary up/down voting. I think the ideal is that on average the local maxima (upvote groupthink) eventually is balanced by local minima (downvote groupthink)... but I would like to see how an established standard could be set for what should or shouldn't be upvoted?
- atlgator 5y ago
  You're right. I was just offering one scenario where it might work, but even then there are people that think they are the sole arbiter of moral thought and speech they disagree with is akin to violence, etc. I didn't want to get into all that. Sufficed to say upvote/downvote is not a great system.
chrischattin 5y ago
The was the original "reddiquette" from back in the day. But as you know, it's pretty hard to align incentives, human nature, and that ideal.

mnsc 5y ago

Hacker news is not social media. I have never recognized a user/username in between two sessions. And I would probably miss the mythical PG if he showed up in a thread. I don't know his handle anyways. Sometimes I'm made aware that a relevant "celebrity" is present in the thread but that's when people act obviously star struck like "oh thank you for that seminal paper back in '15". So nothing social going on here, just weird/interesting discussions between persons x, y, z, i, j and k. Edit: I just noticed that some usernames are green. I don't know what that signifies and I do not want to know.

wowaname 5y ago
>some usernames are green New user. >I do not want to know Too bad :)
buckyfull 5y ago
It isn't? It seems to me like it is. We have groups of people discussing issues in these online forums. Isn't that social media? And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users, we do have the upvote/downvote mechanics for posts and comment count per post. Admittedly I quickly scan all posts for these numbers to help me decide where to click. So it seems like what can make social media a positive or a negative in a person's life is pretty complex. What each person brings to their interactions with the media varies a lot and the ways mechanics are used in the different sites and apps vary a lot. So it seems like a lot social is going on here on this site. The social group here is responsible for all of the content, I think? Right? It wouldn't be the same if it were posts selected by an elite group and we were just allowed to comment on them. So I think the article's suggestion to "quit social media" is too simplistic and lacks the nuance it would need to be helpful advice.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  > And although we don't seem to have "clout mechanics" for users It is possible to see someone's profile, posts and comments. I wonder how many users do this to form opinions about others.