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Sure, but it's doubtless that there are prevailing attitudes, and also doubtless those attitudes are allowed change over time. Because of the voting system you

Sure, but it's doubtless that there are prevailing attitudes, and also doubtless those attitudes are allowed change over time. Because of the voting system you can even measure that change. I would also argue that a voting mechanism can distill that room into a single amplified voice, even if there's some disagreement within the room. As an example: You could post a Dawkins quote on /r/atheism at noon and you'll probably get some upvotes and some comments. If you post the same quote at midnight (when most of those who interacted on the original post are asleep), you'll probably get a similar proportion of upvotes and similar comments, but from entirely different individuals. Meanwhile, you could expect the inverse outcomes making the same post at different times on /r/christianity. What I'm asserting here is that any popular community with comments ranked by upvotes and downvotes inevitably ends up speaking with a singular editorial voice regardless of who happens to be online that day. And (here comes the hot take) in the case of HN, that voice has, for better or worse, lost a lot of its hard-edge over time in my opinion.

dang 5y ago
IMO you're falling prey to the tendency to anthropomorphize these things. That's powerful and common and unavoidable. Where it becomes a moderation issue is when people start posting their images of the community in a snarky or sneering or defensive way, in order to immediately knock them down. (This is what you did above with your "they".) In comments like that, people are simply battling with their own imagination. Such comments are reliably uninformative and go against what we're trying for on this forum (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please don't post like that here. (On the other hand, if you actually want to do a rigorous analysis of the data I'd be happy to help. We'd never publish vote data but I don't see why that would be necessary anyhow.)
- moolcool 5y ago
  I appreciate your thoughtful reply! Honestly when I replied I didn't realize you were a mod. At any rate though I think there's some interesting meat to this discussion, though I will try to be more attuned to what could be seen as snarky in future comments here. I assure you though that snark was not my intent. Like if you'll humor me to continue down the path of anthropomorphization, I can elaborate a little bit on what I meant in my original post. Like my theory is that a lot of the community has grown older, likely gotten more stable jobs, and as it goes, probably also gained a more careful and conservative attitude towards risky and rebellious acts. Simultaneously though, they remember and continue to admire their hacker heroes of yesteryear (like Kevin Mitnick, Aaron Swartz, and Edward Snowden). I think it'd be reductive to boil the dissonance between shifting risk profiles and idealism to just hypocrisy, since I think that sort of conflict manifests within different parts of everybody. I think you can hold both and be valid, just as you can be tired and hungry at the same time, but you wouldn't be a hypocrite for eating instead of sleeping. The conflict is deeper in more interesting than that, and I think it can be productive and interesting to inspect that conflict.

dang 5y ago

IMO you're falling prey to the tendency to anthropomorphize these things. That's powerful and common and unavoidable. Where it becomes a moderation issue is when people start posting their images of the community in a snarky or sneering or defensive way, in order to immediately knock them down. (This is what you did above with your "they".) In comments like that, people are simply battling with their own imagination. Such comments are reliably uninformative and go against what we're trying for on this forum (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please don't post like that here. (On the other hand, if you actually want to do a rigorous analysis of the data I'd be happy to help. We'd never publish vote data but I don't see why that would be necessary anyhow.)

moolcool 5y ago
I appreciate your thoughtful reply! Honestly when I replied I didn't realize you were a mod. At any rate though I think there's some interesting meat to this discussion, though I will try to be more attuned to what could be seen as snarky in future comments here. I assure you though that snark was not my intent. Like if you'll humor me to continue down the path of anthropomorphization, I can elaborate a little bit on what I meant in my original post. Like my theory is that a lot of the community has grown older, likely gotten more stable jobs, and as it goes, probably also gained a more careful and conservative attitude towards risky and rebellious acts. Simultaneously though, they remember and continue to admire their hacker heroes of yesteryear (like Kevin Mitnick, Aaron Swartz, and Edward Snowden). I think it'd be reductive to boil the dissonance between shifting risk profiles and idealism to just hypocrisy, since I think that sort of conflict manifests within different parts of everybody. I think you can hold both and be valid, just as you can be tired and hungry at the same time, but you wouldn't be a hypocrite for eating instead of sleeping. The conflict is deeper in more interesting than that, and I think it can be productive and interesting to inspect that conflict.