4 ms·

Does this include HN? Asking for a friend. Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?

igorstellar 4y ago
This is a real struggle for a lot of people, myself included. Hence the hype.
nomilk 4y ago
> why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters? Most of us would have doom scrolled in one form or another, many do it regularly, which can be hugely detrimental to life satisfaction in the same way any addiction could be, and can also increase anxiety. It's also in the interest of app makers to encourage these mostly destructive habits.
- antupis 4y ago
  Yeah I would say doomscrolling and content which milk strong emotional reactions are culprits.
Syonyk 4y ago
I'd argue that it can include HN, but HN is not designed to be nearly as toxic, and actually goes out of the way to be "as not-toxic as possible without breaking the concept of what it's trying to be." I've spent a while thinking through "What makes social media evil?" - I've read a number of studies, I grew up with the first wave of what we might call "social media" (never used MySpace but was quite familiar with it from friends, extensively used LiveJournal, etc). And my conclusion is that once you go away from "global state" to "individualized algorithmic feeds," it's probably gone evil. HN, as far as I can tell, has a global state. There may be some replication delays (if it's hosted on multiple servers, which I simply don't know - I can't imagine it requires much in terms of resources to host), but "I see what you see what a non-logged in user sees," with only very, very few differences (flagged/dead posts, mostly). It's not reordering the state based on what it knows about me - it's reordering, globally, for all users, based on the consensus. The same was true of LJ - you had your own feed, but outside permission related differences, if I looked at a community and you did, we both saw the same thing. This global state also means that there's no "slot machine" behavior of "pull the slider and see what's new." You refresh. It's the same stuff. Maybe two things switched positions. Go away, because it's simply not going to change that fast for you. HN also doesn't go with the endless scrolling. There's a bottom of the first page. You have to make a deliberate decision to see beyond it, and that's something that historically was just "how things worked," but has been replaced with the bottomless bowl approach. We know that people, given a bottomless bowl of soup, eat more. And given that every ad revenue based social media company has gone to that model, clearly people consume more. Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile. And, finally, HN is "pull" - I have to go to the site, vs it reaching out with notifications to try and drag me back in. Plus, there's the noprocrast setting. It gives you the tools to make it a nuisance to use too much. So, while HN can be somewhat addictive if you let it, the lack of any "weaponization of psychology" tricks and the very active "No, really, you've been looking at it too long, go away" coding means that I don't consider it particularly toxic, and certainly not in the same style as FB/Twitter/etc. Why it's a recurring obsession? Probably because a lot of us have been in the tech industry, have seen how it works, have (probably) been addicted at some point, have watched the whole concept go from "Huh, this is kind of a neat way to connect with people I'd never talk to otherwise!" to "Braaaaaaiiiiiinss... via eeeeeyyyyyeeebaaaallllssss!" in the past 10-15 years, and really want no part of it anymore, and want to help ensure other people see it for the vile, human-toxic trash it is. It'll destroy your ability to focus, make you less emotionally unstable, warp your view of reality in one of a variety of ways, suck basically all the time you let it, try with every trick in the book to addict you. And in exchange, some tech billionaires get another couple feet on their yachts. Yay?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  > Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile. Where's this extension? That seems useful (I'm susceptible to "metricification" - quit reddit because of it. He said, knowing that mentioning quitting reddit would probably net him at least 5 upvotes).
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetricator/dihffdmjkpohpejghlapggoiieifikeo?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetr...
openknot 4y ago
>"Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?" The topic is related to technology (and thus easier to justify as relevant to the forum) and has a low barrier of entry to discuss. A significant majority of people in Western countries use social media and it doesn't require technical knowledge, so it's easier to share opinions about it. Reading HN threads on social media is almost like consuming junk food: the arguments are predictable but comfortable and easy to digest. It's enjoyable in a perverse way, though not a real source of growth as the ideas aren't as hard to struggle with (versus threads on more technical topics).
rilezg 4y ago
I think many people want to spend less time consuming media ('social' or otherwise) and more time interacting with the physical world/people. But it is difficult to do that these days because there is endless attention-grabbing media to consume and that is what it feels like everyone else is doing so it becomes the default. For me it includes HN.
nonbirithm 4y ago
In my opinion, yes. HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one). My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity. And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Every time I see a Firefox announcement of any kind I know the top comment will be a link to bugzilla showing some 15 year old bug that the commenter thinks is absolutely critical or something about the CEOs pay. Maybe if you are lucky, page 2 has comments about the actual article.
  - mattlondon 4y ago
    I have a similar experience with anything related to Google or GCP - click through and there are endless comments about Google shutting down products and how people would never use them or how the customer support is bad. However, I have noticed that this trend is starting to change so there is hope! I am not sure if it is because the HN community has changed, or if Google has changed its public perception (unlikely I expect)
rektide 4y ago
Society's opinion of social media is by far the biggest boldest new pop-culture gazing-at-itself and snake-eating-it's-tale opportunity of the century. This is a cultural fixation, and one we've already largely convinced ourselves is awful & terrible & the source of great suffering. That it happens to be some pretty delinquent not great companies running the show is a great fuel for the bonfire, cause for pyrophilia.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
HN hits the same buttons as reddit for me, that is, compulsion to constantly refresh to see if there is something new, karma goes up, or I've gotten replies, so no, HN isn't any different, though it has less of the toxicity and low or no-value comments.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dt3ft 4y ago
Absolutely. For example, HN karma is something that should not exist, or at least be permanently hidden for all.
randomsearch 4y ago
No, I don’t think so. HN is not constantly measuring your behaviour and trying to feed you more addictive and outrageous content. HN does not advertise your karma to others as a measure of self esteem. HN does not make money from advertising. HN is not like social media in the ways that matter when discussing how damaging social media is.
watwut 4y ago
> Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters? I think that there are too related patterns on HN and both have to do with tech culture. First, complains about loneliness and seeing loneliness as major problem. Second, looking down on socialization or at least ways other people socialize - whether social media or young students partying and socializing. So, any bad news about social media is welcome. There is ethos of not socializing the wrong way or not at all. And ethos of not wasting your time with fluff, doing side project or getting better in something instead (and some amount of this is absolutely good) and of working a lot. And combination then it leads to kind of magical thinking of "if only other people did not used these, everything would be better".

This is a real struggle for a lot of people, myself included. Hence the hype.

> why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters? Most of us would have doom scrolled in one form or another, many do it regularly, which can be hugely detrimental to life satisfaction in the same way any addiction could be, and can also increase anxiety. It's also in the interest of app makers to encourage these mostly destructive habits.

antupis 4y ago
Yeah I would say doomscrolling and content which milk strong emotional reactions are culprits.

Syonyk 4y ago

I'd argue that it can include HN, but HN is not designed to be nearly as toxic, and actually goes out of the way to be "as not-toxic as possible without breaking the concept of what it's trying to be." I've spent a while thinking through "What makes social media evil?" - I've read a number of studies, I grew up with the first wave of what we might call "social media" (never used MySpace but was quite familiar with it from friends, extensively used LiveJournal, etc). And my conclusion is that once you go away from "global state" to "individualized algorithmic feeds," it's probably gone evil. HN, as far as I can tell, has a global state. There may be some replication delays (if it's hosted on multiple servers, which I simply don't know - I can't imagine it requires much in terms of resources to host), but "I see what you see what a non-logged in user sees," with only very, very few differences (flagged/dead posts, mostly). It's not reordering the state based on what it knows about me - it's reordering, globally, for all users, based on the consensus. The same was true of LJ - you had your own feed, but outside permission related differences, if I looked at a community and you did, we both saw the same thing. This global state also means that there's no "slot machine" behavior of "pull the slider and see what's new." You refresh. It's the same stuff. Maybe two things switched positions. Go away, because it's simply not going to change that fast for you. HN also doesn't go with the endless scrolling. There's a bottom of the first page. You have to make a deliberate decision to see beyond it, and that's something that historically was just "how things worked," but has been replaced with the bottomless bowl approach. We know that people, given a bottomless bowl of soup, eat more. And given that every ad revenue based social media company has gone to that model, clearly people consume more. Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile. And, finally, HN is "pull" - I have to go to the site, vs it reaching out with notifications to try and drag me back in. Plus, there's the noprocrast setting. It gives you the tools to make it a nuisance to use too much. So, while HN can be somewhat addictive if you let it, the lack of any "weaponization of psychology" tricks and the very active "No, really, you've been looking at it too long, go away" coding means that I don't consider it particularly toxic, and certainly not in the same style as FB/Twitter/etc. Why it's a recurring obsession? Probably because a lot of us have been in the tech industry, have seen how it works, have (probably) been addicted at some point, have watched the whole concept go from "Huh, this is kind of a neat way to connect with people I'd never talk to otherwise!" to "Braaaaaaiiiiiinss... via eeeeeyyyyyeeebaaaallllssss!" in the past 10-15 years, and really want no part of it anymore, and want to help ensure other people see it for the vile, human-toxic trash it is. It'll destroy your ability to focus, make you less emotionally unstable, warp your view of reality in one of a variety of ways, suck basically all the time you let it, try with every trick in the book to addict you. And in exchange, some tech billionaires get another couple feet on their yachts. Yay?

bee_rider 4y ago
> Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile. Where's this extension? That seems useful (I'm susceptible to "metricification" - quit reddit because of it. He said, knowing that mentioning quitting reddit would probably net him at least 5 upvotes).
- Syonyk 4y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetricator/dihffdmjkpohpejghlapggoiieifikeo?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetr...

openknot 4y ago

>"Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?" The topic is related to technology (and thus easier to justify as relevant to the forum) and has a low barrier of entry to discuss. A significant majority of people in Western countries use social media and it doesn't require technical knowledge, so it's easier to share opinions about it. Reading HN threads on social media is almost like consuming junk food: the arguments are predictable but comfortable and easy to digest. It's enjoyable in a perverse way, though not a real source of growth as the ideas aren't as hard to struggle with (versus threads on more technical topics).

rilezg 4y ago

I think many people want to spend less time consuming media ('social' or otherwise) and more time interacting with the physical world/people. But it is difficult to do that these days because there is endless attention-grabbing media to consume and that is what it feels like everyone else is doing so it becomes the default. For me it includes HN.

nonbirithm 4y ago

In my opinion, yes. HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one). My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity. And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.

Gigachad 4y ago
Every time I see a Firefox announcement of any kind I know the top comment will be a link to bugzilla showing some 15 year old bug that the commenter thinks is absolutely critical or something about the CEOs pay. Maybe if you are lucky, page 2 has comments about the actual article.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  I have a similar experience with anything related to Google or GCP - click through and there are endless comments about Google shutting down products and how people would never use them or how the customer support is bad. However, I have noticed that this trend is starting to change so there is hope! I am not sure if it is because the HN community has changed, or if Google has changed its public perception (unlikely I expect)

rektide 4y ago

Society's opinion of social media is by far the biggest boldest new pop-culture gazing-at-itself and snake-eating-it's-tale opportunity of the century. This is a cultural fixation, and one we've already largely convinced ourselves is awful & terrible & the source of great suffering. That it happens to be some pretty delinquent not great companies running the show is a great fuel for the bonfire, cause for pyrophilia.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

HN hits the same buttons as reddit for me, that is, compulsion to constantly refresh to see if there is something new, karma goes up, or I've gotten replies, so no, HN isn't any different, though it has less of the toxicity and low or no-value comments.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dt3ft 4y ago

Absolutely. For example, HN karma is something that should not exist, or at least be permanently hidden for all.

randomsearch 4y ago

No, I don’t think so. HN is not constantly measuring your behaviour and trying to feed you more addictive and outrageous content. HN does not advertise your karma to others as a measure of self esteem. HN does not make money from advertising. HN is not like social media in the ways that matter when discussing how damaging social media is.

watwut 4y ago

> Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters? I think that there are too related patterns on HN and both have to do with tech culture. First, complains about loneliness and seeing loneliness as major problem. Second, looking down on socialization or at least ways other people socialize - whether social media or young students partying and socializing. So, any bad news about social media is welcome. There is ethos of not socializing the wrong way or not at all. And ethos of not wasting your time with fluff, doing side project or getting better in something instead (and some amount of this is absolutely good) and of working a lot. And combination then it leads to kind of magical thinking of "if only other people did not used these, everything would be better".