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My biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. It’s too easy for users to flag content they disagree with and then unflagging takes too long. On an

My biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. It’s too easy for users to flag content they disagree with and then unflagging takes too long. On any topic, there is an acceptable HN Overton window of acceptable opinions and it skews very Silicon Valley. This window is too small for debate. Personally I enjoy reading reasoned, logical, rational arguments that I disagree with because it interests me. But if you throw a bomb here it is defused far too quickly for my taste.

korroziya 4y ago
[flagged]
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  There is a political thing but there is also just an HN thing. Like rust - I gave it a whirl, didn’t like it, think it’s overrated. Mention that here and it’s like you tried to shoot the Pope.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    It's almost like people like getting into sprawling, noisy fights about programming languages and editors.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  The GP said "it skews very Silicon Valley" and you seemed to think they meant "left-wing", but I think of SV and HN as kind of..right-wing, in a word. Calling HN "left-wing" seems just staggeringly bizarre to me. As dang has pointed out a thousand times, HN seems to each user the opposite of what they are.
  - bobleeswagger 4y ago
    > Calling HN "left-wing" seems just staggeringly bizarre to me. Is it? Find any thread about COVID-19, the opinions are staggeringly on the left. I can come up with more examples. If you can't see the left lean you're more than likely part of it.
    - krapp 4y ago
      >Is it? Find any thread about COVID-19, the opinions are staggeringly on the left. I find those threads tend to be dominated by people who believe vaccinations are fascism, masks don't work and Fauci and Biden cooked up COVID in Hunter's meth lab, which is currently a solidly right-wing stance. Elsewhere there are commenters calling transgendered people mentally ill pedophile groomers, or homosexuality a sin and threat to human survival, claiming systemic racial and gender bias is scientifically justified, insisting that certain races and religions, or states of the Union, simply cannot coexist, still calling Biden's election stolen, worshiping the glory of war in turning soft men hard and the purity of the free market in weeding the weak and lazy out of society, and ranting about wokist CRT cultural Marxists burning the world down. I think the bias you see here really depends on what threads you tend to read, what you tend to notice (which is probably more often than not what you disagree with,) and who shows up first to ruin them.
      - bobleeswagger 4y ago
        > I find those threads tend to be dominated by people who believe vaccinations are fascism, masks don't work and Fauci and Biden cooked up COVID in Hunter's meth lab, which is currently a solidly right-wing stance. Elsewhere there are commenters calling transgendered people mentally ill pedophile groomers, or homosexuality a sin and threat to human survival, claiming systemic racial and gender bias is scientifically justified, insisting that certain races and religions, or states of the Union, simply cannot coexist, still calling Biden's election stolen, worshiping the glory of war in turning soft men hard and the purity of the free market in weeding the weak and lazy out of society, and ranting about wokist CRT cultural Marxists burning the world down. It's funny because you're describing a microcosm of comments as if they are the majority, and ignoring legitimate critiques. I can't say I'm surprised your knee-jerk reaction is to defend the echo chamber, but here we are. Thanks for proving my point so quickly!
brundolf 4y ago
I try to distinguish between comments that are just materially controversial, and comments that are unnecessarily inflammatory/charged/provocative. I usually downvote the latter (or flag in extreme cases), even if the material would have otherwise been legitimate or reasonable, but try not to downvote the former
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Another problem is the downvoting itself. If you have a post that is liked by 50 people but disliked by 54 people, the 4 downvote majority makes it disappear, even though 50 people thought it was worthy enough to upvote. I think the more upvotes something gets the less ability for downvotes to bury it, if the ratio is close. People always post things that are majority-liked because even something slightly disliked more than liked will bury it.
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    After a bit of hesitation, I find myself agreeing. At least in so far, that for posts with lots of votes it should probably be the ratio, not the difference, that governs visibility. Unfortunately, for low vote counts the opposite/current approach is more meaningful. I assume this is one of the reasons why this hasn't changed, it adds a ton of non-obvious decisions to make.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Yeah true, a system that factors in the number (ratio? total?) of votes and not just the difference might be interesting
ghusto 4y ago
I feel the same way. I've (almost) stopped posting those kinds of replies, because it's just too easy to shut down conversations that go against the common narrative/view. On the other hand, when people have taken the time to argue logically with me on some unpopular opinion, I've had meaningful back and forth. Sometimes I've even changed my mind. It's a loss, that for many people being "right" is more important than having meaningful and potentially enlightening conversation that benefits everyone. Let's argue the ideas, not the ideology they're supposed to be attached to.
- username3 4y ago
  They should add a thread for unmoderated comments or let us choose to make all replies to our comments unmoderated. Anything goes for replies to the parent. The alternative is to take the discussion to a discord chat. Join this discord thread to talk freely.
  - sph 4y ago
    Only if usable after some karma threshold. This is still the internet, there is a lot of spam, trolling and malicious people. An unmoderated space doesn't last very long.
  - eloisius 4y ago
    You can enable the option to view dead comments. I have that set, even though the vast majority of dead comments I see are blatant non sequiturs or spam.
    - petodo 4y ago
      they are still not really readable without custom script, you would need to click each of them one by one, so they are essentially hidden and inaccessible since you have to jump through way too many hoops to see them
  - petodo 4y ago
    Or maybe they could just remove Downvote button for everyone and let users upvote content they like and if it's something really bad (not just different opinion) then there is Flag button and if you flag something there should be displayed "Flagged by XY for reason: XY" you would need to fill and which could be seen right under flagged comment. But I knwo this is never going to happen because it's too transparent and welcoming diverse opinions and you could suddenly see all those anonymous internet heroes.
geuis 4y ago
I find the complete opposite. I've been around HN for a while and have seen the community swing back and for within a limited range over the years. Most of the time, and only if you have show dead enabled, you will see that dead comments are that way for a reason. They are low quality, nonsense bots, etc. Very, very rarely do I see a dead comment that represents some well thought counter argument. It's also easy to confuse the flag link as a downvote. It absolutely is not that. If a person abuses the flag button too much, the flag button gets taken away from them. I should know, it happened to me years ago. I was quite judicious with the flag button because my default behavior from digg/reddit/youtube was to downvote things I disagreed with, didn't like, or thought was of low value. So it was taken away for a couple of years. I've since gotten the flag button back and today I only use it for what its supposed to be used for. Case in point, here are the currently dead comments on this post (asterisks are my own on that last one): "I know I’m shadowbanned but I hope you see my crap, Dang." "Jesus H Christ" "It's called "feet" bcuz it's done mainly with the foots :D" "Just go to the point and ask him if you can suck his d***" Not exactly adding to the conversation, if you see my point.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  > Most of the time, and only if you have show dead enabled, you will see that dead comments are that way for a reason. They are low quality, nonsense bots, etc. Very, very rarely do I see a dead comment that represents some well thought counter argument. Unless, of course, the topic at hand happens to be a hot issue in the US. At which point anything outside the established narratives (the propaganda) bites the dust almost immediately.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Yeah this is true. Your comment is probably upsetting to people so it can be said in a more feelings-friendly way - "controversy" is mostly frowned upon here, but with more leeway for hard science and technology. For example I have posted and debated a little about my counter-narrative opinions on "the covid response" here before and had them stay and even gather the occasional upvote, to their credit. But it is also extremely easy to get moderated when walking that line, and likely highly dependent on whether or not the users participating or reading the comments become upset by what they see. This is not just a case of covid in general being an off topic or controversial issue, because you could post until the cows come home about the Covid response if you were cheerleading and parroting the schizophrenic and ever-changing position of western governments and media. I give them credit at least, I think what they have is better than a lot of places for such debate. You just have to know your place and be extremely careful and polite and factual when you deviate, and you have to be prepared at some point the conversation will be shut down if it is upsetting and angering other users. I also like that deleted comments can be made visible, another really good transparent part about the moderation. I do agree there is a lot of junk, but it's nice to see what's verboten. I assume posts can be nuked entirely with no trace , I give the benefit of the doubt and hope that's used sparingly.
glass3 4y ago
My attempted reply to korroziya's now dead comment: >For me, you disqualify your comment by using 'This.' and by using strong words that are borderline insults. To 'non-progressives' it may look like dissenting comments are downvoted but my guess is that people are just protecting the non-aggressive spirit of the site. HN needs far more moderation resources if the discourse descends into aggressive territory. To discuss controversial topics, non-mainstream arguments should be written as non-aggressively as OP's argument about overtone windows. I am sure that without aggression, fair discussions about controversial topics can be held on HN. What I miss is a path to pass the knowledge about how to argue. My guess is that dang doesn't message korroziya and no user can reach him. People like korroziya learn to 'hold back'.
- 41amxn41 4y ago
  >non-aggresive spirit It's more like passive-aggresive here. It's also harder to tell signal from noise if someone has to write a 500-word essay instead of saying "you're an idiot".
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - bobleeswagger 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - Y_Y 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - 41amxn41 4y ago
      Exactly. It's unnatural, not to mention, boring.
    - glass3 4y ago
      How could that be improved? Allowing insults to prevent passive aggressiveness doesn't seem right.
bobleeswagger 4y ago
> My biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. It’s too easy for users to flag content they disagree with and then unflagging takes too long The echo chamber is hard to miss when you see it, but it's pretty remarkable how rosy tinted some users view the site. Censorship exists in a real way here, and it suppresses the flow of information and ideas.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
It's not a perfect system. IMHO, HN could use some meta moderation. I get the occasional down vote. Just the price of having opininos and expressing them. It's actually quite common for me to see the same comment recover afterwards and end up with a positive score. To me that signals that HN has some bad actors abusing their moderation rights to down vote anything that conflicts with their world views. Meta moderation could deal with these users more effectively. Take points from their precious reputation and ultimately take away their moderation rights in case of repeat offenders.
JPLeRouzic 4y ago
Often (at least for me) the first sub-thread is not about the article but about some loosely related topic or personal factoid. The second sub-thread (for me) is often much more interesting. I also observed that it looks like there are two "waves" of commentators, the first one has a pack mentality, if they don't like what they see they downvote instead of discussing. The second "wave" often upvote what was previously downvoted (and it helps that an algorithm removes the downflag button past a few days).
kergonath 4y ago
> My biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. I very rarely see dead comments that did not deserve it (including occasionally my own), and I see all of them in the threads I read. Do you have any example? > On any topic, there is an acceptable HN Overton window of acceptable opinions and it skews very Silicon Valley. Reasonably constructed comments can be downvoted, but are very rarely hidden. And the tone of the community varies dramatically depending on the story and its subject. HN is not a homogenous hive mind.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Agreed, very similar experience. Once in a while I end up posting a comment that runs counter to the prevailing HN opinion in a given thread, and it would get downvoted. However, I put as much effort in those comments as I do in any other ones, as none of it is trolling or just attempts to be edgy, the comments try to fully abide by HN guidelines. With that in mind, I have never gotten flagged (unless i missed it somehow), despite definitely being downvoted for "unpopular" opinions before (especially in hot-topic US politics adjacent threads). I know that's just a sample size of 1, of course, and I don't doubt there are some who got flagged unjustly. But from my personal experience, it doesn't seem like a common scenario.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Controversial topics are allowed, they have to be the correct controversial topics. There was this recent doozey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707305
lazyeye 4y ago
Very true.

korroziya 4y ago

[flagged]

monero-xmr 4y ago
There is a political thing but there is also just an HN thing. Like rust - I gave it a whirl, didn’t like it, think it’s overrated. Mention that here and it’s like you tried to shoot the Pope.
- tptacek 4y ago
  It's almost like people like getting into sprawling, noisy fights about programming languages and editors.
ihatepython 4y ago
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
yesenadam 4y ago
The GP said "it skews very Silicon Valley" and you seemed to think they meant "left-wing", but I think of SV and HN as kind of..right-wing, in a word. Calling HN "left-wing" seems just staggeringly bizarre to me. As dang has pointed out a thousand times, HN seems to each user the opposite of what they are.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago
  > Calling HN "left-wing" seems just staggeringly bizarre to me. Is it? Find any thread about COVID-19, the opinions are staggeringly on the left. I can come up with more examples. If you can't see the left lean you're more than likely part of it.
  - krapp 4y ago
    >Is it? Find any thread about COVID-19, the opinions are staggeringly on the left. I find those threads tend to be dominated by people who believe vaccinations are fascism, masks don't work and Fauci and Biden cooked up COVID in Hunter's meth lab, which is currently a solidly right-wing stance. Elsewhere there are commenters calling transgendered people mentally ill pedophile groomers, or homosexuality a sin and threat to human survival, claiming systemic racial and gender bias is scientifically justified, insisting that certain races and religions, or states of the Union, simply cannot coexist, still calling Biden's election stolen, worshiping the glory of war in turning soft men hard and the purity of the free market in weeding the weak and lazy out of society, and ranting about wokist CRT cultural Marxists burning the world down. I think the bias you see here really depends on what threads you tend to read, what you tend to notice (which is probably more often than not what you disagree with,) and who shows up first to ruin them.
    - bobleeswagger 4y ago
      > I find those threads tend to be dominated by people who believe vaccinations are fascism, masks don't work and Fauci and Biden cooked up COVID in Hunter's meth lab, which is currently a solidly right-wing stance. Elsewhere there are commenters calling transgendered people mentally ill pedophile groomers, or homosexuality a sin and threat to human survival, claiming systemic racial and gender bias is scientifically justified, insisting that certain races and religions, or states of the Union, simply cannot coexist, still calling Biden's election stolen, worshiping the glory of war in turning soft men hard and the purity of the free market in weeding the weak and lazy out of society, and ranting about wokist CRT cultural Marxists burning the world down. It's funny because you're describing a microcosm of comments as if they are the majority, and ignoring legitimate critiques. I can't say I'm surprised your knee-jerk reaction is to defend the echo chamber, but here we are. Thanks for proving my point so quickly!

brundolf 4y ago

I try to distinguish between comments that are just materially controversial, and comments that are unnecessarily inflammatory/charged/provocative. I usually downvote the latter (or flag in extreme cases), even if the material would have otherwise been legitimate or reasonable, but try not to downvote the former

monero-xmr 4y ago
Another problem is the downvoting itself. If you have a post that is liked by 50 people but disliked by 54 people, the 4 downvote majority makes it disappear, even though 50 people thought it was worthy enough to upvote. I think the more upvotes something gets the less ability for downvotes to bury it, if the ratio is close. People always post things that are majority-liked because even something slightly disliked more than liked will bury it.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  After a bit of hesitation, I find myself agreeing. At least in so far, that for posts with lots of votes it should probably be the ratio, not the difference, that governs visibility. Unfortunately, for low vote counts the opposite/current approach is more meaningful. I assume this is one of the reasons why this hasn't changed, it adds a ton of non-obvious decisions to make.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Yeah true, a system that factors in the number (ratio? total?) of votes and not just the difference might be interesting

ghusto 4y ago

I feel the same way. I've (almost) stopped posting those kinds of replies, because it's just too easy to shut down conversations that go against the common narrative/view. On the other hand, when people have taken the time to argue logically with me on some unpopular opinion, I've had meaningful back and forth. Sometimes I've even changed my mind. It's a loss, that for many people being "right" is more important than having meaningful and potentially enlightening conversation that benefits everyone. Let's argue the ideas, not the ideology they're supposed to be attached to.

username3 4y ago
They should add a thread for unmoderated comments or let us choose to make all replies to our comments unmoderated. Anything goes for replies to the parent. The alternative is to take the discussion to a discord chat. Join this discord thread to talk freely.
- sph 4y ago
  Only if usable after some karma threshold. This is still the internet, there is a lot of spam, trolling and malicious people. An unmoderated space doesn't last very long.
- eloisius 4y ago
  You can enable the option to view dead comments. I have that set, even though the vast majority of dead comments I see are blatant non sequiturs or spam.
  - petodo 4y ago
    they are still not really readable without custom script, you would need to click each of them one by one, so they are essentially hidden and inaccessible since you have to jump through way too many hoops to see them
- petodo 4y ago
  Or maybe they could just remove Downvote button for everyone and let users upvote content they like and if it's something really bad (not just different opinion) then there is Flag button and if you flag something there should be displayed "Flagged by XY for reason: XY" you would need to fill and which could be seen right under flagged comment. But I knwo this is never going to happen because it's too transparent and welcoming diverse opinions and you could suddenly see all those anonymous internet heroes.

geuis 4y ago

I find the complete opposite. I've been around HN for a while and have seen the community swing back and for within a limited range over the years. Most of the time, and only if you have show dead enabled, you will see that dead comments are that way for a reason. They are low quality, nonsense bots, etc. Very, very rarely do I see a dead comment that represents some well thought counter argument. It's also easy to confuse the flag link as a downvote. It absolutely is not that. If a person abuses the flag button too much, the flag button gets taken away from them. I should know, it happened to me years ago. I was quite judicious with the flag button because my default behavior from digg/reddit/youtube was to downvote things I disagreed with, didn't like, or thought was of low value. So it was taken away for a couple of years. I've since gotten the flag button back and today I only use it for what its supposed to be used for. Case in point, here are the currently dead comments on this post (asterisks are my own on that last one): "I know I’m shadowbanned but I hope you see my crap, Dang." "Jesus H Christ" "It's called "feet" bcuz it's done mainly with the foots :D" "Just go to the point and ask him if you can suck his d***" Not exactly adding to the conversation, if you see my point.

beebeepka 4y ago
> Most of the time, and only if you have show dead enabled, you will see that dead comments are that way for a reason. They are low quality, nonsense bots, etc. Very, very rarely do I see a dead comment that represents some well thought counter argument. Unless, of course, the topic at hand happens to be a hot issue in the US. At which point anything outside the established narratives (the propaganda) bites the dust almost immediately.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Yeah this is true. Your comment is probably upsetting to people so it can be said in a more feelings-friendly way - "controversy" is mostly frowned upon here, but with more leeway for hard science and technology. For example I have posted and debated a little about my counter-narrative opinions on "the covid response" here before and had them stay and even gather the occasional upvote, to their credit. But it is also extremely easy to get moderated when walking that line, and likely highly dependent on whether or not the users participating or reading the comments become upset by what they see. This is not just a case of covid in general being an off topic or controversial issue, because you could post until the cows come home about the Covid response if you were cheerleading and parroting the schizophrenic and ever-changing position of western governments and media. I give them credit at least, I think what they have is better than a lot of places for such debate. You just have to know your place and be extremely careful and polite and factual when you deviate, and you have to be prepared at some point the conversation will be shut down if it is upsetting and angering other users. I also like that deleted comments can be made visible, another really good transparent part about the moderation. I do agree there is a lot of junk, but it's nice to see what's verboten. I assume posts can be nuked entirely with no trace , I give the benefit of the doubt and hope that's used sparingly.

glass3 4y ago

My attempted reply to korroziya's now dead comment: >For me, you disqualify your comment by using 'This.' and by using strong words that are borderline insults. To 'non-progressives' it may look like dissenting comments are downvoted but my guess is that people are just protecting the non-aggressive spirit of the site. HN needs far more moderation resources if the discourse descends into aggressive territory. To discuss controversial topics, non-mainstream arguments should be written as non-aggressively as OP's argument about overtone windows. I am sure that without aggression, fair discussions about controversial topics can be held on HN. What I miss is a path to pass the knowledge about how to argue. My guess is that dang doesn't message korroziya and no user can reach him. People like korroziya learn to 'hold back'.

41amxn41 4y ago
>non-aggresive spirit It's more like passive-aggresive here. It's also harder to tell signal from noise if someone has to write a 500-word essay instead of saying "you're an idiot".
- kilgnad 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - bobleeswagger 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - 41amxn41 4y ago
    Exactly. It's unnatural, not to mention, boring.
  - glass3 4y ago
    How could that be improved? Allowing insults to prevent passive aggressiveness doesn't seem right.

bobleeswagger 4y ago

> My biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. It’s too easy for users to flag content they disagree with and then unflagging takes too long The echo chamber is hard to miss when you see it, but it's pretty remarkable how rosy tinted some users view the site. Censorship exists in a real way here, and it suppresses the flow of information and ideas.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

It's not a perfect system. IMHO, HN could use some meta moderation. I get the occasional down vote. Just the price of having opininos and expressing them. It's actually quite common for me to see the same comment recover afterwards and end up with a positive score. To me that signals that HN has some bad actors abusing their moderation rights to down vote anything that conflicts with their world views. Meta moderation could deal with these users more effectively. Take points from their precious reputation and ultimately take away their moderation rights in case of repeat offenders.

JPLeRouzic 4y ago

Often (at least for me) the first sub-thread is not about the article but about some loosely related topic or personal factoid. The second sub-thread (for me) is often much more interesting. I also observed that it looks like there are two "waves" of commentators, the first one has a pack mentality, if they don't like what they see they downvote instead of discussing. The second "wave" often upvote what was previously downvoted (and it helps that an algorithm removes the downflag button past a few days).

kergonath 4y ago

> My biggest issue is that controversial opinions are buried. I very rarely see dead comments that did not deserve it (including occasionally my own), and I see all of them in the threads I read. Do you have any example? > On any topic, there is an acceptable HN Overton window of acceptable opinions and it skews very Silicon Valley. Reasonably constructed comments can be downvoted, but are very rarely hidden. And the tone of the community varies dramatically depending on the story and its subject. HN is not a homogenous hive mind.

filoleg 4y ago
Agreed, very similar experience. Once in a while I end up posting a comment that runs counter to the prevailing HN opinion in a given thread, and it would get downvoted. However, I put as much effort in those comments as I do in any other ones, as none of it is trolling or just attempts to be edgy, the comments try to fully abide by HN guidelines. With that in mind, I have never gotten flagged (unless i missed it somehow), despite definitely being downvoted for "unpopular" opinions before (especially in hot-topic US politics adjacent threads). I know that's just a sample size of 1, of course, and I don't doubt there are some who got flagged unjustly. But from my personal experience, it doesn't seem like a common scenario.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Controversial topics are allowed, they have to be the correct controversial topics. There was this recent doozey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707305

lazyeye 4y ago

Very true.