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I’ve significantly reduced my commenting recently because I realized that I’ve been using the internet to hone my discussion/argumentation skills since I got on

I’ve significantly reduced my commenting recently because I realized that I’ve been using the internet to hone my discussion/argumentation skills since I got on the web in 1996 At this point there’s too much noise on the internet for good long term, long form discussion like we had on irc and forums and frankly I’m not sure where that lives today. HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang

weinzierl 3y ago
You've put into words exactly what I feel. "[..] frankly I’m not sure where that lives today" I wish I knew. Being a digital native (albeit an old one) and never having been very social in real life I notice that this trend drives me increasingly into real world interactions. I always found trade fairs, conferences, meet-ups and especially networking events a bit ridiculous and yet I attended more of them after the pandemic than in the decades before and very strangely I enjoyed it. "HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang" Amen to that!
pickingdinner 3y ago
These platforms are not designed for intellectual discourse, even when they're advertised to be, and even when they try to be. You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun and for what, so you don't bother anymore. And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.
- pickingdinner 3y ago
  Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did it. But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse. Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse. Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    I often find that checking comment karma too frequently can come with an emotional rollercoaster. You post a take you think folks will find interesting or resonate with, and then the next time you look at it it's gone from 1 to 0. But it's important to remember that it's a balance that you can't see. If your comment has a 1, that could have been 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes in the time since you posted the comment. And if you wait awhile, more often than not it will go back up. I've had comments hit a -2 and then end up being a 5, or even more. It's all organic. It's best not to overreact because you happened to look when the balance was a little more negative than positive, and it's useful to consider the possibility that there are 9 upvotes and 10 downvotes to make your comment sit at a zero. I empathize with what you are saying in the parent post about being cautious not to create a firestorm of people who are offended by your post. But this is really only an issue early on when your karma is low, and that's when it feels the most negative. Sometimes I post things that folks don't like, getting a -1 or a -2 or even -3- but ultimately the impact of that comment to your karma is capped. I don't think it's possible to, say, get a -57 (your current karma) and zero out your account. EDIT: Oh, according to HN Undocumented, it actually does reduce your user karma even if the comment itself can't go past -4 [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=readme-ov-file#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...]. But it is important to remember that by that point the comment is dead and only users with showdead turned on can even see it anymore. And of course flamewar protection can disable the downvote button (at least the convenient one) when it is triggered, and as a story itself ages downvoting and even upvoting gets automatically turned off. After you've been posting for a long time and your karma grows into the thousands, having a post be unpopular is basically a non-issue. Obviously you should still adhere to the guidelines and not get yourself removed due to misbehavior, but you just don't have to worry about it much. Still, this community works best when we take HN's guidelines to heart. Everyone wants to be treated with kindness and the benefit of the doubt, and trying to build that into your own posts helps maintain that community.
    - fractallyte 3y ago
      Downvotes as punishment for writing reasoned comments and arguments which are true to one's own sensibilities, are an indication that a point of view is "special". One can start to feel a certain pride in that. (Of course, that shouldn't become the purpose of commenting.)
- acover 3y ago
  > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. The guidelines want you to be kind, which is orthogonal to right. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - yzydserd 3y ago
    How is being kind orthogonal to being right?
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      There are hundreds of ways to say something right, but you can phrase it meanly or kindly without changing how right you are. The definition of orthogonal is that one axis doesn’t influence the other. I’d say it’s mostly orthogonal. It’s easier to be mean and right than kind, which is probably why there are so many more comments that are. A very rare some of the time, being right also requires a dose of meanness, which is a lot less fun for everyone involved.
      - yzydserd 3y ago
        > The definition of orthogonal is that one axis doesn’t influence the other. Ok that’s interesting, a new definition on me. I see orthogonal as attributes at right angles, a measure of perpendicularity. I don’t see it as an indicator of attribute independence. So if kind and right are orthogonal, this means you can (mostly) be one or the other but not (usually) both. But a quick google shows your usage is common/normal. Hmm, lovely English. TIL something. Thanks for explaining.
        dllthomas 3y ago
        Imagine X and Y axes, perpendicular as usual. If you become 3 units more X, that doesn't change how Y you are. Contrariwise, if we nudge our axes out of orthogonality, now moving along the X axes changes where I am on the Y. Obviously the use here is metaphorical, but that's the sense meant. Edited to add: consider "independence" and orthogonality in vector spaces, if you want to get mathematically precise about it.
screenoridesaga 3y ago
Really I feel like HN is the worst for discussion. Look at all these long empty comments. There’s nothing of substance here.
Lerc 3y ago
My main issue with HN comments is that the threading display tends to cause focus on a very small number of high ranking comments along with their threads. This leads to potentially insightful comments on the original article being largely unread. It's a problem where the solution is not obvious. There is perhaps an an opportunity to cycle through a series of candidate solutions. I imagine something like placing a single comment at the top of comments selected from some formula of view-count and score, so that comments at least get some views to get the chance of being upvoted to the point of being seen by the wider community.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It’s better not to worry about it so much. Yes, top comments are exponentially more read than the rest. But HN is so big now that even the bottom comments get a large number most of the time. It’s also up to the commenters to strategically place their comments if they care that much. No one forces you to write a toplevel comment when there are already 80. If you have something to say in that situation, and you really want a lot of people to hear it, and you’re pretty sure it’s a good fit for HN (the hardest part), then it usually pays off to post a reply instead. You’ll need to morph what you’re saying slightly so that it doesn’t sound weird, but there are tricks to do so.
- DarkNova6 3y ago
  I doubt a comment section will ever be more than just that. I still mourn the death of traditional internet forums. There you had long-running threads of proper discussions and exchange. After some time you got a sense of community and started to see the personalities of each individual. And if things ever got out of hand, you had moderation that would keep everybody in check. But that was when the web was P2P.
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  Why not just minimize comments as you finish with a thread you find interesting? I start with a root comment, go down the chains as long as they remain interesting, then go back up the to the top level comment at which an interesting branch was and keep reading down it, minimizing branches as I go. Eventually the entire comment section is collapsed and I am done. Miss nothing, and no additional algorithms needed.
rezonant 3y ago
Nowadays this is often filled by interest group Discord servers. The more niche the better, tbh. A lot of people think of Twitch streamers or video games when they think of Discord, but I'm in C++, Typescript, Minecraft mod development, Unreal development, and politics discords, just to name a few. There is a lot out there.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  No different than the millions of specialty myphp boards back in the day Reality is that those fall into the same buckets as well - and each over optimized on some emergent characteristics of their userbase I think the answer for me is: be done with debating altogether, especially on the internet My tools are sharp enough and at this point I don’t need to go to anonymous internet arguments to refine my philosophy
  - rezonant 3y ago
    > Reality is that those fall into the same buckets as well - and each over optimized on some emergent characteristics of their userbase Over optimized, or perfectly optimized? I'm sure that people debate whether to use #pragma or #define HEADER_H_ on these things, the debate will be better when done amongst two highly skilled C++ developers who care about the corner cases. That's why I said niche. The broader a community, the less useful that debate will be, if it even qualifies. Having a fresh CS grad explain that #pragma once is supported in the latest Clang, MSVC and GCC and thus there's never a reason to avoid it are right for whatever small university project they are building, but a seasoned developer is annoyed they still need to target an ancient RHEL release on their mission critical open source project. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is actually a thing, I figure by now #pragma must be good to go even on older LTS distros)

weinzierl 3y ago

You've put into words exactly what I feel. "[..] frankly I’m not sure where that lives today" I wish I knew. Being a digital native (albeit an old one) and never having been very social in real life I notice that this trend drives me increasingly into real world interactions. I always found trade fairs, conferences, meet-ups and especially networking events a bit ridiculous and yet I attended more of them after the pandemic than in the decades before and very strangely I enjoyed it. "HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang" Amen to that!

pickingdinner 3y ago

These platforms are not designed for intellectual discourse, even when they're advertised to be, and even when they try to be. You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun and for what, so you don't bother anymore. And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.

pickingdinner 3y ago
Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did it. But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse. Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse. Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.
- rezonant 3y ago
  I often find that checking comment karma too frequently can come with an emotional rollercoaster. You post a take you think folks will find interesting or resonate with, and then the next time you look at it it's gone from 1 to 0. But it's important to remember that it's a balance that you can't see. If your comment has a 1, that could have been 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes in the time since you posted the comment. And if you wait awhile, more often than not it will go back up. I've had comments hit a -2 and then end up being a 5, or even more. It's all organic. It's best not to overreact because you happened to look when the balance was a little more negative than positive, and it's useful to consider the possibility that there are 9 upvotes and 10 downvotes to make your comment sit at a zero. I empathize with what you are saying in the parent post about being cautious not to create a firestorm of people who are offended by your post. But this is really only an issue early on when your karma is low, and that's when it feels the most negative. Sometimes I post things that folks don't like, getting a -1 or a -2 or even -3- but ultimately the impact of that comment to your karma is capped. I don't think it's possible to, say, get a -57 (your current karma) and zero out your account. EDIT: Oh, according to HN Undocumented, it actually does reduce your user karma even if the comment itself can't go past -4 [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=readme-ov-file#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...]. But it is important to remember that by that point the comment is dead and only users with showdead turned on can even see it anymore. And of course flamewar protection can disable the downvote button (at least the convenient one) when it is triggered, and as a story itself ages downvoting and even upvoting gets automatically turned off. After you've been posting for a long time and your karma grows into the thousands, having a post be unpopular is basically a non-issue. Obviously you should still adhere to the guidelines and not get yourself removed due to misbehavior, but you just don't have to worry about it much. Still, this community works best when we take HN's guidelines to heart. Everyone wants to be treated with kindness and the benefit of the doubt, and trying to build that into your own posts helps maintain that community.
  - fractallyte 3y ago
    Downvotes as punishment for writing reasoned comments and arguments which are true to one's own sensibilities, are an indication that a point of view is "special". One can start to feel a certain pride in that. (Of course, that shouldn't become the purpose of commenting.)
acover 3y ago
> In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. The guidelines want you to be kind, which is orthogonal to right. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yzydserd 3y ago
  How is being kind orthogonal to being right?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    There are hundreds of ways to say something right, but you can phrase it meanly or kindly without changing how right you are. The definition of orthogonal is that one axis doesn’t influence the other. I’d say it’s mostly orthogonal. It’s easier to be mean and right than kind, which is probably why there are so many more comments that are. A very rare some of the time, being right also requires a dose of meanness, which is a lot less fun for everyone involved.
    - yzydserd 3y ago
      > The definition of orthogonal is that one axis doesn’t influence the other. Ok that’s interesting, a new definition on me. I see orthogonal as attributes at right angles, a measure of perpendicularity. I don’t see it as an indicator of attribute independence. So if kind and right are orthogonal, this means you can (mostly) be one or the other but not (usually) both. But a quick google shows your usage is common/normal. Hmm, lovely English. TIL something. Thanks for explaining.
      - dllthomas 3y ago
        Imagine X and Y axes, perpendicular as usual. If you become 3 units more X, that doesn't change how Y you are. Contrariwise, if we nudge our axes out of orthogonality, now moving along the X axes changes where I am on the Y. Obviously the use here is metaphorical, but that's the sense meant. Edited to add: consider "independence" and orthogonality in vector spaces, if you want to get mathematically precise about it.

screenoridesaga 3y ago

Really I feel like HN is the worst for discussion. Look at all these long empty comments. There’s nothing of substance here.

Lerc 3y ago

My main issue with HN comments is that the threading display tends to cause focus on a very small number of high ranking comments along with their threads. This leads to potentially insightful comments on the original article being largely unread. It's a problem where the solution is not obvious. There is perhaps an an opportunity to cycle through a series of candidate solutions. I imagine something like placing a single comment at the top of comments selected from some formula of view-count and score, so that comments at least get some views to get the chance of being upvoted to the point of being seen by the wider community.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
It’s better not to worry about it so much. Yes, top comments are exponentially more read than the rest. But HN is so big now that even the bottom comments get a large number most of the time. It’s also up to the commenters to strategically place their comments if they care that much. No one forces you to write a toplevel comment when there are already 80. If you have something to say in that situation, and you really want a lot of people to hear it, and you’re pretty sure it’s a good fit for HN (the hardest part), then it usually pays off to post a reply instead. You’ll need to morph what you’re saying slightly so that it doesn’t sound weird, but there are tricks to do so.
DarkNova6 3y ago
I doubt a comment section will ever be more than just that. I still mourn the death of traditional internet forums. There you had long-running threads of proper discussions and exchange. After some time you got a sense of community and started to see the personalities of each individual. And if things ever got out of hand, you had moderation that would keep everybody in check. But that was when the web was P2P.
Grimblewald 3y ago
Why not just minimize comments as you finish with a thread you find interesting? I start with a root comment, go down the chains as long as they remain interesting, then go back up the to the top level comment at which an interesting branch was and keep reading down it, minimizing branches as I go. Eventually the entire comment section is collapsed and I am done. Miss nothing, and no additional algorithms needed.

rezonant 3y ago

Nowadays this is often filled by interest group Discord servers. The more niche the better, tbh. A lot of people think of Twitch streamers or video games when they think of Discord, but I'm in C++, Typescript, Minecraft mod development, Unreal development, and politics discords, just to name a few. There is a lot out there.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
No different than the millions of specialty myphp boards back in the day Reality is that those fall into the same buckets as well - and each over optimized on some emergent characteristics of their userbase I think the answer for me is: be done with debating altogether, especially on the internet My tools are sharp enough and at this point I don’t need to go to anonymous internet arguments to refine my philosophy
- rezonant 3y ago
  > Reality is that those fall into the same buckets as well - and each over optimized on some emergent characteristics of their userbase Over optimized, or perfectly optimized? I'm sure that people debate whether to use #pragma or #define HEADER_H_ on these things, the debate will be better when done amongst two highly skilled C++ developers who care about the corner cases. That's why I said niche. The broader a community, the less useful that debate will be, if it even qualifies. Having a fresh CS grad explain that #pragma once is supported in the latest Clang, MSVC and GCC and thus there's never a reason to avoid it are right for whatever small university project they are building, but a seasoned developer is annoyed they still need to target an ancient RHEL release on their mission critical open source project. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is actually a thing, I figure by now #pragma must be good to go even on older LTS distros)