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I think you need to admit HN is failing due to how easy it is to manipulate what content and comments are shown. Allows a single determined group to literally c

I think you need to admit HN is failing due to how easy it is to manipulate what content and comments are shown. Allows a single determined group to literally control the narrative. Eliminate upvotes/downvotes. Keep flagging but make it public record. And revoke privileges for those who abuse it.

dang 2y ago
That's not an accurate description of what's happening, and we're not going to redesign the site in response to political winds, gale-force though they are right now. Actually that would be the worst moment to do that.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  It 100% absolutely is, you're just too deep to recognize it. It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic. Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.
  - dang 2y ago
    That's just not an accurate description of HN based on what I know, but of course it's indeed possible that I'm too embedded to see clearly. Edit: some of these points can be refuted by data though (albeit not public data, which means people have to take our word for it, which many are understandably reluctant to do). For example, flaggers of these stories are by and large longstanding community members who have participated for years on HN in lots of threads about lots of topics, etc. That doesn't prove they're not flagging at the behest of outside groups, but it does make it unlikely.
    - hipadev23 2y ago
      Make it public. Upvotes/downvotes/flagging should have usernames attached to it.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        That would be a disaster of epic proportions. Every thread, no matter how innocuous the topic, would devolve into perpetual feuds about which kinds of people were upvoting and downvoting which other kinds. These sorts of shitstorms were pretty common on HN, in the long-long-ago, and even then all we were revealing were comment scores, not voting attribution.
        hipadev23 2y ago
        Then we remove upvotes and downvote entirely. Web2.0 online discourse (visibility is controlled by recommendation algos keyed on upvotes/downvotes) is fundamentally broken.
        tptacek 2y ago
        That would create a different forum. HN is an experiment in how long this kind of forum can ward off gravitational collapse. There are things fundamentally wrong with these kinds of forums, but that's true of every kind of forum.
        hipadev23 2y ago
        Very well then. I’m going to create a better product to accelerate that gravitational collapse. See some of you on the other side but it won’t be here. I’m out.
        tptacek 2y ago
        That's exactly what you should do! Psyched to see whatever you come up with.
        2y ago
- wswope 2y ago
  I think many users would be willing to hear a long-form version of your take on the subject (maybe in a fresh meta thread for visibility?), but your comment as-is feels like a shallow dismissal of legitimate concerns. You’re not really offering any insight into why or how you reached the conclusion that you posted. As a user on the outside, it sure looks like the site structure has begun to buckle in the wind.
  - dang 2y ago
    Sorry - I spent hours yesterday writing about this at length, so in my mind I've already done that, but you're right, of course. Let me dig up the links for you... Edit: there's a shorter version at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 and two much longer ones at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (including a later reply). If you (or anyone) read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
    - wswope 2y ago
      That’s entirely understandable - I’ll dive into your profile to read those thoughts. I second the suggestion to have some sort of metathread, stickied comment on hot political threads, or other consolidated way to present your collected thoughts so that a larger number of users see it and can benefit. Like you said, the winds are blowing hard, and you might go a long way to quelling the moderatorial waters by addressing the whole site as a collective.
      - dang 2y ago
        Past efforts to do that kind of thing haven't worked, so I'm a bit down on the idea. What ends up happening is (1) the meta communication stirs up a flurry of objections, some relevant and many not; as well as people passionately restating what they feel about current affairs and/or how much they dislike what some other comment said; and at the same time (2) most people still don't see it, so it ends up not having the desired effect and just taking a ton of time. Somehow, no matter how often we repeat something, the set of users who hear it always has measure zero (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443). That's why I mostly stick to answering specific comments with detailed explanations, and hope that at least some other users will see it.
- computerthings 2y ago
  These aren't "political winds". This is all a bit too much "we're all looking for the guy who did this", when it comes to Y Combinator and "tech bros" in general. > Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.” > The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over. -- https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net... That HN is for stuff not discussed in the news is basically disproven daily. The other thing I keep hearing that "if we allow this, the front page would be only about politics", I don't believe it anymore. It's like the stone that keeps tigers away. People may genuinely believe in that stone and that they're guarding the village, but I think it's bull and having to entertain this superstition takes up more resources than the occasional tiger attack would. I know disabling flags is probably not feasible, since real spam does get posted. but we have "showdead" for comments, why can't we simply have the same option for threads? Then those who want to discuss these things can do it, at the price of also having to wade through actual spam. Anybody else would be unaffected. If the goal is not to suppress awareness and discussion, that can be very easily proven with such a feature, and the best time to implement it would have been a long time ago IMO.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    Votes are a far bigger problem than flagging because it takes a pavlovian approach to what ideas are allowed. Flagging is important to remove spam and wholly inappropriate content. And if you revoke the ability of users who flag content based on a personal disagreement, that user simply loses that ability.
    - computerthings 2y ago
      I suggested to add the ability of users to have their view of HN unaffected by these flags. Without that, HN simply has no ability to defend itself against abuse of users who take it upon themselves to play censor.

dang 2y ago

That's not an accurate description of what's happening, and we're not going to redesign the site in response to political winds, gale-force though they are right now. Actually that would be the worst moment to do that.

hipadev23 2y ago
It 100% absolutely is, you're just too deep to recognize it. It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic. Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.
- dang 2y ago
  That's just not an accurate description of HN based on what I know, but of course it's indeed possible that I'm too embedded to see clearly. Edit: some of these points can be refuted by data though (albeit not public data, which means people have to take our word for it, which many are understandably reluctant to do). For example, flaggers of these stories are by and large longstanding community members who have participated for years on HN in lots of threads about lots of topics, etc. That doesn't prove they're not flagging at the behest of outside groups, but it does make it unlikely.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    Make it public. Upvotes/downvotes/flagging should have usernames attached to it.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      That would be a disaster of epic proportions. Every thread, no matter how innocuous the topic, would devolve into perpetual feuds about which kinds of people were upvoting and downvoting which other kinds. These sorts of shitstorms were pretty common on HN, in the long-long-ago, and even then all we were revealing were comment scores, not voting attribution.
      - hipadev23 2y ago
        Then we remove upvotes and downvote entirely. Web2.0 online discourse (visibility is controlled by recommendation algos keyed on upvotes/downvotes) is fundamentally broken.
        tptacek 2y ago
        That would create a different forum. HN is an experiment in how long this kind of forum can ward off gravitational collapse. There are things fundamentally wrong with these kinds of forums, but that's true of every kind of forum.
        hipadev23 2y ago
        Very well then. I’m going to create a better product to accelerate that gravitational collapse. See some of you on the other side but it won’t be here. I’m out.
        tptacek 2y ago
        That's exactly what you should do! Psyched to see whatever you come up with.
        2y ago
wswope 2y ago
I think many users would be willing to hear a long-form version of your take on the subject (maybe in a fresh meta thread for visibility?), but your comment as-is feels like a shallow dismissal of legitimate concerns. You’re not really offering any insight into why or how you reached the conclusion that you posted. As a user on the outside, it sure looks like the site structure has begun to buckle in the wind.
- dang 2y ago
  Sorry - I spent hours yesterday writing about this at length, so in my mind I've already done that, but you're right, of course. Let me dig up the links for you... Edit: there's a shorter version at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 and two much longer ones at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (including a later reply). If you (or anyone) read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
  - wswope 2y ago
    That’s entirely understandable - I’ll dive into your profile to read those thoughts. I second the suggestion to have some sort of metathread, stickied comment on hot political threads, or other consolidated way to present your collected thoughts so that a larger number of users see it and can benefit. Like you said, the winds are blowing hard, and you might go a long way to quelling the moderatorial waters by addressing the whole site as a collective.
    - dang 2y ago
      Past efforts to do that kind of thing haven't worked, so I'm a bit down on the idea. What ends up happening is (1) the meta communication stirs up a flurry of objections, some relevant and many not; as well as people passionately restating what they feel about current affairs and/or how much they dislike what some other comment said; and at the same time (2) most people still don't see it, so it ends up not having the desired effect and just taking a ton of time. Somehow, no matter how often we repeat something, the set of users who hear it always has measure zero (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443). That's why I mostly stick to answering specific comments with detailed explanations, and hope that at least some other users will see it.
computerthings 2y ago
These aren't "political winds". This is all a bit too much "we're all looking for the guy who did this", when it comes to Y Combinator and "tech bros" in general. > Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.” > The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over. -- https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net... That HN is for stuff not discussed in the news is basically disproven daily. The other thing I keep hearing that "if we allow this, the front page would be only about politics", I don't believe it anymore. It's like the stone that keeps tigers away. People may genuinely believe in that stone and that they're guarding the village, but I think it's bull and having to entertain this superstition takes up more resources than the occasional tiger attack would. I know disabling flags is probably not feasible, since real spam does get posted. but we have "showdead" for comments, why can't we simply have the same option for threads? Then those who want to discuss these things can do it, at the price of also having to wade through actual spam. Anybody else would be unaffected. If the goal is not to suppress awareness and discussion, that can be very easily proven with such a feature, and the best time to implement it would have been a long time ago IMO.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  Votes are a far bigger problem than flagging because it takes a pavlovian approach to what ideas are allowed. Flagging is important to remove spam and wholly inappropriate content. And if you revoke the ability of users who flag content based on a personal disagreement, that user simply loses that ability.
  - computerthings 2y ago
    I suggested to add the ability of users to have their view of HN unaffected by these flags. Without that, HN simply has no ability to defend itself against abuse of users who take it upon themselves to play censor.