6 ms·

The root cause is not incivility, it's inanity. Why do we have threads about these not-exactly-revolutionary things sitting all over the front page? Who votes

The root cause is not incivility, it's inanity. Why do we have threads about these not-exactly-revolutionary things sitting all over the front page? Who votes for this stuff? The Surface one up there is just some guy's blog review. It's not poorly written, but why are we reading randomly selected Surface reviews? There's an entire post right now that is basically a Samsung press release via CNET, describing some (totally unquantified, of course) minor uptick in sales for the latest Android phone. There is literally nothing to talk about there except to proffer essentially baseless flames, praise, or speculation. I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. "Intellectual curiousity" is not referring to what you have every time a phone comes out which is 20% lighter and 10% longer.

lowboy 14y ago
The balance between user voting and mod/admin curation is a tricky one.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
coderdude 14y ago
>I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. Those threads are not useful in the sense of spawning civil discussions, but they may be useful in the sense that it keeps people heavily engaged on HN. I can imagine someone running HN thinking "Hmm, the site is kind of dead when the front page talks about Haskell but the site explodes when Apple and Microsoft fans wage war." From the point of view of someone (YC) trying to get as many possible eyeballs to look at their stuff (YC investments), allowing this sort of thing to continue seems like the logical choice. Are the raganwalds of HN going to leave because of flaming Apple threads? I doubt it. So it'll probably continue. Alright, enough conspiracy for one afternoon. :)
- gue5t 14y ago
  There is no need to artificially keep people engaged by encouraging useless, off-topic content. If it's necessary to dilute articles about intellectually worthwhile subjects in order to have them here at all, then this community should shrivel and die and let another better-designed, better-focused or better-populated one take its place. HN doesn't even run on ad money. I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers. Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.
  - coderdude 14y ago
    It should be noted that Hacker News used to be called Startup News. That special blend of 'hacking' (programming) and entrepreneurship is what makes HN unique and worth having around. Once you leave that behind all you have is /r/programming.
    - gue5t 14y ago
      I'm aware of that, but programming is not the same thing as hacking.
      - coderdude 14y ago
        I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking is "tinkering" that directly involves programming. I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Well I for one vote for Surface reviews and similar articles. And I think there is a lot to talk about with Surface, both on the product in itself and on the product as a signifier. Surface is a major product release, and iconic of a big shift in corporate strategy by one of the largest tech companies in the game. Surface is Microsoft's first step as an Apple-esque high-end device manufacturer. It speaks to the evolution of Microsoft specifically and to the continued development of post-iPhone UI and consumer tech in general. So there is a lot of interest riding on how Microsoft has executed the Surface, how well Windows 8 lives up to its promise, and the problems, potentials and future development of the platform. And Marco's review touched on all those points, as well as the issue of Microsoft's retail strategy and the Microsoft-Apple rivalry. Then consider that all of these issues plug into even deeper trends of the growing relationship between IT, everyday life and popular culture, including Apple's successful fashion-isation of technology (always a hot button for the traditionally specs and functionality oriented IT enthusiast crowd.) So it's not surprising I think that people are interested and emotional about these issues. It would be surprising if they weren't. But just because they are appear populist does not mean they aren't rich potential sites of inquiry - it just becomes harder to explore why they are interesting when the debate so easily spins out of control.
- mquander 14y ago
  Yes, I agree that there are things to talk about related to Surface and to Microsoft. But I disagree that either Marco's review (for reference: http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe) or the currently popular review talk about them. Neither of them discuss Microsoft's general strategy hardly at all (Marco slips a few paragraphs in at the end, but it's not exactly the focus of the piece), and they sure don't talk about deeper trends regarding anything cultural whatsoever. You're being extremely gracious by describing Marco as having "touched on...Microsoft's retail strategy" -- what he actually did is insert about ten jokey comments showcasing what he perceives as their incompetence. It was pretty funny, but if you re-read it, I don't think you'll honestly claim that you learned something credible or useful about Microsoft based on his description. If you want to write a blog post connecting Surface to other components of Microsoft's strategy, and you have some interesting things to say about that strategy or about culture or about whatever, that sounds potentially cool. But these posts are really, really not that.
ghshephard 14y ago
It's actually people like me who are the problem, and I have to learn to control myself. When I read a great essay by Marco, or Gruber, that is substantive, well written, and speaks to something I truly believe in, I have an instinctive twitch to upvote it. This is particularly true when I recognize that a lot of effort has gone into an essay like Gruber's recent "MacBook Pro Retina Essay", but, I'll even admit to even doing it with marco's silly blog entry about his trip to the Microsoft store in the mall - that really had no place on HN. (And, I say that coming from the position of listening to every one of his podcasts, reading his blog, and as a loyal instapaper and "The Magazine" subscriber) I (and, I would kindly suggest), others need to learn to control our base urges to do this, or I agree, we'll need to lean on moderators to fix it for us. Save us from ourselves. Just because we (sometimes strongly) agree with it, we find it interesting, and it's well written, does not mean that it's fodder for HN. And, we need to learn to write more like grellas, or patio11 when contributing to a thread - put some time, effort, and research into providing information on something that we know about, and can really educate others, with new, or insightful information that people are universally interested in. Our (my) tendency to feed the echo chamber only brings the level of discourse down, and there are (many) other outlets that would be more appropriate venues for such threads.
- mattmanser 14y ago
  I don't think it's useful to ask people to talk like someone else. Patio11 and grellas are but facets of the conversations that go on here. I personally, and I stress the personally bit, rarely find any value to either of their views or writings. I, again personally, think they are the echo chamber. I frequently find myself almost diametrically opposed to their viewpoints or find what they say to be inane or obvious or just a brain dump of nonsense. But that's not what's this is about. I understand others find what they say to be enlightening and excellent. I understand that there's plenty of people here who enjoy what they write and there are lots of people who highly value their contribution. And I completely admit they'll write something that I find thought provoking and interesting. Something that might challenge my world view. And so I appreciate reading it even if sometimes I think 'stop upvoting these HN celebs just because they spoke'. What I'm trying to say is that you and the OP shouldn't presume to say what the HN audience wants. The point I'm trying to make is that we all like different things. What determines what we like is upvotes. That's just the way it works. Some things get upvoted that you don't agree with. Hard luck. We have no better way.
bitcartel 14y ago
People identify with brands and criticism is taken as a personal attack on one's own value system. So-called objective reviews are in truth more like the proselytizing words of rabid fundamentalists. You can hide the discussion but you can't moderate the religious flames of consumerism.
pg 14y ago
It contradicts the definition of civility to say that the root cause of it is things that annoy you. Civility only comes into play when things annoy you. The HN frontpage has its ups and downs and has for a long time. If you don't like the stories, it's not going to improve the situation to be uncivil in the comment threads. It just provokes people to reply in kind. And a fluff story on the frontpage (assuming it is) is not improved by having a flamewar appended to it.
- 6ren 14y ago
  Isn't cooperation the real basis of civilization? Rules of civility/politeness help of course, but without a basic respect for others, it's not enough. A civilization that stops cooperating soon stops existing. I think the dismissive top comments are a symptom of this lack of cooperation and respect. I think a second difficulty is that HN has both the "intellectually gratifying" and "startup news". Unfortunately, almost any technology/market news is related to the latter. I suggest bifurcating the frontpage, into something like fascinating NewScientist/Atlantic/Slate/Feynman/Hamming etc vs. pragmatic technology/market. Though some would qualify for both, it's usually very clear when a story isn't intellectually gratifying. This clarity makes it easier for HNers to upvote/ignore appropriate material. Good fences makes good neighbours.
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    "Isn't cooperation the real basis of civilization?" Yes and no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory Human interaction and human civilization exist across multiple layers of abstraction, and different layers have different properties and operate on different principles. (To give what has to be the most vague and least useful answer possible.)
- crag 14y ago
  Look. It's not that hard. Don't like the story don't click the story.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  How about "this doesn't belong to the front page" flag for the stories? Clearly it takes very little effort to upvote a fluff story to the front page and to keep it there. It takes substantially more effort to pull an interesting story up from the New page. For example, I am routinely disappointed with the Front page content, and yet I am very rarely browse the New page. Moreover, this is not going to change, because I know myself. I am guessing I am not alone. There's lot more people who would be willing to clean up the front page from the fluff than those who'd be willing to patrol New page in a search of fitting submissions. Just give us a chance.
sounds 14y ago
Does the first HN guideline still apply? There has been a significant increase in political submissions (not about some new phenomenon): "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It is possible to click "flag" on them, but I try to only flag things that are blatant; this seems more like naivete.
dusing 14y ago
Personally I come to HN every time a new thing comes out because I specifically want to know what this circle of people think of it. There is a unique and informed perspective here.

lowboy 14y ago

The balance between user voting and mod/admin curation is a tricky one.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

coderdude 14y ago

>I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. Those threads are not useful in the sense of spawning civil discussions, but they may be useful in the sense that it keeps people heavily engaged on HN. I can imagine someone running HN thinking "Hmm, the site is kind of dead when the front page talks about Haskell but the site explodes when Apple and Microsoft fans wage war." From the point of view of someone (YC) trying to get as many possible eyeballs to look at their stuff (YC investments), allowing this sort of thing to continue seems like the logical choice. Are the raganwalds of HN going to leave because of flaming Apple threads? I doubt it. So it'll probably continue. Alright, enough conspiracy for one afternoon. :)

gue5t 14y ago
There is no need to artificially keep people engaged by encouraging useless, off-topic content. If it's necessary to dilute articles about intellectually worthwhile subjects in order to have them here at all, then this community should shrivel and die and let another better-designed, better-focused or better-populated one take its place. HN doesn't even run on ad money. I think Y Combinator is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to hacker news, as a common noun. HN (the community) ends up being flooded with startup and consumer electronics articles that are completely useless for hackers. Marketing and business are not hacking in any sense of the word, and diluting the term by applying it to these multitudinous fields (see e.g. lifehacker.com) frustrates communication of its original meaning: those who are passionate about computing and stretch it past its limits.
- coderdude 14y ago
  It should be noted that Hacker News used to be called Startup News. That special blend of 'hacking' (programming) and entrepreneurship is what makes HN unique and worth having around. Once you leave that behind all you have is /r/programming.
  - gue5t 14y ago
    I'm aware of that, but programming is not the same thing as hacking.
    - coderdude 14y ago
      I've never been able to truly differentiate between what some people would call hacking and what others would call programming. Most of what gets called hacking is "tinkering" that directly involves programming. I sometimes see people use "hacked" as in "I hacked the city bus to give me free passes by only paying X amount on X day after I told the guy I'm eating ramen noodles." In those cases hacking is about some kind of process or tweak that caused an unexpected or rare thing to occur. It's an ill-defined word to say the least.

corporalagumbo 14y ago

Well I for one vote for Surface reviews and similar articles. And I think there is a lot to talk about with Surface, both on the product in itself and on the product as a signifier. Surface is a major product release, and iconic of a big shift in corporate strategy by one of the largest tech companies in the game. Surface is Microsoft's first step as an Apple-esque high-end device manufacturer. It speaks to the evolution of Microsoft specifically and to the continued development of post-iPhone UI and consumer tech in general. So there is a lot of interest riding on how Microsoft has executed the Surface, how well Windows 8 lives up to its promise, and the problems, potentials and future development of the platform. And Marco's review touched on all those points, as well as the issue of Microsoft's retail strategy and the Microsoft-Apple rivalry. Then consider that all of these issues plug into even deeper trends of the growing relationship between IT, everyday life and popular culture, including Apple's successful fashion-isation of technology (always a hot button for the traditionally specs and functionality oriented IT enthusiast crowd.) So it's not surprising I think that people are interested and emotional about these issues. It would be surprising if they weren't. But just because they are appear populist does not mean they aren't rich potential sites of inquiry - it just becomes harder to explore why they are interesting when the debate so easily spins out of control.

mquander 14y ago
Yes, I agree that there are things to talk about related to Surface and to Microsoft. But I disagree that either Marco's review (for reference: http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe) or the currently popular review talk about them. Neither of them discuss Microsoft's general strategy hardly at all (Marco slips a few paragraphs in at the end, but it's not exactly the focus of the piece), and they sure don't talk about deeper trends regarding anything cultural whatsoever. You're being extremely gracious by describing Marco as having "touched on...Microsoft's retail strategy" -- what he actually did is insert about ten jokey comments showcasing what he perceives as their incompetence. It was pretty funny, but if you re-read it, I don't think you'll honestly claim that you learned something credible or useful about Microsoft based on his description. If you want to write a blog post connecting Surface to other components of Microsoft's strategy, and you have some interesting things to say about that strategy or about culture or about whatever, that sounds potentially cool. But these posts are really, really not that.

ghshephard 14y ago

It's actually people like me who are the problem, and I have to learn to control myself. When I read a great essay by Marco, or Gruber, that is substantive, well written, and speaks to something I truly believe in, I have an instinctive twitch to upvote it. This is particularly true when I recognize that a lot of effort has gone into an essay like Gruber's recent "MacBook Pro Retina Essay", but, I'll even admit to even doing it with marco's silly blog entry about his trip to the Microsoft store in the mall - that really had no place on HN. (And, I say that coming from the position of listening to every one of his podcasts, reading his blog, and as a loyal instapaper and "The Magazine" subscriber) I (and, I would kindly suggest), others need to learn to control our base urges to do this, or I agree, we'll need to lean on moderators to fix it for us. Save us from ourselves. Just because we (sometimes strongly) agree with it, we find it interesting, and it's well written, does not mean that it's fodder for HN. And, we need to learn to write more like grellas, or patio11 when contributing to a thread - put some time, effort, and research into providing information on something that we know about, and can really educate others, with new, or insightful information that people are universally interested in. Our (my) tendency to feed the echo chamber only brings the level of discourse down, and there are (many) other outlets that would be more appropriate venues for such threads.

mattmanser 14y ago
I don't think it's useful to ask people to talk like someone else. Patio11 and grellas are but facets of the conversations that go on here. I personally, and I stress the personally bit, rarely find any value to either of their views or writings. I, again personally, think they are the echo chamber. I frequently find myself almost diametrically opposed to their viewpoints or find what they say to be inane or obvious or just a brain dump of nonsense. But that's not what's this is about. I understand others find what they say to be enlightening and excellent. I understand that there's plenty of people here who enjoy what they write and there are lots of people who highly value their contribution. And I completely admit they'll write something that I find thought provoking and interesting. Something that might challenge my world view. And so I appreciate reading it even if sometimes I think 'stop upvoting these HN celebs just because they spoke'. What I'm trying to say is that you and the OP shouldn't presume to say what the HN audience wants. The point I'm trying to make is that we all like different things. What determines what we like is upvotes. That's just the way it works. Some things get upvoted that you don't agree with. Hard luck. We have no better way.

bitcartel 14y ago

People identify with brands and criticism is taken as a personal attack on one's own value system. So-called objective reviews are in truth more like the proselytizing words of rabid fundamentalists. You can hide the discussion but you can't moderate the religious flames of consumerism.

pg 14y ago

It contradicts the definition of civility to say that the root cause of it is things that annoy you. Civility only comes into play when things annoy you. The HN frontpage has its ups and downs and has for a long time. If you don't like the stories, it's not going to improve the situation to be uncivil in the comment threads. It just provokes people to reply in kind. And a fluff story on the frontpage (assuming it is) is not improved by having a flamewar appended to it.

6ren 14y ago
Isn't cooperation the real basis of civilization? Rules of civility/politeness help of course, but without a basic respect for others, it's not enough. A civilization that stops cooperating soon stops existing. I think the dismissive top comments are a symptom of this lack of cooperation and respect. I think a second difficulty is that HN has both the "intellectually gratifying" and "startup news". Unfortunately, almost any technology/market news is related to the latter. I suggest bifurcating the frontpage, into something like fascinating NewScientist/Atlantic/Slate/Feynman/Hamming etc vs. pragmatic technology/market. Though some would qualify for both, it's usually very clear when a story isn't intellectually gratifying. This clarity makes it easier for HNers to upvote/ignore appropriate material. Good fences makes good neighbours.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  "Isn't cooperation the real basis of civilization?" Yes and no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory Human interaction and human civilization exist across multiple layers of abstraction, and different layers have different properties and operate on different principles. (To give what has to be the most vague and least useful answer possible.)
crag 14y ago
Look. It's not that hard. Don't like the story don't click the story.
huhtenberg 14y ago
How about "this doesn't belong to the front page" flag for the stories? Clearly it takes very little effort to upvote a fluff story to the front page and to keep it there. It takes substantially more effort to pull an interesting story up from the New page. For example, I am routinely disappointed with the Front page content, and yet I am very rarely browse the New page. Moreover, this is not going to change, because I know myself. I am guessing I am not alone. There's lot more people who would be willing to clean up the front page from the fluff than those who'd be willing to patrol New page in a search of fitting submissions. Just give us a chance.

sounds 14y ago

Does the first HN guideline still apply? There has been a significant increase in political submissions (not about some new phenomenon): "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It is possible to click "flag" on them, but I try to only flag things that are blatant; this seems more like naivete.

dusing 14y ago

Personally I come to HN every time a new thing comes out because I specifically want to know what this circle of people think of it. There is a unique and informed perspective here.