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"Uncivil"? "Inappropriate"? "Bile"? "Divisive incivility"? Those are pretty strong words. All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately pett

by acabal 14y ago

"Uncivil"? "Inappropriate"? "Bile"? "Divisive incivility"? Those are pretty strong words. All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately petty--consumer electronics issues. It's all just opinion. Nobody's said "Person X is ignorant waste of consciousness and they should kill themselves" (which would be uncivil, inappropriate, bilious, and divisive.) They just have opinions about products. Products that in the grand scheme of human achievement really aren't that important. You're just causing even more drama with this self-righteous post. It's all, like, your opinion, man; take it easy, let the geeks bicker (relatively politely) about fruit versus miniature eiderdown, and save the outrage for things that are truly worth it. Edit: I'm not going to upvote this parent meta-post, and neither should you, dear reader, for it itself is the one causing drama, not the majority of posts on HN in the past few days.

raganwald 14y ago
But my comment really ties the forum together, man. EDIT: Also, I was thinking of r/politics, where they have a neat rule: Mo self-posts M-F. It would be interesting if we followed the same dictum and allowed all sorts of meta on the week-ends but were strict about content on week-days.
- acabal 14y ago
  I'd be happy with no truly meta-posts at all. I've been running my own social network for the past five years, and in my experience it's been the meta-posts that are the ones that actually cause the drama. Person A and person B have a little innocuous spat, but sort it out amongst themselves. Self-righteous person C decides that person A committed a heinous atrocity and that it's symptomatic of a deeper festering infection in the site as a whole, and they make a meta-post about it to call people out. Next thing you know what was a minor, inconsequential, and ultimately solved issue becomes a site-wide rally-point for false outrage. It sucks. HN is better than that, and the OP needs to chill before dragging the entire site into a false tempest in a teacup. Edit: Oops, the OP is you. I wrote this reply thinking you agreed with me. Oh well!
  - raganwald 14y ago
    There is absolutely nothing wrong with your opinion or your comments, thanks for sharing your perspective.
  - forensic 14y ago
    Raganwalder is one of those lonely social phobics whose entire social life is a collection of blogs and forums. If your entire social life happened online, you might be tempted to try and improve the wall paper as well. The simple fact of the online world is that people express their true feelings which are always harsher, more negative, more hostile than their offline polite/fake feelings, so the online world is a harsher, more negative place. Some people who live in it perpetually also want to fix it. As soon as they fix it, however, all the users will just flee to a more anarchic site because the human spirit craves freedom and the internet liberates us to express our genuine hostility and negativity without being socially punished. People love the strong emotions of the Apple vs Android debate. The emotions are the POINT of the socializing. The strong feelings are the PAY OFF, and if you don't let people have their feelings, you'll just have a tumbleweed town. Raganwald's online utopia will be a dead and boring place. Not even Raganwald himself would go there; there would be nothing to get all self-righteous about. Nothing to complain about on his dramablog. If Raganwald actually wanted a perfectly sanitized experience, he would go to a forum that provided it. But actually he doesn't. His purpose in life is to find a forum without that sanitization and promote it on there. The promotion itself is a pay off for him: in terms of the feelings he gets from the socialization and in terms of the traffic he gets to his blog.
    - raganwald 14y ago
      People love the strong emotions of the Apple vs Android debate. The emotions are the POINT of the socializing. The strong feelings are the PAY OFF, and if you don't let people have their feelings, you'll just have a tumbleweed town. Don't people enjoy expressing strong emotions about online freedom, startup life, the ethics of various companies, and many other subjects on the front page as well? Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?
msbarnett 14y ago
> "Uncivil"? "Inappropriate"? "Bile"? "Divisive incivility"? From literally the story directly under this one, #2 over all at the moment: > Its an appeal to the Apple sycophants who troll this web site: "oh no who dares best my beloved Apple?!? I'd better click!" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706953 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706953 As I post this, the karma on that comment is currently > 0. Comments like that didn't used to happen "back in the day". Then they happened infrequently but pretty much everybody downvoted them into oblivion. Now they happen as a matter of course and get voted up instead of down. The level of discourse has unquestionably gone downhill.
- acabal 14y ago
  Oh, please. That comment is in reply to one at the very, very bottom. (As I'm viewing it.) Cherry-picking a single--frankly, not really that rude or terrible--comment isn't proving anything. In either case, the "good old days" never existed. See: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... I get it, though. It feels good to be self-righteous. So let's go nuts, let's have this little drama in this thread and give PG and the mods another headache they don't want or need. As the owner of a social network for over five years, I feel for them.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    > I get it, though. It feels good to be self-righteous. This is, to put it mildly, uncharitable. If you're only interested in being part of the problem, I don't think we're going to find anything useful to say to each other, and I'll bid you adieu.
hellmans 14y ago
"All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately petty--consumer electronics issues." But they aren't petty issues. This is the evolution of the computer industry. People are going to have strong opinions. Let me correct that: People in this industry should have very strong opinions. I marvel at the various claims that this is trivial / bike shed / etc, as a massive seismic shift of our entire platform occurs. This impacts all of us in technology profoundly.
raganwald 14y ago
Here you go, I made this just for you: https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/262370665636716545 https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/262370665636716545

by acabal 14y ago

raganwald 14y ago

But my comment really ties the forum together, man. EDIT: Also, I was thinking of r/politics, where they have a neat rule: Mo self-posts M-F. It would be interesting if we followed the same dictum and allowed all sorts of meta on the week-ends but were strict about content on week-days.

acabal 14y ago
I'd be happy with no truly meta-posts at all. I've been running my own social network for the past five years, and in my experience it's been the meta-posts that are the ones that actually cause the drama. Person A and person B have a little innocuous spat, but sort it out amongst themselves. Self-righteous person C decides that person A committed a heinous atrocity and that it's symptomatic of a deeper festering infection in the site as a whole, and they make a meta-post about it to call people out. Next thing you know what was a minor, inconsequential, and ultimately solved issue becomes a site-wide rally-point for false outrage. It sucks. HN is better than that, and the OP needs to chill before dragging the entire site into a false tempest in a teacup. Edit: Oops, the OP is you. I wrote this reply thinking you agreed with me. Oh well!
- raganwald 14y ago
  There is absolutely nothing wrong with your opinion or your comments, thanks for sharing your perspective.
- forensic 14y ago
  Raganwalder is one of those lonely social phobics whose entire social life is a collection of blogs and forums. If your entire social life happened online, you might be tempted to try and improve the wall paper as well. The simple fact of the online world is that people express their true feelings which are always harsher, more negative, more hostile than their offline polite/fake feelings, so the online world is a harsher, more negative place. Some people who live in it perpetually also want to fix it. As soon as they fix it, however, all the users will just flee to a more anarchic site because the human spirit craves freedom and the internet liberates us to express our genuine hostility and negativity without being socially punished. People love the strong emotions of the Apple vs Android debate. The emotions are the POINT of the socializing. The strong feelings are the PAY OFF, and if you don't let people have their feelings, you'll just have a tumbleweed town. Raganwald's online utopia will be a dead and boring place. Not even Raganwald himself would go there; there would be nothing to get all self-righteous about. Nothing to complain about on his dramablog. If Raganwald actually wanted a perfectly sanitized experience, he would go to a forum that provided it. But actually he doesn't. His purpose in life is to find a forum without that sanitization and promote it on there. The promotion itself is a pay off for him: in terms of the feelings he gets from the socialization and in terms of the traffic he gets to his blog.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    People love the strong emotions of the Apple vs Android debate. The emotions are the POINT of the socializing. The strong feelings are the PAY OFF, and if you don't let people have their feelings, you'll just have a tumbleweed town. Don't people enjoy expressing strong emotions about online freedom, startup life, the ethics of various companies, and many other subjects on the front page as well? Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?

msbarnett 14y ago

> "Uncivil"? "Inappropriate"? "Bile"? "Divisive incivility"? From literally the story directly under this one, #2 over all at the moment: > Its an appeal to the Apple sycophants who troll this web site: "oh no who dares best my beloved Apple?!? I'd better click!" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706953 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706953 As I post this, the karma on that comment is currently > 0. Comments like that didn't used to happen "back in the day". Then they happened infrequently but pretty much everybody downvoted them into oblivion. Now they happen as a matter of course and get voted up instead of down. The level of discourse has unquestionably gone downhill.

acabal 14y ago
Oh, please. That comment is in reply to one at the very, very bottom. (As I'm viewing it.) Cherry-picking a single--frankly, not really that rude or terrible--comment isn't proving anything. In either case, the "good old days" never existed. See: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... I get it, though. It feels good to be self-righteous. So let's go nuts, let's have this little drama in this thread and give PG and the mods another headache they don't want or need. As the owner of a social network for over five years, I feel for them.
- msbarnett 14y ago
  > I get it, though. It feels good to be self-righteous. This is, to put it mildly, uncharitable. If you're only interested in being part of the problem, I don't think we're going to find anything useful to say to each other, and I'll bid you adieu.

hellmans 14y ago

"All I've seen is a few geeks trading opinions about--ultimately petty--consumer electronics issues." But they aren't petty issues. This is the evolution of the computer industry. People are going to have strong opinions. Let me correct that: People in this industry should have very strong opinions. I marvel at the various claims that this is trivial / bike shed / etc, as a massive seismic shift of our entire platform occurs. This impacts all of us in technology profoundly.

raganwald 14y ago

Here you go, I made this just for you: https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/262370665636716545 https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/262370665636716545