10 ms·

Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employe

Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.
- ddingus 12y ago
  I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process. A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently: 1. Subject change 2. False comparison 3. Claim of too many opponents 4. Silence 5. Claim to either be a member of, or opponents of discussion being members of club, with said membership somehow required to complete what is otherwise a non-rational conclusion. 6. Claim of overall subject and or implications of subject complexity being greater than scope of discussion; therefore, it’s all a waste of time. (You would not understand) 7. Transformation of rational point at hand to emotional one. 8. The bible. 9. Redefinition of common words. 10. Personal attack. 11. Obsfucation. (however you spell it) 12. Excess verbosity. What I did was post this, put names on it, including my own, and then start citing it when the behavior is seen. I expected people to moderate the behaviors and perhaps improve dialog. What actually happened was the behaviors intensified! They created new ones, and started using them in combination: Subject change, excess verbosity, silence was very common. Blow up the dialog to prevent realizations or consensus, then go silent to let it all fade away. Then do it again, and again... Now, something good did happen. Participants who get it, tended to add their own observations to the list, and a bond formed between them. This helped differentiate the dialog some, and high clarity material, rational material was easier to identify and that dialog did improve. But the noise makers also improved, making better noise, more frequently, division went up, and the overall tone of the place was harder to enjoy. This led me to another realization: We very often want to frame things as debate when the truth is we are often doing advocacy. Advocacy has three components: Reason, character, emotion. Advocacy is a super set of debate. Effective advocates employ all three and here is the kicker: They will trump an effective debater in a dialog. Interesting isn't it?
  - protonfish 12y ago
    Nice list. I try to reserve my downvotes for these behaviors especially excessive verbosity, redefinition of common words and other non-substanitive content. I think I am going to add the now common request for citation (seriously, you are on the Internet, google it yourself, man.) I am all about reading different points of view but they they should contribute something new.
    - ddingus 12y ago
      Use the phrase "add value" for this. Calling for people to add value requires them to make material, original contributions to a dialog, not just quote, cut, paste and link. Link dropping is the worst. People won't actually express themselves. They will just collect information and drop it into a dialog like a trump, or battle card, rendering the whole thing a mess. A call to add value helps push back on garbage like this. As for "Google it", that cuts both ways. It can be valid for a person to cite the burden of proof as being yours. If you are pushing something not peer-reviewed and logically sound, supporting what you say needs to be the dominant norm. More work for you, but if you establish that norm, it also means the clowns, asses, dullards, zealots, etc... will have a much harder time establishing overall group credence. Not as simple as it seems, is it?
      - protonfish 12y ago
        Good points, but I think I still disagree with the power of citations. Just because a peer-reviewed article exists doesn't mean its true. Appeal to authority is, and always will be, a logical fallacy. But my beef with asking for citations as a counter-argument is that it is shifting the burden of proof. If someone makes a statement that you are questioning, you may ask for clarification, but the ball is in your court to find evidence for disproof. The existence or non-existence of a published supporting article is neither proof nor disproof.
        ddingus 12y ago
        Yes, in debate that is true. In advocacy it is NOT TRUE. Let that sink in for a while... :) Most of the time we are doing advocacy. Let that sink in too. Now, let's discuss what that really means: It means people who want their way more than they want to be right or just or true, etc... can and will dominate a discussion with effective advocacy techniques whether or not they have rational merit. Secondly, emotional arguments are only partially rational, yet they carry very significant weight. Being logically right, yet having that result feel bad, or cruel, or unjust is a very significant part of policy discussions. For an example, this is why libertarians often do not gain traction in many policy discussions. (no slight on liberitarians, just an example) They are typically, and often brutally rational, dismissing emotional and character arguments entirely. Somebody who can read a room, employ effective advocacy, and who can provide emotional, character and a fair degree of rational support will win the day almost every time.
- ddingus 12y ago
  Notably, I also found out a few other dynamics: Personification trumps vilification and ridicule. Let's take something really ugly, like abortion. People will post up the ugly pictures and they will post up their favorite slogans, and they will denigrate opponents with brutalities like, "baby killer" This kind of noise completely destroys rational advocacy / debate on the topic, which is why religion and politics are often discouraged in technical and other discussion venues. Now, personify it. I took a story from Brazil where a 9 year old girl was raped by her father, her mother wanted to get an abortion for her, and the church, state, father and others wanted to deny the girl that. Instead of the usual advocacy path, I asked people what they personally would say to the little girl who doesn't want to carry a pregnancy. This required they simulate the scenario, and express their thoughts as actions, or virtual actions in this case, rather than just pull out their favorite "pokemon battle card" type sayings... Amazingly, the dialog split into two camps! The majority of participants answered honestly, and were quite disturbed at the experience. The majority said they would not tell the little girl no, regardless of their personal beliefs / preferences. It was the human thing to do. For those ideologues who were being absolutist about it, they would not answer, because they would reveal cracks in their black and white vision of things, so they vilified instead! And it was intense. The rest of the group turned on them, and they got shouted down. Secondly, that experience changed the group dynamics. Abortion noise is no longer tolerated like it was before. It's potency as a distraction is now much less in that venue. The personification really impacted people. Edit: One absolutist actually said the right answer was to cut the girl open after she has carried the baby far enough along to be viable. The group response to this was harsh, and they were banned. I personally took a lot of heat for that disturbing approach and had to apologize for the rough dialog. And I did, citing my interest in finding out what trumps what. This was well received, but the whole thing was expensive emotionally. Honestly, this is one of the few times I've ever seen the noise machine beat back into submission like that. Lesson there somewhere. (Yes, this is an area of interest of mine, and I've been running little experiments for some time as the problem identified in this thread is growing rapidly and we have few answers. I find the use of data intriguing, and I plan to do some reading to better understand what other options we may have.)
  - protonfish 12y ago
- Natsu 12y ago
  > There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point. I'd be careful about this one. People don't always have the same news sources, so what constitutes "common knowledge" for one person might be alien to another. Personally, I expect myself to be able to provide a citation for anything reasonably controversial or not widely known and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with asking someone to show their work. After all, there's the opposite side of this coin: someone who isn't giving evidence because they cannot. I mean, if I claim to have a unicorn in my garage, I can't reasonably expect everyone to accept it on my say-so. I know that's not at all the scenario you have in mind, but I think you'd hate to have someone engaged in such behavior justifying it with your logic when that's not what you meant at all.
  - protonfish 12y ago
    A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish, and what is submitted to be published is heavily filtered, and the final articles are being paywalls, how can a plea for citations be a legitimate request? If you are claiming you have a unicorn in your garage, I don't want citations - I want EVIDENCE. A picture would be a fine place to start. I can't imagine any citation being of value either pro or con. In a discussion I want to read evidence or reason - everything else is filler.
    - Natsu 12y ago
      > A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish, I think you just exposed the root of this. You're thinking a citation has to be a scientific paper or something equivalent. I'm saying that when you argue something, you should be willing to cite ordinary evidence, of which a scientific paper is just one kind. A photo would be a perfectly reasonable thing to cite as evidence.
rakoo 12y ago
AFAIU flamewars increase the discussion on a topic, so this makes a story much more likely to stay on frontpage.
- hluska 12y ago
  The danger of flamewars is that they rapidly devolve to personal attacks. When threads devolve this far, it keeps intelligent people from joining the conversation and actually elevating it. 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters may create a best seller, but 10,000 raving lunatics with Internet connections destroy any chance of an intellectual conversation....:)
- dubfan 12y ago
  I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.
  - r721 12y ago
    Here: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this."
grecy 12y ago
> but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. I'm amazed how obvious this is on Reddit now, and always laugh when I bring it up and get down voted to oblivion :) I'm no expert, but it's clear NetFlix has a few thousand users in /r/movies for example.
- pekk 12y ago
  Netflix also has however many thousands of normal users there.
  - grecy 12y ago
    Sure, but do you honestly love any product you pay for enough to continuously post about it? Has consumerism really come to that? And instead of saying "Go for a drive on Highway 1 because it's beautiful", have you ever said "Take your Ford on Highway 1, because a Ford is the best way to see it" ? (Every second post on /r/movies is "check <movie>, on Netflix NOW!")
selmnoo 12y ago
The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big big players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.
- RobertKerans 12y ago
  There's great chapter in Edward Bernays' Propaganda where he takes apart a stereotypical set of newspaper stories and categorises them according to the type of agenda they serve; surpirise surprise almost none are real news (if that's actually a thing? Depends how reductionist you want to go). Applies just as much now as then, and as much to HN as any other media outlet
- Htsthbjig 12y ago
  This was just the start: http://vimeo.com/85948693 http://vimeo.com/85948693 Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything. I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products. When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid. Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable. One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great. I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff. What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672326140 http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672... Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough. ()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.
tptacek 12y ago
The "usual suspect" discussions about NSA are something like 10:1 against NSA. If there's an NSA sockpuppet army trying to influence HN, it's a good one, because there's no evidence of it.
- Andrew_Quentin 12y ago
  Except for your constant defence of them of course
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I think my comment may have sailed right over your head.
    - psykovsky 12y ago
      I think his comment also may have sailed right over your head. That or you're playing dumb. Either way, it's not working.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        No, your face is a mashed potatoes.
        psykovsky 12y ago
        Still not working... And that grammar...
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    it's basically tptacek and mpyne against the world. for the most part i welcome contributors who aren't entirely biased. unfortunately as even my own worst paranoia was not predictive enough, paranoia that has had me laughed at to my face and behind my back, given what's come out: it's very hard for me to react reasonably. so people with a different bias to myself or others can greatly contribute to such discussions.
sitkack 12y ago
One can't also tell the difference between subterfuge trolling and plain up trolling. It would be nice to use machine learning in a multidimensional conversation scoring system so that tired hollow techniques at conversation manipulation would fade in to the background noise.
aaron695 12y ago
> One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely. Being very meta do you have any links? HN being open it shouldn't be hard to do an analysis. I guess you aren't claiming it is being done but it could be done, but I don't see this as a problem. Like, if this was happening, a blog with evidence would rank pretty well for karma points, but it hasn't been done.
phkahler 12y ago
You left off just plain downvoting. I've seen some fairly benign comments on certain topics go down to -3 or -4 in a hurry with no counterpoint given. Stuff the collective here will often ignore or debate, but down it goes.

waterlesscloud 12y ago

There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.

ddingus 12y ago
I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process. A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently: 1. Subject change 2. False comparison 3. Claim of too many opponents 4. Silence 5. Claim to either be a member of, or opponents of discussion being members of club, with said membership somehow required to complete what is otherwise a non-rational conclusion. 6. Claim of overall subject and or implications of subject complexity being greater than scope of discussion; therefore, it’s all a waste of time. (You would not understand) 7. Transformation of rational point at hand to emotional one. 8. The bible. 9. Redefinition of common words. 10. Personal attack. 11. Obsfucation. (however you spell it) 12. Excess verbosity. What I did was post this, put names on it, including my own, and then start citing it when the behavior is seen. I expected people to moderate the behaviors and perhaps improve dialog. What actually happened was the behaviors intensified! They created new ones, and started using them in combination: Subject change, excess verbosity, silence was very common. Blow up the dialog to prevent realizations or consensus, then go silent to let it all fade away. Then do it again, and again... Now, something good did happen. Participants who get it, tended to add their own observations to the list, and a bond formed between them. This helped differentiate the dialog some, and high clarity material, rational material was easier to identify and that dialog did improve. But the noise makers also improved, making better noise, more frequently, division went up, and the overall tone of the place was harder to enjoy. This led me to another realization: We very often want to frame things as debate when the truth is we are often doing advocacy. Advocacy has three components: Reason, character, emotion. Advocacy is a super set of debate. Effective advocates employ all three and here is the kicker: They will trump an effective debater in a dialog. Interesting isn't it?
- protonfish 12y ago
  Nice list. I try to reserve my downvotes for these behaviors especially excessive verbosity, redefinition of common words and other non-substanitive content. I think I am going to add the now common request for citation (seriously, you are on the Internet, google it yourself, man.) I am all about reading different points of view but they they should contribute something new.
  - ddingus 12y ago
    Use the phrase "add value" for this. Calling for people to add value requires them to make material, original contributions to a dialog, not just quote, cut, paste and link. Link dropping is the worst. People won't actually express themselves. They will just collect information and drop it into a dialog like a trump, or battle card, rendering the whole thing a mess. A call to add value helps push back on garbage like this. As for "Google it", that cuts both ways. It can be valid for a person to cite the burden of proof as being yours. If you are pushing something not peer-reviewed and logically sound, supporting what you say needs to be the dominant norm. More work for you, but if you establish that norm, it also means the clowns, asses, dullards, zealots, etc... will have a much harder time establishing overall group credence. Not as simple as it seems, is it?
    - protonfish 12y ago
      Good points, but I think I still disagree with the power of citations. Just because a peer-reviewed article exists doesn't mean its true. Appeal to authority is, and always will be, a logical fallacy. But my beef with asking for citations as a counter-argument is that it is shifting the burden of proof. If someone makes a statement that you are questioning, you may ask for clarification, but the ball is in your court to find evidence for disproof. The existence or non-existence of a published supporting article is neither proof nor disproof.
      - ddingus 12y ago
        Yes, in debate that is true. In advocacy it is NOT TRUE. Let that sink in for a while... :) Most of the time we are doing advocacy. Let that sink in too. Now, let's discuss what that really means: It means people who want their way more than they want to be right or just or true, etc... can and will dominate a discussion with effective advocacy techniques whether or not they have rational merit. Secondly, emotional arguments are only partially rational, yet they carry very significant weight. Being logically right, yet having that result feel bad, or cruel, or unjust is a very significant part of policy discussions. For an example, this is why libertarians often do not gain traction in many policy discussions. (no slight on liberitarians, just an example) They are typically, and often brutally rational, dismissing emotional and character arguments entirely. Somebody who can read a room, employ effective advocacy, and who can provide emotional, character and a fair degree of rational support will win the day almost every time.
ddingus 12y ago
Notably, I also found out a few other dynamics: Personification trumps vilification and ridicule. Let's take something really ugly, like abortion. People will post up the ugly pictures and they will post up their favorite slogans, and they will denigrate opponents with brutalities like, "baby killer" This kind of noise completely destroys rational advocacy / debate on the topic, which is why religion and politics are often discouraged in technical and other discussion venues. Now, personify it. I took a story from Brazil where a 9 year old girl was raped by her father, her mother wanted to get an abortion for her, and the church, state, father and others wanted to deny the girl that. Instead of the usual advocacy path, I asked people what they personally would say to the little girl who doesn't want to carry a pregnancy. This required they simulate the scenario, and express their thoughts as actions, or virtual actions in this case, rather than just pull out their favorite "pokemon battle card" type sayings... Amazingly, the dialog split into two camps! The majority of participants answered honestly, and were quite disturbed at the experience. The majority said they would not tell the little girl no, regardless of their personal beliefs / preferences. It was the human thing to do. For those ideologues who were being absolutist about it, they would not answer, because they would reveal cracks in their black and white vision of things, so they vilified instead! And it was intense. The rest of the group turned on them, and they got shouted down. Secondly, that experience changed the group dynamics. Abortion noise is no longer tolerated like it was before. It's potency as a distraction is now much less in that venue. The personification really impacted people. Edit: One absolutist actually said the right answer was to cut the girl open after she has carried the baby far enough along to be viable. The group response to this was harsh, and they were banned. I personally took a lot of heat for that disturbing approach and had to apologize for the rough dialog. And I did, citing my interest in finding out what trumps what. This was well received, but the whole thing was expensive emotionally. Honestly, this is one of the few times I've ever seen the noise machine beat back into submission like that. Lesson there somewhere. (Yes, this is an area of interest of mine, and I've been running little experiments for some time as the problem identified in this thread is growing rapidly and we have few answers. I find the use of data intriguing, and I plan to do some reading to better understand what other options we may have.)
- protonfish 12y ago
Natsu 12y ago
> There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point. I'd be careful about this one. People don't always have the same news sources, so what constitutes "common knowledge" for one person might be alien to another. Personally, I expect myself to be able to provide a citation for anything reasonably controversial or not widely known and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with asking someone to show their work. After all, there's the opposite side of this coin: someone who isn't giving evidence because they cannot. I mean, if I claim to have a unicorn in my garage, I can't reasonably expect everyone to accept it on my say-so. I know that's not at all the scenario you have in mind, but I think you'd hate to have someone engaged in such behavior justifying it with your logic when that's not what you meant at all.
- protonfish 12y ago
  A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish, and what is submitted to be published is heavily filtered, and the final articles are being paywalls, how can a plea for citations be a legitimate request? If you are claiming you have a unicorn in your garage, I don't want citations - I want EVIDENCE. A picture would be a fine place to start. I can't imagine any citation being of value either pro or con. In a discussion I want to read evidence or reason - everything else is filler.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    > A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish, I think you just exposed the root of this. You're thinking a citation has to be a scientific paper or something equivalent. I'm saying that when you argue something, you should be willing to cite ordinary evidence, of which a scientific paper is just one kind. A photo would be a perfectly reasonable thing to cite as evidence.

rakoo 12y ago

AFAIU flamewars increase the discussion on a topic, so this makes a story much more likely to stay on frontpage.

hluska 12y ago
The danger of flamewars is that they rapidly devolve to personal attacks. When threads devolve this far, it keeps intelligent people from joining the conversation and actually elevating it. 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters may create a best seller, but 10,000 raving lunatics with Internet connections destroy any chance of an intellectual conversation....:)
dubfan 12y ago
I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.
- r721 12y ago
  Here: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this."

grecy 12y ago

> but more visibly with the employees of certain companies. I'm amazed how obvious this is on Reddit now, and always laugh when I bring it up and get down voted to oblivion :) I'm no expert, but it's clear NetFlix has a few thousand users in /r/movies for example.

pekk 12y ago
Netflix also has however many thousands of normal users there.
- grecy 12y ago
  Sure, but do you honestly love any product you pay for enough to continuously post about it? Has consumerism really come to that? And instead of saying "Go for a drive on Highway 1 because it's beautiful", have you ever said "Take your Ford on Highway 1, because a Ford is the best way to see it" ? (Every second post on /r/movies is "check <movie>, on Netflix NOW!")

selmnoo 12y ago

The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big big players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.

RobertKerans 12y ago
There's great chapter in Edward Bernays' Propaganda where he takes apart a stereotypical set of newspaper stories and categorises them according to the type of agenda they serve; surpirise surprise almost none are real news (if that's actually a thing? Depends how reductionist you want to go). Applies just as much now as then, and as much to HN as any other media outlet
Htsthbjig 12y ago
This was just the start: http://vimeo.com/85948693 http://vimeo.com/85948693 Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything. I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products. When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid. Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable. One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great. I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff. What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672326140 http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672... Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough. ()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.

tptacek 12y ago

The "usual suspect" discussions about NSA are something like 10:1 against NSA. If there's an NSA sockpuppet army trying to influence HN, it's a good one, because there's no evidence of it.

Andrew_Quentin 12y ago
Except for your constant defence of them of course
- tptacek 12y ago
  I think my comment may have sailed right over your head.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    I think his comment also may have sailed right over your head. That or you're playing dumb. Either way, it's not working.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      No, your face is a mashed potatoes.
      - psykovsky 12y ago
        Still not working... And that grammar...
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  it's basically tptacek and mpyne against the world. for the most part i welcome contributors who aren't entirely biased. unfortunately as even my own worst paranoia was not predictive enough, paranoia that has had me laughed at to my face and behind my back, given what's come out: it's very hard for me to react reasonably. so people with a different bias to myself or others can greatly contribute to such discussions.

sitkack 12y ago

One can't also tell the difference between subterfuge trolling and plain up trolling. It would be nice to use machine learning in a multidimensional conversation scoring system so that tired hollow techniques at conversation manipulation would fade in to the background noise.

aaron695 12y ago

> One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely. Being very meta do you have any links? HN being open it shouldn't be hard to do an analysis. I guess you aren't claiming it is being done but it could be done, but I don't see this as a problem. Like, if this was happening, a blog with evidence would rank pretty well for karma points, but it hasn't been done.

phkahler 12y ago

You left off just plain downvoting. I've seen some fairly benign comments on certain topics go down to -3 or -4 in a hurry with no counterpoint given. Stuff the collective here will often ignore or debate, but down it goes.