5 ms·

Translation: become a subservient hive mind conformist wimp.

by solve 11y ago

mahouse 11y ago
This is pretty accurate, actually—votes in an Internet community just encourage the hive mind. I just say what I want and never mind my "karma" or "vote count" or whatever it is called in the community.
- zo1 11y ago
  I know, why don't we just have elections every 4 years for community moderators to represent us. And they can vote/downvote on our behalf! Sounds brilliant. A bit of a sarcastic tone, yes. But the hive-mind comment strikes at the heart of the issues of "democracy" and group dynamics. I'd even argue that group-moderated internet discussions are more "democratic" than actual democracy, with the only difference being the real-world physical repercussions of said voting.
  - solve 11y ago
    An excellent benevolent dictator can be so much better than any system where there's a big pressure to converging to the crowd average, or even the lowest common denominator of the crowd. Most of us joined HN for exactly this reason. It was run in dictator fashion by a guy whose writings and actions showed that he was clearly above what ever be achieved by a general crowd average, at least in a particular area of expertise. Unfortunately, his other work prevented him from spending much time here, and it's now been years since he left all active involvement in the community entirely. The departure of the benevolent dictator is almost always catastrophic, as far as I sense. Imagine if Linus had left Linux after just a couple years, or if Guido had left Python after just a couple years. You can start to see evidence of the problems that a disappearing excellent dictator causes in the decision paralysis facing the Bitcoin community now. What's good, is that the HN successor should appear within the next few years.
- solve 11y ago
  It's a totally non-conscious change that keeps pulling you in further. You get so addicted to pleasing, or at least not upsetting the forum. You unknowingly adapt to learn their language, try to stay ahead of the latest themes. Pretty soon, mixed in with the great stuff, you also start believing some total uninformed nonsense that the community has emergently evolved to, and you don't even realize how terribly wrong some of it was until years later when you experience how badly they mislead you first hand. That includes a few things that HN believes too. So terribly wrong, on a few particular things. No different than religion. We're made to fall for this stuff. People who believe themselves smart, MORE SO than anyone else. Same reason that parents try so hard to keep their children from "falling in with a bad crowd". Your mind is weak and desperate to please those you're surrounded with.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Don't know why you were downvoted, but have an upvote from me. You nailed it. There is such an assuredness of the rightness of some beliefs here and I have used the word religion to describe it as well. It's a shame. It's called Hacker News and presumably seemed to have Libertarian leanings that you might expect. Yet, in reality, there is a solid emphasis on conforming over individualism. A bunch of comformist hackers (oxymoron) and professed libertarians who insist that you believe as they do? And, to your point, I think a lot of people do conform (knowingly or not). Because, unless everyone actually does agree with one another on everything (not likely), then the choices are to conform or simply stop participating.
- Gracana 11y ago
  I've talked about this a lot with friends, and while voting on aggregated content seems like an obviously good idea, voting on comments is not. On HN it's not a huge problem because it's generally easy enough to read all the comments in a thread, but in busier threads (for examples see popular forums on reddit), minority viewpoints are quickly and efficiently hidden from view. The system is very effective at promoting the most popular viewpoint (at the expensive of every other quality), which makes comment threads boring and predictable.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
I feel like my views are reasonably heterodox on HN and the only posts I really get slammed on are the drive-by low-effort ones.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

Translation: become a subservient hive mind conformist wimp.

by solve 11y ago

Translation: become a subservient hive mind conformist wimp.

This is pretty accurate, actually—votes in an Internet community just encourage the hive mind. I just say what I want and never mind my "karma" or "vote count" or whatever it is called in the community.

zo1 11y ago
I know, why don't we just have elections every 4 years for community moderators to represent us. And they can vote/downvote on our behalf! Sounds brilliant. A bit of a sarcastic tone, yes. But the hive-mind comment strikes at the heart of the issues of "democracy" and group dynamics. I'd even argue that group-moderated internet discussions are more "democratic" than actual democracy, with the only difference being the real-world physical repercussions of said voting.
- solve 11y ago
  An excellent benevolent dictator can be so much better than any system where there's a big pressure to converging to the crowd average, or even the lowest common denominator of the crowd. Most of us joined HN for exactly this reason. It was run in dictator fashion by a guy whose writings and actions showed that he was clearly above what ever be achieved by a general crowd average, at least in a particular area of expertise. Unfortunately, his other work prevented him from spending much time here, and it's now been years since he left all active involvement in the community entirely. The departure of the benevolent dictator is almost always catastrophic, as far as I sense. Imagine if Linus had left Linux after just a couple years, or if Guido had left Python after just a couple years. You can start to see evidence of the problems that a disappearing excellent dictator causes in the decision paralysis facing the Bitcoin community now. What's good, is that the HN successor should appear within the next few years.
solve 11y ago
It's a totally non-conscious change that keeps pulling you in further. You get so addicted to pleasing, or at least not upsetting the forum. You unknowingly adapt to learn their language, try to stay ahead of the latest themes. Pretty soon, mixed in with the great stuff, you also start believing some total uninformed nonsense that the community has emergently evolved to, and you don't even realize how terribly wrong some of it was until years later when you experience how badly they mislead you first hand. That includes a few things that HN believes too. So terribly wrong, on a few particular things. No different than religion. We're made to fall for this stuff. People who believe themselves smart, MORE SO than anyone else. Same reason that parents try so hard to keep their children from "falling in with a bad crowd". Your mind is weak and desperate to please those you're surrounded with.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  Don't know why you were downvoted, but have an upvote from me. You nailed it. There is such an assuredness of the rightness of some beliefs here and I have used the word religion to describe it as well. It's a shame. It's called Hacker News and presumably seemed to have Libertarian leanings that you might expect. Yet, in reality, there is a solid emphasis on conforming over individualism. A bunch of comformist hackers (oxymoron) and professed libertarians who insist that you believe as they do? And, to your point, I think a lot of people do conform (knowingly or not). Because, unless everyone actually does agree with one another on everything (not likely), then the choices are to conform or simply stop participating.
Gracana 11y ago
I've talked about this a lot with friends, and while voting on aggregated content seems like an obviously good idea, voting on comments is not. On HN it's not a huge problem because it's generally easy enough to read all the comments in a thread, but in busier threads (for examples see popular forums on reddit), minority viewpoints are quickly and efficiently hidden from view. The system is very effective at promoting the most popular viewpoint (at the expensive of every other quality), which makes comment threads boring and predictable.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

I feel like my views are reasonably heterodox on HN and the only posts I really get slammed on are the drive-by low-effort ones.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]