> How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

There is a simple answer to that - HN is not a homogeneous set of people; different users have different opinions and express them at different times with different intensity.

True, but I would have expected at least a little visible disagreement. You never see anybody saying “wait a second, I think making the filter bubble effect a bit worse is actually worth it!” Each individual submission’s comments is just full throated, unanimous condemnation —- even when adjacent comments are directly contradictory. They just don’t engage with the possibility that deciding what to do might actually be hard.

People speak up more when they disagree than when they agree.

Which is why I'm commenting right now.

For 15+ years, I've run a sports forum and it is inevitable that societal/political debates emerge in many threads. In recent years, they've become increasingly as you describe. There's almost never a calm, reasonable comment. People get at each other's throats and slinging left-right insults immediately.

I think a lot about how @PG almost never posts on HN any more. Might be wrong, but I suspect he's come to resent some of the discourse/attitudes and time-wasting here.

If this were true you'd have the average opinion filter out - naysayers would downvote supporters and vice versa. The truth is in fact that hn is hypocritical and becomes outraged for the sake of outrage just like every other opinionated group (where the raison d etre is to express an opinion rather than discourse).

Edit: think hn isn't just about getting attention? Then explain to me why responses are ranked? Or even ranked without requiring a response? Even Amazon reviews in principle require leaving ratings only in good faith (ie having engaged with the product). It's obvious and dang and whomever could make that a perquisite of voting. That they haven't proves my point.

Responses have to be ranked, because some comments are much more valuable to the reader than others. Well-thought-out comments and spam lie at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

I think there's merit to the idea of requiring a response for upvotes or downvotes, but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite.

>comments are much more valuable to the reader than others

This presupposes some kind of universal value function.

>but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite

This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument. I don't know and I'm not going to hypothesize right here right now where one misstep on my part gives credence to the idea that it's impossible.

Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity. Those places were actual venues for discussion. Ranking only exists for monetization. If you don't agree with this then consider professional venues for discourse: academic journals. I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.

> This presupposes some kind of universal value function.

Sorry, I did not mean to suggest that some comments are intrinsically more valuable. But we do want to sort comments so that, on average, the distance between the "ideal" order for any given reader and the actual order is minimized, don't we?

> This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument.

I'm not trying to argue anything here, I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively.

> I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.

I don't know if arXiv is a very good comparison — the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.

>But we do want to sort comments so that, on average, the distance between the "ideal" order for any given reader and the actual order is minimized, don't we?

why? who cares? do you not know how to skim and skip irrelevant text?

>I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively

you could think of any number of ways to vet comments. we live in the future after all; you could require a minimum length, you could classify comments according to sentiment and reject those that have unwanted overtones, you could use topic modeling to see whether in fact the comment was on topic, etc etc etc. ranking algorithms have had thousands of labor hours invested in them across all social media sites - apply the same fervor to this problem and there will be an adequate solution.

>the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.

you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv

https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area

you're also wrong that it's moderated - the only thing that you're required to have to submit is endorsement. but i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint? yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators? i also don't know what the relevance of arxiv's narrow range of topics is.

> why? who cares? do you not know how to skim and skip irrelevant text?

Ignoring inflammatory content can be more taxing to people than you pretend, and moderators and flagging are too slow to act. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying enough that I would consider alternative services.

A forum is nothing without its users, and a forum that puts its users first shouldn't irritate its users with off-putting content without good reason.

> you could think of any number of ways to vet comments.

Alright, I was just checking whether you had any new ideas, and it seems that you do not.

> you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv

HN receives at least twice as many submissions per month, and an order of magnitude more comments. This makes the arXiv a very poor analogy for HN.

> you're also wrong that it's moderated

From [0] (see also, [1]):

> All submissions are subject to a moderation process that verifies material is appropriate and topical. Material that contains offensive language, non-scientific content, or is plagiarized may be removed.

Looks a lot like they have moderation to me.

> i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint

If you already heavily filter by quality, then the order in which posts are presented obviously becomes much less important.

> yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators?

HN does have an excellent moderation team. They just aren't anywhere near as stringent as the arXiv, on quality, on politeness, or on any number of other characteristics.

If HN was as heavily moderated as the arXiv, then they wouldn't need a voting system either. It'd be a much colder place, though, which is probably why they don't do that.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/help/submit

[1]: https://arxiv.org/help/moderation

So long as people's value functions have a directional bias in hyperdimensional value-space, the averaged value function embodied by the upvote-downvote tendencies is useful.

(If there were no bias- if people's opinions/tendenfies varied equally likely between all possibilities- all comment scores would be 0. Of course, practically survivor bias soon sets in, as radical suicide advocates wouldn't stick around long enough to like/dislike much.)

Academic journals have a barrier to entry and the content is already judged, the journals decide what information they publish. It is not a random collection of every single article submitted, so you are already starting out with above-average content.

> This presupposes some kind of universal value function.

Yes: "a majority of HN readers of this comment found it useful / not useful". That's the best you're going to get.

But for the most part, it does actually work. If 80% of people on the site agree that a comment is useful, that's good enough; it's unreasonable to expect any evaluation of subjective matters to be universal.

And that's why moderators will step in and do some manual tweaking if things get very divisive. If that 80% number (that I made up) drops too low, getting too close to 50%, then that means that the discussion just isn't likely to be productive. HN is not a homogeneous group, and sometimes the there isn't a clear majority in agreement.

> Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity

I don't agree with this.

One reason is the lack of threading. phpBB and its contemporaries just had a list of posts, and all replies linearly under each post link. Digging through for the bits you actually care about was a huge pain in the ass, and it's one of the reasons why I never enjoyed fora like that.

The other reason is just scale. I'm not sure how old you are, but I was in HS in the late 90s. Back then the internet was much smaller, not as commercialized, and people generally behaved decently well toward each other. We didn't have the spambots we do today, and every forum site wasn't under constant attack by people who want to destroy online communities just for fun. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was a lot easier to manage communities back then and keep discourse civil and on-topic, with very few automated tools at hand.

These days it's pretty much impossible to create high quality discussions at any scale without a ranking system. Sure, you see smaller communities of a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, people where these things work sorta like they did 20+ years ago (but I guarantee you the board itself is doing a ton of automated spam filtering to get you there).

HN has... what? Tens of thousands, or likely more than a hundred thousand users. If you enabled showdead in your profile page, you'll see a lot of garbage that gets through the automated filters and ends up flagged out of existence. And even regardless of that, with a community this size, you're going to have enough disagreement on the fundamentals of any complex topic that you're going to get a ton of disagreement. Voting and flagging is far from perfect, but it can help it from devolving into a cesspool of low-effort comments and outright name-calling.

The Law of Averages isn't actually a law, and everything doesn't balance out in the end.

Lol the law of large numbers (the real name for the law of averages) is absolutely a law and it's exactly the phenomenon I'm alluding to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

Facebook is sometimes in a difficult position. But, with respect, I don't think it's correct to say that it's the fault of their critics for putting them in a dilemma.

Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing] anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?

Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways. https://twitter.com/BKCHarvard/status/1263891198068039680

That said, I think you're right that being an effective arbiter on planetary speech is a difficult place to be, even for people with the best intentions, and FB didn't get where they are today by having the best intentions all the time.

But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

> Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?

Well that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Obviously there would be no controversy if everyone agreed on which removals are justified. Every censorship article that reaches the front-page of HN includes a litigation over the specifics of the removal, including those who are quite clear that in an ideal world all large social media websites would be prohibited from filtering out content based on the site operator's judgements about content acceptability.

> Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways

A distinction without much difference for the sake of this discussion; if the system is hiding the content it's as good as deleted or perhaps even worse than deleted in the same way that shadowbans are often perceived as more hostile than explicit bans.

> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

I share that perspective. I believe that social media is a net negative to society despite the nice things its given us like a stream of friend and family photos, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Ultimately this is a cultural problem, it costs a user nothing to have the Facebook app sitting on their phone even if they only open it once a year. Literally billions of Facebook users don't care at all about what Facebook removes from the site, most users know what they want out of the internet and know which places to go to get the things they want.

> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

The fundamental problem with Facebook is that it serves the people, and as a rule, we are too reactive, too judgmental, too ignorant, too emotional, too irrational, and too hateful. If you want to find something bad on Facebook, you will succeed, because everybody is there, and this is just how we are. Turn back the clock and you'll find ethnic hatred spread through private Whatsapp messages, bullying on Myspace, ignorance in chain email, disingenuous appeals to emotion in yellow journalism, and hysteria in a mob whipping itself into a lynching frenzy in a literal public square. The platforms have changed hundreds of times, the people have not.

What amazes me is that critics of social media don't see this -- despite their vaunted liberal arts degrees, they act as if Zuckerberg invented human flaws in 2004, and pretend that he has the power to get rid of them with a technological solution. Destroy Facebook tomorrow, and the people will just move somewhere else. The exact same problems will reappear, because the people are the same.

If Facebook followed some deterministic algorithm like "show all content from friends, in chronological order" then I don't think there would be such loud voices calling for it to also solve $social_problem.

But Facebook does exercise editorial control, in the service of engagement. It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-effects it's known to have (divisive content is more engaging and so is amplified; at least correct it back down to neutral).

If facebook was following a deterministic algorithm, people would complain too.

Is that reason enough not to try? Because people will complain? You know very well that people will complain no matter what happens, yet we still must seek to work towards truth and a better way, even though "better" is in opinion word, and sometimes so is "truth."

good luck filtering human content via deterministic algorithms, and if people can reverse engineer these then they'll get gamed... it's just a stupid idea.

Back in the day this is how it worked. They changed it. Nobody that I can recall was complaining for it to change at the time. Circa 2006 I think.

edit: grammar

It was much smaller and less influential back then.

But that’s not how it actually works. For example, it’s agreed among journalists covering social media that Facebook’s greatest crime is that it “created a genocide in Myanmar”, as you can read in an ocean of longform articles. What they mean is that people shared hateful messages privately via Messenger and Whatsapp, two services that use a completely deterministic algorithm (“show all incoming messages by recent”).

The only practical way to stop this is to employ an army of censors to read private conversations and delete the ones deemed bad. But of course this is also horrible and dystopian. So, as always, it’s trivial to write a scathing critique of Facebook no matter what they do.

The problem is that hate doesn’t need an algorithm to amplify it; it can just amplify itself, as it has throughout all of human history. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the people. And you can’t just “fix” people.

> show all content from friends, in chronological order

Then typical user Facebook feed will be 99% pictures of funny cats from one of their loved friends, which are too good to unfriend (if that friend is, for example, mother).

(Not to mention, it's practically impossible to configure filtering for 99% users).

And then these users will just leave the service because it's boring, and that's it, end of Facebook.

We already had a lot of services with no feed ranking. All of them died or started doing the ranking.

> Facebook does exercise editorial control

As any other mainstream service with feed and user-generated content. For example, Twitter or TikTok.

> It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well

The big neural network which defines feed ranking is developed by hundreds of engineers, and already optimized for (I guess) hundreds of parameters, including time spend of website, ads revenue, fraud protection, lower risk of suicide and so on.

I agree. The second you start censoring $VIEW_X, people will start questioning why you aren't also censoring $VIEW_Y. Are you not censoring $VIEW_Y because you endorse it, Facebook? Is Facebook $VIEW_Y-ist? Rinse and repeat for every fringe view.

The right course of action is to stop using Facebook. That's it, very simple. people here being polarized is exactly what Facebook wants. Current facebook users are akin to opioid addicts... probably found some relief from whatever social pain they were feeling that now they have accepted selling their privacy for their fix.

I would say I can't wait for the day that Facebook is gone but it will be a long time considering the amount of insecure and unintelligent people that need a platform like that to avoid ever being challenged in the real world.

I agree, but also from a different angle.

The other day a friend told me about a takeaway place I should try. I couldn't find the menu on their website, and my friend replied that it was on theirbl Facebook page, and I should stop being a luddite.

No, no, dammit! We're literally giving the world wide web to a single corporation, and worse, normalising it - to a lot of people, Facebook basically is "the internet".

How can this possibility be in the best interest of users? It almost feels like the balance has swung too far, and it's perilously close to the point of no return...

Sometimes you just have to miss out on a good meal.

> The right course of action is to stop using Facebook.

That'd give rise to something akin to a Gresham's Law problem [0]. I think we have a civic duty to engage patiently — and politely — with our friends who hold views we disagree with, because (A) they get to vote; (B) angry invective isn't persuasive; and (C) social proof is a thing, and sometimes people can be persuaded to come around to their friends' point of view, eventually. It's a long shot, but worth a shot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

So stay on Facebook. Keep in mind that while you're trying to patiently and politely engage, Facebook continues to build a profile about who you are and how to manipulate you. The more you feed it, the more it learns and knows how to use yourself against yourself.

In terms of civic duty, this definition of American civic duty made me laugh:

Citizenship connects Americans in a nation bound by shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom. Being a citizen comes with both rights and responsibilities. Civic duty embodies these responsibilities. Such civic duties help uphold the democratic values of the United States.

The problem with civic duty is that I feel mine is to tell people to stop using Facebook... but others... well, they are going to show up at a state capital carrying military grade weapons because they don't want to wear facemasks in a pandemic. Would you like to patiently and politely engage with them? I sure as hell wouldn't because they focus more on their perception of "rights" while ignoring their responsibilities.

My point is that civic duty in America is a pretty romanticized concept that is certainly not based in any reality in 2020.

When I did use Facebook briefly back before 2012, I found it disappointing that my "christian" extended family members would send me incredibly hateful memes about how Obama was a muslim terrorist or satan in a tan suit. If that is civic discourse, no thanks. The one upside is that I haven't spoken to them in almost a decade and never plan to again.

> others... well, they are going to show up at a state capital carrying military grade weapons because they don't want to wear facemasks in a pandemic. Would you like to patiently and politely engage with them?

I have a few friends like that on Facebook, and yes I do patiently and politely engage with them — but on occasion I've had to remind them that they aren't the only ones who own guns and know how to use them ....

Why? It's a great app to keep track of what your friends are doing

You people want less government, but you also want more. Which is it, guys?

You could say this about any divisive issue if you lump all sides together.

I want more government when it helps me and less when it doesn't. What's so hard about that? Everyone agrees with me, I'm sure.

> Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

Perhaps because it's not the same people in the two different cases? HN is a pretty diverse bunch at this point; I'm sure there are a lot of people here who want FB to be a disinterested publisher, and others who want FB to curate like mad.

I liked the idea of tweaking the newsfeed based on the frequency of activity of the producers, and bumping down the influence of bots and chain accounts. It would probably make for a higher quality newsfeed, and it wouldn't play favorites. The problem is, as the article suggests, it might decrease the only metrics Facebook cares about, and there's no guarantee it would look fair to the outside world.

I am not at all outraged that Facebook would impose "restrictions" on speech, nor I think are people in my social circles. You can't have a working newsfeed without a significant amount of filtering, for example. So I suspect that's a straw man.

All that being said, I have left Facebook because I prefer to exercise my freedom _not_ to hear the kinds of speech Facebook has made their stock in trade. So, as far as I'm concerned, Facebook can do as they like.

There is no single voice here on HN. It is a divisive, complex issue. Not only are (some) individuals uncertain on where they stand, but the community itself does not entirely agree. I know personally that I draw the line somewhere, though where exactly isn't clear. I suspect that to fully articulate my opinion on this, I would have to spend about a week doing research and forming a truly educated opinion.

Show all things posted in chronological order. Let users filter out things they don’t want. Done.

I don't think this would be a good idea. There's a lot of content created on Facebook at any given moment. If you show things only in chronological order, it would take an incredible amount of filtering (that the vast majority of users won't do) to get to anything reasonable.

But this is how Reddit works. And HN actually.

Reddit and HN front pages are both driven by an algorithm sampling both popularity and time. I think HN also has a chronological view, but that's not considered the front page.

This 100%, this reminds me of PG's haters post[1].

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

Neither of the top two subthreads matches this description.

(I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315216 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507)

That’s true, but it wasn’t when I posted my comment. It looks like comments just naturally get more reasonable over time... similarly, about half my comments get to negative score instantly, but most then slowly climb back up to positive over the next 24 hours.

I'm glad to hear that! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

All of HN other than you isn't actually one person arguing with themselves. There are a variety of people here with a range of opinions, each with different degrees of internal consistency. This smacks of the "everybody says all kinds of things, so you should just ignore everybody" or the "they're yelling at me from the left and from the right, so that's proof I'm doing everything correctly" defenses. The second is the moderation fallacy; the first might be called the "Argument From Sociopathy."

Personally I don't think Facebook should censor anything except spam and posts that break the law like direct threats of violence and child abuse. However, I do think they have a responsibility when it comes to paid content and the algorithms they use to push content on people. Its one thing to have an uncensored forum where people might be exposed to things they seek out, and entirely another thing for Facebook to choose and collate what people are seeing. Once they do that, they share responsibility for the content people see, rather than just being a platform.