It'd be very interesting to see how a short delay of posting comments on new post would impact this.
Compared to other vote-based sites, HN is very health - but to your point, reflexive, shallow comments are the easiest.
I'm envisioning a use-case for this would be when say, an article briefly touching on tech interviewing (or with a title about tech-interviewing) is posted, and immediately the top-comment changes the subject to "Boy tech interwiews really grind my gears!" Suddenly everyone wants to vent and the thread is overwhelmed.
One natural reason for this penalty is that a highly-ranked comment brings along all the comments that ride along with it to the top. The most extreme form is when the entire comment page is a single comment-thread.
Alternatively, a flexible proposal is to allow users to choose their sort preference, like they can on reddit.
The fundamental issue here, at least to me, is that the upvote is an "I like this" signal. The instinctive use of an upvote is to see more of what you like. Turns out that what people like is what people already agree with.
Unless you build a strong culture that values the signal/noise ratio (remember that early reddit had much more of "UPVOTE IS NOT A DISAGREE" culture, hivemindy as it was), you're not getting your desired outcome. Worse, if you let in the mobs, it doesn't matter how principled your initial group was as they'll soon be overwhelmed by the crowd. The historical record there is obvious.
I think the only way about this is gate-keeping. You want that culture, you'd better enforce it. If you somehow start with a seed userbase of principled people, you only allow people voting rights once they meet whatever gatekeeping criteria that you've set. I don't think this is that scalable, but smaller more tightly knit communities might be a plus to some.
Actually, I'm wondering if something like this might have a niche out there somewhere. We know that Digg in the old days had the superuser group, and the strength of reddit was it's specialized subreddits. Would a system crossing specialized subs with hierarchical user privileges (viewer/voter/voter_with_grant_privs) be something that could work?
In a way it's sort of evolutionary. People attempt to propagate their own ideas or similar, and remove ideas they dislike from the meme pool, via voting systems.
If you take it to the extreme, a youtube video being posted and everyone having to wait 5 minutes to comment, there is enough people that will see it at 4.30 to have a visceral reaction and post inflammatory comments. You can extend that down to each level of comments.
You can, of course, click on the timestamp and see it anyway, so it's more of a speedbump for folks who don't know all of the details of how the forum works than a true delay, though.
Presumably you are talking about HN discussions but what your are saying sounds extremely general
The parent post to this was talking about a pro-authoritarian slant, not the quality of post. Pro-authoritarian =/= reflexive, shallow, generic, angry. Can be. So can anti-authoritarian. Just as much. Sometimes more. Much more.
I don’t know how the pro-authoritarian observation leads to the analysis above. Frankly, I don’t see the pro-authoritarian slant from the top posts.
The whole discussion I’m reading is about the changed/expanded definition of a “journalist” for gathering stats. A valid, almost instinctive observation because practically everyone has a high-quality video camera in their pocket nowadays. And has then wondered, “well, if I capture an event, am I a journalist?” Not a deep life-changing musing, but everybody who has recorded a video event on a smartphone has thought it. So the 2020 mind is primed with those thoughts.
A result like this is posted, and the definitional issue is immediately brought to mind, because it isn’t that far away from lived current experience. The only issue I have with the discussion is nobody answered the basic question in the top responses...so was the definition of journalist responsible for the effect?
The name-calling against “pro-authoritarian” suggests that, in fact, it was. But just a guess.
After that, will be a wave of complaints about the first responders (e.g. in this case he pro-authoritarians). This wave gets upvoted heavily to sit at the top.
So when you and I arrive 9 hours after the drama, we'll see the top X comments either complaining about a slant that is now down-voted, or up-voted comments being reflective of the true biases of HN.
That's basically what happened here.... it's not that the pro-authoritarian comments are naturally shallow, is that they were merely the first comments posted in the first seconds after the article was posted, and are just reflexive since no one reads an article in seconds. If we post an article with a pro-authoritarian title, we'll get a wave of reflexive anti-authoritarian comments too.
I suppose there is, and it's segregated by thread. Some topics attract first responses from libertarian anti-authority types, such as crypto and intellectual property.
But even so there's a kind of overlap. It's anti-authority when it comes to obligations, and pro-authority when it's about property. Or more generally, anti-authority about us, pro-authority about them.
That's not so much "contrarian" as simply "selfish", but it does have the "pent up energy" that dang mentioned. And yeah, I do think you see a lot more selfishness on HN than in the past.
This is a throwaway because I've deleted the passwords to my past 5-digit karma accounts because of my disgust with the commentor's of this site's obsession with freeze peach and their prepondency for posting misinformation.
Has anyone gone back and looked at Corona threads from earlier this year? Remember when HN was telling everyone that there was absolutely no societal harm posed by anti-science folks pushing anti-vaxx and flat-earth theories?
Meanwhile I know that numerous others like me have lost all interest in participating and have left. Because this is what happens when comment sections aren't moderated properly.
Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are.
Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread.
It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things.
Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).