Re:Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to tri...
by dang on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @02:04PM
(#26093334)
Two reasons: (1) we try to prune subthreads when they get too massive; and (2) this one was a step in a generic direction (i.e. police in general), away from the specifics of this story.
Steps toward the generic nearly always lower discussion quality [1], because the larger the topic becomes, the harder it is to say anything new about it. Therefore the conversations tend to repeat the same points over and over, same as the last N times the topic came up (and this has been one of the most-argued, if not most burnt-out, topics in the last year). They also to get nastier as they proceed. My semi-serious theory is that the mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of new information [2].
The generic topics are like massive planets that exert a strong pull on passing discussions—there's always a strong tendency to hop to the nearest generic orbit, because that's what our pre-existing mental associations connect to [3]. The trouble with this is that points away from curiosity, which is interested in new and specific information more than in familiar and general arguments. Curiosity wants the diffs [4]. Generally we're not aware of these competing directions in ourselves, but the effects show up unmistakeably at scale.
It's not that you or the other commenters did anything wrong! it's perfectly natural for conversation to drift in this way, and a balance of familiarity and curiosity makes for good conversation. But from a moderation perspective, it's our job to look out for the site globally, and try to dampen the sequences where each step makes sense locally but the sequence still ends up in a much less curious place.
That's a longer explanation than you probably expected, but since it's not possible to explain every individual move (it would be too much work, and also too noisy), I try to make up for it by periodically giving longer ones.
Steps toward the generic nearly always lower discussion quality [1], because the larger the topic becomes, the harder it is to say anything new about it. Therefore the conversations tend to repeat the same points over and over, same as the last N times the topic came up (and this has been one of the most-argued, if not most burnt-out, topics in the last year). They also to get nastier as they proceed. My semi-serious theory is that the mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of new information [2].
The generic topics are like massive planets that exert a strong pull on passing discussions—there's always a strong tendency to hop to the nearest generic orbit, because that's what our pre-existing mental associations connect to [3]. The trouble with this is that points away from curiosity, which is interested in new and specific information more than in familiar and general arguments. Curiosity wants the diffs [4]. Generally we're not aware of these competing directions in ourselves, but the effects show up unmistakeably at scale.
It's not that you or the other commenters did anything wrong! it's perfectly natural for conversation to drift in this way, and a balance of familiarity and curiosity makes for good conversation. But from a moderation perspective, it's our job to look out for the site globally, and try to dampen the sequences where each step makes sense locally but the sequence still ends up in a much less curious place.
That's a longer explanation than you probably expected, but since it's not possible to explain every individual move (it would be too much work, and also too noisy), I try to make up for it by periodically giving longer ones.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] And the hottest controversies are even stronger—those are like black holes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...