It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.
If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.
What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.
12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.
That might be true, but a more benign explanation is incompetence.
If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.
Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.
If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
I've done that. Not been banned.
> point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite
Well, I mean, aside from being false, that’s also going to often be a specific labelling of something here as “white supremacist” or “hate speech”; flagging exists pretty specifically to deal with content where that description actually applies without sidetracking conversations with incendiary debate about whether it does. So, yeah, comments doing that will be flagged and moderated and, if thet persist, will likely get you banned.
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this.
If it was banned, you couldn’t post from it. So, since you obviously can, I assume you are misrepresenting the facts when you call it a banned account.
I don't think this is true, or I just don't see any evidence it. Take a look a this HN yesterday thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26782031. Neither PG nor his YC companies are immune to criticism.
Citation needed - this claim is very far from my own experience. If you think you'll be banned, then email me with your evidence and I'll look at it.
If you express some completely heinous ideas in polite, mostly grammatical writing then normally you will not be banned. This is based on my experience of over a decade of various accounts and occasional banning on "Hacker" News.
To be fair, much of the overtly racist and bigoted content I've seen lately has gotten voted down and flagged, and I've seen Dan step in and stand against it on a few occasions. I don't know if this is the result of a shift in my perceptions or in the community, but to me it seems like things were far worse a few years ago, and now at least a few of the notorious bad accounts have been banned. It's certainly not a paradise, God knows any time race, religion or gender comes up this place often winds up validating its execrable reputation, but I do think the mods are trying. It's not their fault the tech community is being taken over by incels and neo-reactionary fascists.
The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the most. The assumption of good intention on the part of someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
There are definitely points of view here, no matter how well articulated, that will be buried in low-contrast purgatory very quickly. And I'm not just talking about "white supremacy" type stuff.
This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.
This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.
Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.
Yes, but at least unpleasant discussions usually just stop at that, unlike Reddit or even worse Twitter where you get a shitstorm of insults.
I consider myself more of a leftist than your typical hn user and when I have been abnormally downvoted I never felt it was because of my opinion but rather because I was too hot headed or too ignorant about what I was talking about.
So I am very concerned by those claims but without any data about presumed tolerance to bigotry stuff, they are of no value too anyone. Anybody could feel sore and angry about how some social online gathering is not as X as he wish he was. Heck, that's my life on Reddit. Gimme data, gimme sources, I'll vote you up.
Looking at your comment history, it looks like you enjoy wading into political conversations with strongly-held opinions. Food for thought, I'd have downvoted some of your comments that I agree with because they bring down the quality of the conversation.
Commenters who post grand narratives about why they were banned typically have a long string of past banned accounts. The giveaway is that they never link to them. That would let readers make up their own minds about why they'd gotten banned, and how accurate their story really is.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I would like to point out that this is a silicon valley/SF tech forum; considering the demo, to mod out all of the vile sexist/race-realist objectivist bleating would be crushing. Just argue back. The left-liberal addiction to manager-calling is ruining their ability to defend their positions, heavily moderated "safe spaces" really become places where people can repeat their beliefs by rote, free from challenges. The reason libertarians are wrong is because their philosophy is intellectually bankrupt, not because it's upsetting. Practice in putting them down refines your own beliefs.
This entire comment is one of the most closed-minded, "lower value" comments I've seen on HN recently.
Complaining about how comments aren't open-minded, and also that "hate speech" and "bigoted shit" is the norm is something of a contradiction. If one is open-minded, he should be tolerant even of "hate speech." He should also be open to the ideas that hate speech is both very real or not real at all. Censoriousness is inextricably closed-minded.
I can't speak to PG portfolio criticism, but I think dang does yeoman's work in moderation. Only once have I seen a decision that I thought was harsh, and I think everyone is entitled to a bad day every now and then.
If you walked into my house and started berating and insulting me, I'd probably have a dim view of you, too.
Also, how are you posting from a banned account? That seems to go against the nature of being banned.
Also I don't think "in my house" metaphor has had much success. Which seems fair : Hacker News is not PG's house, although it is his baby, he handed moderation power over to the users, the algorithm and the moderators. Which is why we like it and trust it and use it. You can't just compare anything to one on one relationships, it does not work like that.
SE prominently displays reputation points, which is different.
Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying small means dang can generally be expected to read most of the comments on the site.
And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely worth wading into. If a million people started using HN, then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.
Though I doubt redditors reddit just for the karma.
Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
For one, answers change over time. The best answer five years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The most current and correct answer will never be able to catch up with that.
Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a collaboration brings out the worst in some people.
Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are the ones that look plausible. They're not necessarily definitive, or ideal.
Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they don't.
Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed and duplicates aren't really duplicates.
I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki, or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the problem.
They introduced it to gamify the whole charade without any deeper thought. At the beginning they had a lot of people addicted to answering questions and displaying their points on blogs which to me always looked ridiculous.
They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope, it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I quit before long.
I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
This assumes all conversation is equal quality. That particular point has never been true in social media, and has actually become worse post-2016, with increased partisanship and bad faith arguing.
It's impossible to run a high-quality discussion forum without some sort of check on bad behavior. That said, it's up for debate whether downvotes are the best answer to this problem.
Secondly, there are two solutions to that problem:
1. If you believe the environment, group, or social body of a particular conversing venue is heavily biased, whether deliberate or not, you don't have to participate there. Simply leave.
2. If you believe a particular user is deliberately exercising some form of bad behavior or displays an inability to follow the conversation you don't have to reply to them. Simply let it die.
For example: whether or not I ever liked or voted for President Trump I would never spend time on Reddit at r/theDonald because I know conversation there is biased like a form of cult worship. Why bother conversing where you are not allowed to disagree on any matter?
Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly controversial and important topics are being removed with this mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.
Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin (that's a problem on all sides by the way).
I have seen entire heated topics killed but that kills both sides of the argument equally. What value is a 500-comment talk-over-each-other argument, fundamentally about politics even if on-topic, on this site? I doesn't seem like something we should waste time on.
If a few things are over-moderated I might be mildly missing out. So what? Humans are fallible. There is no perfect system. You're not arguing that HN is so moderated that it's completely worthless. You're not even getting close to that.
So what do we do about a system that isn't perfect but is doing a pretty fine job?
The rules to stay on topic is not the same as censorship. Often I noticed people talk (write) past each other and get into misunderstandings; it happens to me I'll admit.
What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.
And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has different niches :).
You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.
That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom.
HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker would find interesting, but who is to say what that is? The guidelines basicly say that what's on topic is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Again, what I think is that the "good hacker" is us. We shouldn't nitpick topics. We should take care to have good discussions. We consider technology important and relevant, so we discuss it. Same for everything.
Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discourse gets, and the faster good people leave - it's a feedback loop that quickly grinds a community down to the lowest common denominator.
That's why stable, quality communities either expel (like HN) or contain (like plenty of forums limiting politics to only the Offtopic board) such topics. And it's not like it's a new invention - a lot (possibly most) societies have a long-standing custom that says not to bring up politics and religions in typical conversations between strangers (or at dinner with extended family).
I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
When I see that a conversation is going south, I try to bring coolheadedness to it, or point out how it could be made better. I think that's the way to a good forum.
I think I see what you're getting at, so let me reassure you a bit, and correct for any miscommunication I may have caused:
> But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
HN doesn't strictly forbid controversial topics. The guidelines[0] outline what is and isn't considered on-topic, provide heuristics for good behavior and pleas to avoid certain bad patterns. They don't say, "these topics will be automatically removed", or "these topics will get you insta-banned". They're just guidelines, a description of what this place should strive for. They work as a Schelling point[1] for individual participants.
So what happens in practice is, when you post a clear-cut intellectually stimulating hacker topic, it'll get upvoted. If it's boring, it'll get ignored. If you post a completely garbage submission, it'll get flagged faster than you can refresh the site. If a topic is on a fence, the balance of upvotes, flags and vouches will lean one way or the other. It's an organic system, but the direction it's leaning is strongly shaped by the guidelines - the one thing everyone knows everyone is expected to know :).
It's also easy to observe that whether or not a given topic stays on the front page or gets quickly flagged out of it isn't just a function of the topic and the source - but also the context (and I think sometimes the timezone). For example, political news aren't very prominent on HN, except when something really big happens, and HN briefly turns into a 24h news station.
And on the controversy itself, the general principle is - it's not the topic being controversial itself that's the problem. The problem is if the discussion around it decays into low-quality bickering. For some topics this is almost a law of nature, so people flag them on sight. But others only get flagged down if and when they evolve into actual flame war.
All in all, I think it's a decent system.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
This needs to be expressed more often, too bad often people do write that but not in a friendly way and some threads go on with countless bickering.
If you want to discuss off-topic controversies, there's an entire Internet full of sites to have that discussion on.
Because I've seen people totally make up stuff to make a point.
Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it. It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting down discussions for everyone.
What do you think HN does get wrong?
Phrasing it in a more positive way, what could you do to raise the quality of conversation on HN even higher?
Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.
I will downvote comments that are simply low quality, like comments that merely say "^ This!". I don't usually downvote bad faith arguing because it's hard to prove when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.
Sometimes the person just misinterprets the conversation, especially if not being a native english speaker, but the responses could get overly harsh and that's a pity because I'd like to see more international discussions here.
Even if you see other people using downvotes for disagreement, that doesn’t make it ok for you to do the same.
Downvotes are for when people violate the norms and values of our community without thoughtfulness or self awareness.
The difference is subtle sometimes, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing I downvote. Low effort, dismissal / rejection of the community’s norms without nuance or justification beyond “well other people do it too so that makes it ok”.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN! There has certainly never been a guideline against it, and the case law is clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.
I think the idea that things should be otherwise actually comes from Reddit (no?) which takes this to a triple back flip level of irony.
I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent. Certainly part of that continuum warrants downvotes. "Don't use downvotes to signal disagreement," is meaningless in that context.
More concretely, the HN guidelines say nothing about why to downvote. They only say, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Yeah, I like this perspective but I think there's two axes we can separate a little. One axis is disagreement. (I agree with you <-> I disagree with you). the other axis is effort / coherence. (I'm going to invest significant effort to clearly articulate my point of view <-> I'm going to make a flippant off-handed comment).
Disagreement alone isn't the problem - I've had some lovely conversations on HN with people I disagree with. Eg, a couple weeks ago I had this interesting exchange[1] talking about RMS on the FSF board. But the conversation worked because everyone was careful and articulate. When someone says something I disagree with, but they say it in a thoughtful, well articulated way, I learn something new.
There's probably more factors at play, but as a rule of thumb I suppose downvotes are in the low effort + strong disagree quadrant. In that zone I feel like there's no implied intent to even talk it through. And absent conversation, why are we even here?
Perhaps I'm only acknowledging that I'm less likely to downvote someone that I agree with? For example, if someone speculates wildly but it's consistent with my own experience, I'm not likely to downvote. If someone speculates wildly and it's inconsistent with my experience, I'm far more likely to downvote.
Probably where we disagree is whether it's OK to downvote a comment that someone put effort into. I've seen someone ask a question about a particular technology, and someone who clearly has very little experience with that technology posts a long screed where they're ~~talking out their ass~~ sharing their opinion in a way that sounds authoritative. Or maybe they're repeating business-level talking points instead of getting down to technical brass tacks.
I hope that gives an idea what I mean. I don't want to see comments like that on HN, regardless of how much effort or how well-meaning the comment is.
This seems to be a really wide net for downvotes, and almost certainly won't match other people's use cases for downvoting. I don't think downvoting should be open to interpretation like this, hence why I think it should be removed. The alternative? Just don't upvote, or flag if something is truly inappropriate.
The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)
10 Years In, Was He Right? “Value of Downvoting; How HN Gets It Wrong” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 - June 2020 (1 comment)
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325726 - Jan 2017 (12 comments)
The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875619 - Jan 2016 (36 comments)
Reddit's Discussion about HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 - March 2009 (24 comments)
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948 - March 2009 (114 comments)