Ideologues of all flavors frequently diss HN like this. Someone needs to stand up for the community, so I guess I will. This was a slur, and your prediction turning out consummately wrong illustrates this nicely.
I think it's in poor taste to diss a group with grand rhetoric whilst participating in it, since you're as much a part of it as anyone else. If you think so poorly of your community, perhaps find a different one and post nastily there. I hear Twitter is good for that.
The reality of the HN community is that it's divided much the way that society at large is. The comments here inevitably reflect that. It's a mixed bag, a lot of what's in that bag isn't great and a small portion is awful, but (a) this community does manage somewhat better than most of the rest of the internet and (b) far more of the participants here are thoughtful and decent than otherwise.
You haven't made it clear that you sincerely want to know. It takes a lot of time and energy to respond to a question like that—I'd guess a couple orders of magnitude more than it costs to post the question.
The risk/reward of giving you a sincere answer is very different if your goal is to become a good HN contributor vs. merely continue an argument which interests no one. If you want people to answer, you need to show that it won't be a waste of their investment to do so.
> have to put our words into sugar coated ass kissery
If you frame it this way then sure, it's cowardly to do that and it becomes a matter of principle not to. But you know the phrase 'all models are wrong, some are useful'? On HN, this is not a useful model.
There are some systems in which no-holds-barred aggression actually works, i.e. leads to interesting outcomes. Examples include rugby teams that beat the crap out of each other on the pitch and then go out drinking together, literary circles where the game is to be as poisonously witty as possible, or the mathematical world, where the only thing that matters is whether you can prove what you say (though people tend to exaggerate that aspect and ignore the social one). These systems have in common that they're small, well-defined, and strongly cohesive. Such communities can withstand violence because other forces hold them together.
HN is not like that. The community is large, ill-defined and weakly cohesive, and there are no forces other than civility holding it together. What happens here if people start throwing their elbows around (as you did in your comment above) is that we get massive flareups, all the interesting animals leave the forest, only the people with grievances and flamethrowers remain and then ('hey, where did everybody go?') even they leave. Then we have scorched earth, or heat death—not an interesting outcome. For this not to happen, HN needs protecting. HN users need to understand that participating here means optimizing for curiosity, which requires a sustainably interesting community.
You complain that people aren't judging your content, but actually everything you post is content—there's nothing else there. You don't get to decide how that content gets classified. If you put turds in the punch bowl and expect people to consider your punch on its merits, that's another unhelpful model.
This report reminds me of some of Jeffrey Lin (Riot Lyte)'s work on League of Legends. He found that 1% of players are toxic, frequently acting badly. But that only accounts for 5% of toxic behavior; 77% of bad behavior comes from people who are just having a bad day. That echoes this report's finding that 34 Wikipedia folks are responsible for 9% of abuse.
A related finding is Riot found that toxicity in LoL was contagious; people who played with an abusive player were more likely to be abusive in their next game. The Wikipedia phenomenon of abuse pile-ons seems similar.
Flag submissions you consider inappropriate for HN. If you recall Political Detox Week, it was very chaotic and noisy. It's very difficult to find widespread agreement as to what's politics and what's not, and what's an exception because it's really really important.
'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. I'll dig around for them and update this comment with links to them in a bit to provide more context.
Edit: Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic.
There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.
When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.
Serious question: have you noticed how there's no way to level that accusation without feeling like a jerk? It's because it's hard to accuse someone of doing something good for the wrong reason without behaving like a jerk. It's a sort of intrinsically nihilist position to take. And we laugh when nihilists take a bowling ball to the stomach. Or maybe just when it's Flea.
It's very difficult to use the concept of "virtue signaling" as a rhetorical weapon without conceding a whole lot of personal credibility. There's a reason that only a certain strange subset of people, people you probably don't want to associate yourself with, toss that term around casually.
I know how patronizing I sound writing this, and I'm sorry, but I swear to Christ I'm serious about the morbid curiosity I hold for people who think "virtue signaling" is some kind of devastating online bon mot.
But that's a losing strategy, in a game-theoretic sense, if your goal is to end sexism/discrimination/bias.
It is fine if your goal is upholding a moral code where you personally actively committing an act of discrimination is unacceptable, but even unintentionally; you personally passively upholding discrimination is fine; and other people actively committing discrimination and you failing to stop them is not a thing you're super morally culpable for. That's certainly not my moral code, and I think even among the crowds that believe in intrinsically evil actions regardless of context (e.g., Catholic moral theology), they wouldn't agree that passively upholding evil or failing to stop others from doing active evil is fine (e.g., "I have greatly sinned ... in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do"). If we're making a deontological argument, we should nail down what we think about passive wrong or allowing a wrong to continue, and if we're making a consequentialist argument, we're not worried about intrinsic wrongs along the way to a right.
It's a losing strategy because everyone who actively supports sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination have plausible reasons why their discrimination is justifiable. Even the white-nationalist types these days hesitate to say that the white race is superior; they just say they want protections for the white race in white countries (whatever those are). And most of the discrimination in today's society doesn't come from people who are nowhere near as overt as white nationalists. The colleges say, "Oh, we're just trusting these test scores." The standardized test companies say, "Oh, we're just trusting past performance at college." And if anyone had previously introduced bias into the system, they've now successfully laundered the bias; there's a feedback system that keeps whatever biases were present when it was created, and you can quite genuinely say, "Oh, I'm just following this system, which on paper should be a perfectly objective system" and there's no proof that you're actively and intentionally discriminating. But you're upholding discrimination, all the same.
If you want to see this sort of bias-laundering in practice, my favorite recent example is the voting laws in North Carolina that were recently struck down by their Supreme Court:
Every restriction, on the face of it, was defensible. Voter ID in the abstract is a good idea. Eliminating certain parts of early voting seems fine. But the courts looked at the emails behind this law, where legislators asked which particular voting mechanisms were used by specific demographic groups, and eliminated those mechanisms "with almost surgical precision". You couldn't prove from the text of the law that there was any intention at bias, which was the entire point; it wasn't supposed to look like a discriminatory law.
We don't have the benefit of seeing those discussions most of the time. So waiting until we have a proof of a wrong to fix that wrong is a losing strategy, one that is easily exploited by people who want to discriminate, and one that people who want to discriminate have demonstrated their willingness to exploit.
>> We've adjusted the dupe detector to reject fewer URLs. If a story hasn't had significant attention in about the last year, reposts are ok. That's been the policy for a while, but we've brought the software closer to it. It will still reject reposts for a few hours, though, to avoid stampedes. Allowing reposts is a way of giving high-quality stories multiple chances at making the front page. Please do this tastefully and don't overdo it.
>> When reposting, please don't delete the earlier post. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been posted in the first place, such as if you regret having said something publicly.
>> When a story is a duplicate—that is, has had significant attention on HN in the last year or so—it's helpful to post a comment linking to the previous major thread, so users and/or moderators can flag the dupe. In addition, when a URL isn't the best source for a given story, it's helpful to post a better URL in the thread. We often see those and change the posts to use them.
> jsnell's correct, and I'll add that reposts are ok on HN if an article hasn't had significant attention yet. 23 points and no comments (which a previous submission had) would normally count as significant attention, but we sometimes relax the criteria when an article is substantive and seems likely to interest the community.
> When we put stories in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and earlier posts linked from there), we try to pick the original submission as the one that reaps the benefit.
The guidelines ask that these type of questions are sent to them rather than posted in threads. But I feel guilty about saying (no matter how politely) "email the mods". It feels like I'm dumping work on them.
The original has a hell of a linkbait title (at least when it comes to audiences with ardor for internet fora) so we changed it in accordance with the HN guidelines.
I don't think the idea was to permanently not discuss politics. I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be.
Further: I don't believe that technology is dissociable from politics either. But I don't have to believe that to think that the political discussions we have on HN are unhealthy and unproductive.
'ubernostrum took issue with my comparison of technology and woodworking, because, I suppose, woodworkers aren't upending the housing market and converting tens of thousands of W2 employees into 1099s. That's fair. But none of us think that means that r/golang or r/haskell should host discussions about Facebook's fakenews problem --- so it's clearly not the case that talking about technology obligates us to host all possible political discussions.
Ultimately my problem with politics on HN is that the discussions are vapid. The best recent example was the Google research project on quantifying and manipulating bias built into machine learning algorithms, which immediately attracted a flock of trolls hijacking the thread with claims that the mere concept of bias was "PC".
I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN.
I don't have to be oblivious to the intersection between my work and politics to believe that HN is a poor venue for politics. Politics is inseparable from technology in a very similar sense as it's inseparable from woodworking, but we don't imagine a woodworking forum would have a hard time enforcing a ban on purely political posts that were crowding out hand-cut dovetail tutorials.
This dichotomy that keeps being presented on HN --- that one either supports politics on HN or is oblivious to politics --- is obviously false, and a little offensive. People who feel a proprietary ownership over political awareness are often missing something.
I don't know what your politics are, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they're comparable to my own. Respectfully, I'm going to keep playing this card until my deck runs dry of them, which could be awhile: I think there's might not be anybody else on the site who has put more effort into political persuasion about racial and gender equity than I have (not because I'm a great person, but because I'm a quintessential message board nerd that happens to have strongly held beliefs about structural injustice in our field). I've learned a couple of things in that work:
* It takes way more effort to compose a careful, persuasive comment about political issues on HN than it does to compose a shrill, superficial, partisan appeal to one issue's pole or the other. The bad comments have a structural advantage.
* Political threads on HN are invariably nastier than technical threads, in part because they attract a lower grade of commenter that thrives on accumulating karma from shrill partisan appeals.
* The rest of the tech community does not appreciate thoughtful political commentary on HN, and in fact has created an ongoing schtick whose premise is that HN should be written off --- politically engaged tech people are less likely to have an active HN account than a Wicker Park hipster is to own a TV.
* Despite the almost total lack of support I feel from the rest of the tech community (or at least that portion of the community that shares our beliefs about structural injustice) --- really, the almost total lack of awareness of HN they have, apart from the circulation of egregiously awful comments in the few moments they exist here before people like me flag them off the site --- these people all have curiously strong opinions about how the site should be moderated.
* The net result of all these bullets is that political threads on HN are a shitshow --- they're almost guaranteed to be a shitshow, because all these people who feel so strongly that repressing politics on HN represents further repression of the underrepresented are unwilling to put the effort in to doing the required amount of writing to ensure that political threads are productive, rather than just an awful joke to share with each other on Twitter.
> Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness.
Politics isn't always tribal and many people on HN are capable on thoughtful arguments on politics. HN suffers from the "LKML-effect". Few people can or are interested in following the linux-kernel mailing list, so naturally it only gets attention when Torvalds is screaming at someone. It's the same with politics.
When "diversity in tech" became more popular on the Internet it would get flagged off HN repeatedly. Some stories would get through and thoughtful discussions would start, but people quickly learned (maybe without knowing it) that if you just flame the story it would hit the controversy algorithm. So people would submit more sensationalist stories so it could get more upvotes to counter the flags and flame. Now the level of discussion is set and people don't mind how they express themselves on the topic.
If instead HN would have owned the issue and moderated it heavily it would increasingly have gotten better. People would have learned that flagging or flaming wasn't a good idea and those with more reasoned arguments would formed a critical mass to self moderate comments.
Programming is often tribal, yet there aren't a lot of flame over things like Erlang on HN. Because even if not a lot of people know Erlang, we haven't alienated all the Erlang programmers. So Erlang stories are generally advanced enough to not attract bad arguments and even they would someone would presumably challenge it.
Yes, there are political stories that aren't relevant and/nor thoughtful. But those aren't the stories that could, presumably, be categorized as "fit for HN" anyway. But by just banning entire segments of political but relevant stories is letting the "unthoughtful" people win at the cost of the thoughtful ones.
It might not be relevant enough to fight for discussions about Trump in general. But are we going to avoid to talk about e.g. surveillance, like we always have, just because the president is controversial? That would, if anything, be changing HN.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I have a really hard time with this, too. I've seen the problems it's caused me personally and in the US with its crippling polarization. There have been some discussions around HN recently:
I also found Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"[0] really worthwhile. I mean to read it again in the next week or so. What I find particularly impressive with his work is that he found that his research actually changed his own thinking.
And you know, re-reading your response "I've never had facts change anyone's mind", I think even if you don't change someone's mind at the time, finding some common ground, something you agree on is a worthwhile accomplishment. Sometimes it seems the gulf between us is so large. Recognizing that it might not be is reassuring.
You can't comment like this on HN. Snark is deprecated here and personal attacks are a bannable offence. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
There's not just one sense of something being someone's data. The comments people make here are part of public conversations with other people, like in a newsgroup. There's a different sense of something being someone's data in a situation like that than there is in, say, Google Docs.
Imagine one of those collaborative drawing programs in which multiple users can make marks and the resulting drawing is the sum of all their marks. Should one of the users be able to come back later and claim that he wanted all the marks he'd made deleted, on the grounds that they were "his content?" I'd argue that someone doing that would be violating an implicit social contract with the other users.
Similarly, if someone wanted all their HN comments deleted, they'd ruin other people's comments by making them incomprehensible. And how far would deletion be expected to go? If user y quotes part of a comment by user x, is that also supposed to be deleted if x wants his comments deleted? It should be if it's "his personal data," right?
We do delete individual comments and submissions when people do something they worry will get them in trouble. That combined with the fact that accounts are anonymous and that users can wipe their profiles seems to me to strike the right balance.
There are known methods of vote verification and auditing that prevent the actual vote from being disclosed, voluntarily or otherwise. See Punchscan or Scantegrity for examples.
Pretty interesting stuff from a comp sci point of view.
http://hckrnews.com can be used to see which submissions reached the front page and then were marked [dead]. [dead] is distinct from [flagged] and can occur for administrative reasons. [flagged] means that enough users have flagged the story to penalize the ranking, but not to remove it.
http://hnrankings.info can indicate which submissions were [flagged] by enough users to be penalized. You'd be looking for sudden drops in ranking. Note though that the 'flamewar detector' (based on the number of comments to upvotes) can also cause sudden drops that can be hard to distinguish.
If you think your reasons for wanting this are well justified, consider writing a polite email to hn@ycombinator.com and asking if they would be willing to provide it. Personally, I think it would be an interesting analysis, although they may have legitimate reasons to keep the information private.
Yes. There's a few HN APIs/sources out there:
* https://hn.algolia.com/api
* https://github.com/HackerNews/API
* https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news