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Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

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Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#71

Post by ultramancool »

creshal wrote: post #65
ultramancool wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a site that indexes reddit's most downvoted posts and quite often it's about 75% right-leaning political news being posted to major news and politics subreddits, if you visit those subreddits, the upvoted stuff is indeed stuff that's more left-leaning. Hard to see otherwise here, especially when you factor in the upvotes and not just # of comments.

> There's a site that indexes reddit's most downvoted posts Link?

http://notreddit.top

Not much political stuff on the past day right now but if you look at the past month's posts about the US presidential candidates you'll see what I'm talking about.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#72

Post by Symbiote »

Jtsummers wrote: post #35
gunn wrote: post #17

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy. Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules th…

/.'s moderation system sort of gives you this, but not the connection to the authors of the posts. You set a score threshold for visibility. The discussion system hides things below the threshold, but doesn't hide the thread itself (like reddit does, IIRC). * (Score: 5) Some stuff * (Score: 0) *Hidden* * (Score: 4) Actually, if you read ... * (Score: -1) *Hidden* * (Score: 3) Blah blah blah Posts are also moderated b…

/. used to have a "friends and foes" feature, which is more or less as described.

I think you could set +1 or -1 for

  friends
  foes
  friends-of-friends
  friends-of-foes
  foes-of-friends
  foes-of-foes
I had a few "foes" set to -1, to attempt to filter out some frequent, crazy commenters. But I stopped reading the site when extreme opinions became the only opinions.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#73

Post by pyre »

sergiotapia wrote: post #63
hood_syntax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative IMO, it doesn't matter if the platform leans left as long as it fosters constructive and open discussion. You're correct that a lot of the heavy handed moderation (censorship?) is on popular communities that trend left, but that's just a money related trend imo. Companies want to make their product a "safe" platform for investors

> but that's just a money related trend imo It's _much_ more insidious, but I'll leave it at that.

You to realize the irony that in a discussion about constructive / objective / considerate discussion, you have posted something that is not very constructive.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#77

Post by pjc50 »

creshal wrote: post #62
gunn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they…

I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to. How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here…

> high-quality content you disagree with

I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic?

The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views.

The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#78

Post by JDiculous »

gunn wrote: post #17

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy. Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules th…

This is a fantastic idea, and I'd love to see it tested out. Unfortunately I can't see HN or Reddit actually implementing this feature. They already have the monopoly over their respective communities, and thus have stopped toying with new features and innovating.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#79

Post by rootusrootus »

gunn wrote: post #41
creshal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Only showing downvoted authors would, going by my Reddit voting statistic, expose me to 95% dick jokes and 5% authors that have valid points I dis…

> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they…

In my opinion it is not really possible to have a good comments system when voting is simply up or down. The definition of up and down varies too much by person to really be all that useful for anything other than creating an effective echo chamber. I think we need easy, one-click ways of classifying a comment with a more specific assessment.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#80

Post by Jtsummers »

Symbiote wrote: post #72
Jtsummers wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/.'s moderation system sort of gives you this, but not the connection to the authors of the posts. You set a score threshold for visibility. The discussion system hides things below the threshold, but doesn't hide the thread itself (like reddit does, IIRC). * (Score: 5) Some stuff * (Score: 0) *Hidden* * (Score: 4) Actually, if you read ... * (Score: -1) *Hidden* * (Score: 3) Blah blah blah Posts are also moderated b…

/. used to have a "friends and foes" feature, which is more or less as described. I think you could set +1 or -1 for friends foes friends-of-friends friends-of-foes foes-of-friends foes-of-foes I had a few "foes" set to -1, to attempt to filter out some frequent, crazy commenters. But I stopped reading the site when extreme opinions became the only opinions.

Oh, that's right. I'd totally forgotten about it.

https://slashdot.org/faq/friends.shtml

I stopped reading it when I couldn't find interesting articles [EDIT: 0]. I think the firehose style of HN or Reddit is, in many ways, better than the curated submission system of /.. User directed submission moderation + scanning /new is usually enough for me, paired with going to direct to certain news sources (for whatever particular topic or category).

The comments were also pretty annoying. For those not familiar: See the strong anti-Microsoft posts that periodically show up here, and imagine that as the only thing that makes it to +5 when MS announces something. A ton of rhetoric with no substance.

EDIT:

[0] There were interesting articles. But there was a period (not sure about today) where the updates to the frontpage were incredibly slow. Perhaps I could've dug more into the topic areas or set some different display options, but things changed too slowly and I'd end up seeing the same articles for most of a day, or days.

On the one hand, this is a good format for some sites (and maybe for /.) as it allows things to remain visible for extended periods. On the other hand, it wasn't good for my usecase. /. was an aggregator, I wanted to see it update frequently. If I wanted a news magazine that totally cycles its front page only once a week, I'd be on that site.

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