221–230 of 241 posts
every strongly moderated place will do. HN and some subreddits like r/science, r/askscience, etc. are of very good quality. can't stress enough that moderation is the key.
Every strongly moderated place turns to the bias of the moderators. Any discussion outside their allowance gets censored.
Now, the loudest, most visible fraction of any political group tends to be the stupid.
So your conversational Utopia needs some kind of poll-test at the entrance.
I think that an educated gentleman of 150 years ago wouldn't be annoyed at the ignorant opinions of a servant, because they were of two different worlds. Today with the spread of literacy and erosion of class distinction, these different levels of discourse are forced together.
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 could also apply to moderation in addition to comments; we could make it so only people whose moderations we respect actually count. Others' voting is disregarded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "bury" I mean more than "grey/flagged/dead". I also mean in terms of order on the page. When looking at rank order, groupthink is a large if not prevailing determinant, especially since HN applies a penalty for contentiousness (defined as lots of upvotes AND downvotes) to both articles, comments and users.
> ...HN applies a penalty for contentiousness (defined as lots of upvotes AND downvotes) to both articles, comments and users. Unless I've misunderstood what you're saying, this simply isn't true.
I suggested to Daniel back then that HN should let users with penalties know that they have them, and show them what earned those penalties so that they can adjust their behavior. Feedback loops only work when the user understands the feedback. He agreed.
It’s also important for transparency. It isn’t very honest to show us our positive karma scores but also keep a separate negative karma hidden.
Almost all of the popular communities online lean left, take your pick. You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. http://gab.ai recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.
I'll be interested in whether the let ISIS-sympathizers and KKK-style white supremacists in, in the name of free speech and the right to offend. That should certainly make for an explosive combination.
I mostly stay here. The amount of political and economic discussion here is what I personally consider enough in my life; I don't think looking for more sources would improve SNR for me. I sometimes like to peruse Reddit for some well-defined topics - the trick is to find an appropriate subreddit for it. So, for instance, when I want to follow SpaceX news, I'll tune in to /r/spacex, because quite a lot of people ther…
HN is where I follow the tech news. For discussions, if we take civility as politeness and elaboration of one's points, HN is quite good. But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good. Here there are some certain and strong biases and dogmas, and the moderation is oligarchic. I've learnt to not post on political stuff and philosophic…
I agree. But how could it be made better?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is where I follow the tech news. For discussions, if we take civility as politeness and elaboration of one's points, HN is quite good. But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good. Here there are some certain and strong biases and dogmas, and the moderation is oligarchic. I've learnt to not post on political stuff and philosophic…
> But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good. I agree. But how could it be made better?
Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. Look at the experimentaion that the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.
If making votes publically visible in the API is a no-go, there are other options, such as Y-combinator accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and produce alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. Or by an algorithm that systematically buries articles and users (whose accounts accrue ranking penalties) that generate any heated debate by challenging the slant. W…
"The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral." Yes a thousand times yes and also lacking in the kind of perspective you would normally hear from people who have struggled in life and learned some valuable life lessons.
Therefore there are are many IRC channels where OldSchoolJohnny could find those discussions.
Oh wait, did he say "for civil discussion"...
Even if it works, I think this might reduce the signal along with the noise :-) The most insightful commentary has at least a touch of rhetoric.