Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
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Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
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Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#2Those comments he linked to did contain actual arguments. They also contained insults, which is unfortunate, but they were definitely not merely ad hominems.
I would not have problems with such comments directed at myself. As long as there are well written, structured arguments in there a insult won’t annoy me. Well, it probably will, but not very much.
I think it‘s also important to note that this is a controversial, highly emotional topic. I would expect it to get a little bit rough whenever that’s the case. The vast majority of comments on HN don’t contain insults or ad hominems.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#3Those comments he linked to did contain actual arguments. They also contained insults, which is unfortunate, but they were definitely not merely ad hominems. I would not have problems with such comments directed at myself. As long as there are well written, structured arguments in there a insult won’t annoy me. Well, it probably will, but not very much. I think it‘s also important to note that this is a controversial…
I think the problem is that there are progressively fewer and fewer places where civil discourse is the norm. Many sites start out that way and establish a stimulating environment. As the site becomes popular and attracts a wider audience, civility and discourse are replaced by memes, ageism, misogyny, and sarcastic sniping. I think we've all seen it happen, on many sites. It gets old fast.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#4Such spiritedness is very rare on HN, and such comments can be downmoded to invisibility, which I think is enough.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#5HN is not civil towards external targets (i.e. bloggers, Microsoft, Zuckerberg, etc), but it is civil in the sense that HN readers are discouraged from attacking each other.
I guess we could learn to not attack the authors or subjects of the articles, but that's not the point. The "civil discussion" rules are there to keep the discussion from degrading into flame wars, not to be nice to bloggers.
Also, not that he uses simple present (HN readers are mean), then only considers one article (his own article about why you should never ever hire a job hopper). Most of the discussions seem fairly civilized to me. I guess you wear a bit of heat if you suggest that a large fraction of your audience isn't worth hiring. The insults weren't pretty, but they aren't typical HN comments.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#6The civility on HN is unparallelled. This community, with pg's guidance has done an amazing job of fostering a thoughtful community for intelligent discussion. Suster's arguments all focus around one particular discussion in which emotions ran a little higher than usual, and are not, in my opinion, representative of the community as a whole.
As for Suster's suggestions, the first one would be a mistake. There are many situations when a throw away account is warranted, such as asking for anonymous advice on a tricky work situation, or submitting a controversial article.
For the second suggestion, it already exits. Once a user reaches a certain karma level s/he has the ability to down-vote comments.
For the last, an RSS feed on a user's "threads" page would likely be useful to those who wanted to be notified on updated conversations they are participating in.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#7To be totally honest, the article those comments were in response to was an ad hominem directed at many of our users. It's one thing to ask if someone's going to leave in 6 months. But it's another thing to ask if someone is a job hopper.
I think a point can be made that we should have risen above his ad hominems, but don't complain about an argument you started.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#81. If you are writing self-admittedly inflammatory material, and you get inflammatory responses, you should try stopping doing that and see what happens before suggesting changes in HN. People are mirrors.
2. You can flag inappropriate comments (click on their link or parent link for the flag link to appear). [EDIT maybe there's a karma threshold to see the flag link.]
I think swearing and meanness is very rare on HN. I would say there is a fair bit of "scrappiness" - argumentativeness/combativeness - which sometimes undermines the productivity of the discussion. But although annoying, it's quite different from mean spiritedness.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#9The civility on HN is unparallelled. This community, with pg's guidance has done an amazing job of fostering a thoughtful community for intelligent discussion. Suster's arguments all focus around one particular discussion in which emotions ran a little higher than usual, and are not, in my opinion, representative of the community as a whole. As for Suster's suggestions, the first one would be a mistake. There are man…
He's asking for a notification of when his site is linked to, not anything to do with conversations. It sounds like a clumsy solution to a problem that trackbacks should already have solved.
Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News
#10Job hopping is a touchy subject because young people don't like job hopping, as was discussed in those posts. They do it because, in today's corporate climate, they usually have to do it in order to prevent being pigeonholed, neglected, and otherwise left to stagnate.
Most people in most companies are going to find that the people above them don't care about their advancement. Sure, companies have their spiel about personal growth and continuing professional development, but it's often paper-thin. Managers can't look out for the careers and development of 10 or 20 different people, so it's often only one or two who gets "protege" status (favoritism in project allocation, mentoring, political look-out).
Also, the level of visibility and relevant work that are necessary for career advancement in today's competitive culture simply cannot be available to everyone. Unless you're a startup founder, you have to become the protege of someone important-- which only happens for the lucky few within 12 months at a new job, or you're wasting your time. This means that anyone with half a speck of ambition is going to keep moving around until finding a fit. No one exactly likes doing this; it's better to have this success early on and no longer need to "job hop".
So job hopping is not really voluntary. It's a natural outgrowth of today's corporate culture, one created by our elders who seem to be unhappy about our rational response to it. They're mad that the people under 35 have actually figured out the unwritten rules.
Oh, and I am pw0ncakes. Why did I (have to) change username? Because the incivility on Hacker News exists on both sides of the table. At least uncivil comments can be seen and argued against, whereas the sloppy, poorly-reasoned, invisible and heavy-handed ban policy, on the other hand...