Well culture is an echo chamber. It does not mean it's bad. I see it as there is a certain culture here, one which i happen to be in agreement with most of the time, while there is still room for dissent.
no there isnt
Hacker News is a social echo chamber
41–50 of 206 posts
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#42Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. Really? I've tended to notice the opposite: new ones are constantly appearing, they get lots of comments, inspire heated debates and most sentiments are sympathetic, sometimes to an almost unhealthy and postmodern degree.
These stories regularly appear, get upvoted, inspire lots of discussion, then get flagged and disappeared within the hour. It's almost as if the people /visiting/ this site want to talk about these things but the people /running/ the site don't.
Also, many of us have no problems with postmodernity and consider ourselves part of the political left. Which is fine, programming and god forbid "startup culture" should not be monolithic.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Flamewar" is such a Paul Graham term that doesn't really help with dealing with the problem. I'd rather use the reddit terminology of "controversial discussions" where people are coming from very different places. I think the problems with Hacker News has more to do with a failure to account for those situations over the echo chamber discussions where everyone is in (borderline-insufferable) agreement.
> "Flamewar" is such a Paul Graham term We were discussing flame wars on Slashdot before News.YC (ahem, Hacker News) even existed. People on the internet before then were discussing flame wars on usenet (as the parent post mentions).
We had perfectly good flamewars on BBSes in the 80s, and it only got worse once fidonet sprung up.
And before that on ham radio bands like 80M and to a lesser extent 20M we had plenty of people arguing over basically nothing since... I donno 1920s or so?
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#44I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative: - I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions. - I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through…
As an other point of data:
- I only flag stories that are clearly posted here for promotional purposes only (example: Ask HN threads where the author does not ask anything but just posts a link to his site/startup)
- I upvote stories that I feel have a very good level of quality (i.e., deeply technical stuff) and have a low point count (support the underdogs)
- I upvote any comment that's mature, respectful, and which the author clearly spent a decent chunk of time on.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#45Flamewars != disagreements. Discouraging flamewars (namecalling, counterproductive arguing that devolves into ad hominem and unrelated attacks) doesn't mean it kills stories that generate disagreement and discussion. I've had many a disagreement in HN threads, been convinced that my original stance was wrong, and (I believe) convinced others that their original stance was wrong (or incomplete, or to change something…
Reasoned disagreement is obviously easier to deal with than emotional attacks, but topics that incite emotional responses are arguably the most important ones to keep visible - they expose the most contentious points of disagreement in a community. It's certainly true that these angry discussions contain little of value in themselves, but the fact that they exist is valuable. A better compromise would be to limit fur…
That's not why Hacker News exists. It's to share and discuss things hackers find interesting. It got as popular and important as it is for a reason, and a piece of that reason are the rules that people now are complaining about. There are other places on the internet to vent your outrage.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#46I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative: - I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions. - I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through…
You should visit new and upvote the interesting links, and consider flagging the links that should not be here.
If a submission is good I always upvote it.
I downvote quite often, but not for disagreement, only for comments that are not helpful to the discussion.
HN would be better if more people used their tools.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
4chan. Anonymous (well, you can use a trip, but you'll be mocked for it). No downvotes. Very limited moderation, and what there is has a lot of transparency. There's, inevitably, a lot of low-level trolling, but you also get some amazingly original insights.
4chan [...] amazingly original insights. On /b/? Where?
/b/ is not 4chan. I for one find the /int/ board pretty interesting (less the racist bullshit that's posted from time to time to troll people).
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh no. You can criticize HN while also claiming pg has the right to do what he wants. Oh look, the article does just that: "Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. "
Oh look, I never once said the author wasn't allowed to criticize the way HN was run. I said that if he wants something different, then do it himself instead of trying to hijack HN for his purposes.
I think I agree with what you mean, but I only agree in practice if this thread was started and is being contributed to by the OP. He can't control if an HNer submits this.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reasoned disagreement is obviously easier to deal with than emotional attacks, but topics that incite emotional responses are arguably the most important ones to keep visible - they expose the most contentious points of disagreement in a community. It's certainly true that these angry discussions contain little of value in themselves, but the fact that they exist is valuable. A better compromise would be to limit fur…
That's not why Hacker News exists. It's to share and discuss things hackers find interesting. It got as popular and important as it is for a reason, and a piece of that reason are the rules that people now are complaining about. There are other places on the internet to vent your outrage.
Hackers clearly find these topics interesting - they get upvoted and spark debate. The problem is that if they spark excessively acrimonious debate, the topic gets treated as if it wasn't interesting in the first place. The stated aim is to avoid flamewars, not to avoid making people aware of controversial topics.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#50What HN should do is add a feature where readers can upvote stories so they can have their say about what is on the front page. This would address OP's concerns.
Stories receive upvotes and reach the front page. Certain topics then tend to be aggressively flagged and vanish off the front page no matter how many upvotes they have.
I don't see an issue with that. There are other venues for discussing certain things. This isn't to say that these topics are bad, just that at the time, they really don't belong here.