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Hacker News is a social echo chamber

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Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#71

Post by potatolicious »

DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'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…

- I flag stories only if it seems like the story is abusive, not just off-topic (e.g., overly self-promotional, complete noise, etc). This happens very rarely.

- I don't usually upvote stories. I only do so if I have a very immediate "holy shit this is amazing!" reaction to it.

- I upvote comments frequently, particularly if it's a good, well-argued point done in good style (i.e., more factual than rhetoric). I downvote a lot more than I used to, but usually reserve it for posts I consider abusive. This means ad hominems and egregious displays of fundamentalism/extremism (e.g., "all laws are paid for by big corporate interests", which comes up every. single. time. AirBnb or Uber is mentioned).

That last part is subject to some personal bias naturally, but I do think it's important to reward posts that provide a holistic, nuanced view of issues rather than the fiery rhetoric of people banging on black and white drums. I've noticed a lot more of this sort of drumbeating on HN nowadays.

There are some topics that show up on HN frequently, but the discussion is incredibly poor every single time. I've given up on upvoting/downvoting any such discussions and simply don't read them anymore. This includes everything on sexism in tech.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#72

Post by bcoates »

babs474 wrote: post #14
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #5

Stories 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.

This is really an egregious pattern. Two examples below. One is an npr story. You can flag these stories all you want, but they still influence how the wider population views programmers and the field. Wouldn't it be interesting to discuss that here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6374508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360328

Those stories are barely more than gossip and belong on mainstream news sites. It doesn't look like they were generating much of interest in the comments either, just the usual go-my-team rhetoric and unfocused outrage in a random direction.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#73

Post by blueblob »

danielweber wrote: post #57
DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'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…

I heard about a guy getting hellbanned for flagging all but one of the "Steve Jobs is dead" stories on the day Steve Jobs died. Each time my finger hovers over the "flag" button I wonder ". . . is this really worth the hassle?" Then I close the tab and go off somewhere else. (I've flagged probably 10 things total.) EDIT : jlgreco corrects me. The guy I was thinking of was flag-banned, not hell-banned.

I wanted to do this for the google privacy settings change, did 4 links about it really need to be on the front page?

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#74

Post by VLM »

jdjb wrote: post #64
VLM wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"inspire lots of discussion" inspire lots of repeated, rehashed discussion. Hey you probably don't know this, but some guys working in sausagefest industry segments, like IT, exhibit uncivilized behavior around women, and I theorize acting like apes doesn't exactly encourage ladies to help us fix the sausagefest problem, bet you never heard about that story before! However, story 234243 on that topic adds nothing so…

Thank you. Far too often it's the same story, over and over again. Whether it's ageism, anti-gay or anti-women it's always the same issue and the same discussion that comes up. Everyone laments at the situation and then goes back to hiring young white male developers. I feel the NSA stories are the same. We get it; they're intercepting as much internet traffic as they can get and trying to break SSL (which they haven…

"my personal favourite are the Americans who are mostly outraged at the fact they're being targeted (sic)"

Despite a fear of dredging up a flamewar, what you're describing is a turf war where according to various executive orders the FBI is supposed to be spying on us, and the NSA is supposed to be spying on them. Its a (astroturf? planted?) distractor from the core issue of a whole lotta spying going on. And that's the long format explanation of why it adds nothing to the conversation.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#75

Post by yummyfajitas »

The author's sole example is incorrect. Paul Graham did not dismiss any peer reviewed research. The original article provided no argument (peer reviewed or otherwise) asserting that natural born programmers were a myth - the cited research merely argued that the belief in natural born programmers was harmful. Paul Graham gave an anecdote explaining why he believed in natural born programmers.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#76

Post by k-mcgrady »

angersock wrote: post #53
DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'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…

My heuristics go as follows: - I flag stories only if they're poorly-written and completely unrelated to tech, or if they are opinion pieces that fail to back up their assertions (two or three short paragraphs)--in those cases I'll try to comment on why I flagged it. - I upvote stories if they're technically interesting or socially relevant; I try to make a pass through the new section at least once every day. - I up…

>> "I flag stories only if they're poorly-written and completely unrelated to tech"

Why the tech requirement? It's HackerNews not TechNews. There are plenty of good posts I've found useful which fit the hacker label but not the tech one.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#77

Post by untog »

jasonlotito wrote: post #50
mjg59 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the principle feels odd to me. Flags appear to be more powerful than upvotes. So a minority of users can remove stories the majority wants to see.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#78

Post by VLM »

Pxtl wrote: post #15
the_watcher wrote: post #4

Flamewars != 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…

The end result is the same though, HN conceals any controversial subjects, even ones that are important to the vitality of our industry.

"important to the vitality of our industry"

I do not think the topics getting the smackdown fit that category very well. They fit the category of meaningless "raise awareness" and "anecdote party" and "shouting match". But Vitality? Important?

How about Industry? They are VERY important to the linkbait multi-page online "journalism" banner ad soaked industry, but not the HN readers, mods, or owner. This probably makes linkbait industry people angry, come on guys you're supposed to be addicted to this stuff so click! but its not our problem. I don't know why they'd want us anyway, probably no community on the net with a higher concentration of adblockers installed in our browsers, so we won't make linkbaiters any money anyway.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#79

Post by mynewwork »

tehwalrus wrote: post #23
makerops wrote: post #16

I tend to agree with the premise of the article, but found this line from a self described "big government" type, funny: We have always been at war with Eastasia.

big government != mind control. EDIT: to add, I thought that Orwell actually wrote an essay called "I am on the left" although I can't now find it. He was definitely not right wing - he was just very critical of communism as a supposedly left wing system.

Reading Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was eye-opening for me, I'd highly recommend it to everyone.

In short, while I think communism is roughly the worst idea ever, that book gave me an understanding of the world he lived in and why he was quite rational to view radically left-wing ideas as the best option for that time and place. A functioning, reasonably fair capitalist society like we have in the US today would have been unimaginable or unbelievable based on his life experiences.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#80

Post by te_platt »

Semaphor wrote: post #65
DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'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…

- I flagged one story in my time on HN ( - I see newer stories thanks to some chrome extensions showing a 2 column layout. I rarely upvote though as I feel I am too inexperienced to decide what others should find interesting. - I upvote comments that made me learn something. I downvote "redditism", flaming etc. Just as another data point.

It's ok to upvote something just because you found it interesting. Emphasis on you.
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