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Hacker News is a social echo chamber

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Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#81

Post by jlgreco »

MichaelAza wrote: post #59

"There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia." Boy oh boy, I sure love me some Orwell references. Referencing 1984 should be on par with referencing Hitler. It's just a lazy debate tactic. If you have a good point you can make it without resorting to these much-too-often used references. Orwell himself went against it his essay "Politics and the English Language".…

I don't see any particular reason to eschew common or obvious references to history or literature because they are easy or common. If that is honestly something that bothered us, we would be complaining at the shear number of western authors who have been falling back on biblical allusion, or greek mythology for centuries (both in fiction and otherwise). It is easy to reference The Tower of Babel, or the story of Icarus, but we don't complain when people do.

(I know, I know, being an easy comparison isn't the real reason we complain about references to Hitler. I don't find the real reasons to be compelling either.)

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#82

Post by mildtrepidation »

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…

I agree aside from the American jab. If it's happening to you, no matter who you are, I don't think it's unreasonable for that to be your primary complaint or motivation. It's human nature; we're selfish creatures.

Besides, most Americans I know aren't upset that it's happening to them to the exclusion of all others. That it is happening at all is the most common and most reasonable complaint. That it's not explicitly couched in concern for non-US-citizens does mean it implicitly discludes them.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#83

Post by bhauer »

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…

Your heuristics are a very close match for my own. I've written similar options in previous threads here concerning flagging and the ranking algorithm.

Whenever this matter surfaces, I recommend the HN Slapdown user script [1] which indicates stories that have been moved below the position they would have based on points only. In other words, it draws attention to stories that have been flagged or otherwise adversely affected.

In my opinion, the homepage either weights non-upvote inputs too heavily or receives too many non-upvote interactions from users.

I can't be certain whether flagging or other measures such as the "flamewar detector" are more or less responsible for the volatility of the home page ranking. My only anecdotal evidence is that when I have (very rarely) flagged stories, I've witnessed an immediate and severe rank adjustment, often immediately sending the submission into second-page purgatory. This has given me great respect for the severity of flagging.

My heuristics:

1. Most of all, I try to keep my interactions positive. If I don't agree, I act as if I don't care, by which I mean I do nothing. I see little value in downvoting something I disagree with. It won't change the person's mind—only a comment in reply has a chance of that.

2. I will downvote comments that I believe are objectively wrong and potentially misleading to other readers or are clearly intended to be offensive or mean-spirited. Still, I feel I am very sparse with downvotes. I downvote approximately one out of every 1,000 comments I read.

3. I've only flagged stories that are unrelated to technology, but even then only in extreme cases. I don't bother flagging stories about popular fiction, movie reviews, or other elements of geek culture because I don't think those stories are an epidemic at HN. Like you, I feel it's important to leave a comment when flagging a submission. I have flagged two stories if my memory serves me correctly.

4. I skim the new section on every visit to site; about once per day.

5. I upvote stories I find interesting or agreeable. I think this is the point of the upvote. Upvotes are where I can be entirely subjective. I upvote approximately one out of every 10 stories I read.

6. I upvote comments by the same rule as stories. I upvote approximately one out of every 100 comments I read.

7. I strongly disagree with downvoting or flagging simply because of disagreements. I don't think use of downvoting is as problematic at HN as elsewhere (e.g., Reddit), but I do feel there is still slightly excessive comment downvoting and moderately excessive story flagging (or other adjustments).

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/150452

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#84

Post by llamataboot »

VLM wrote: post #55
llamataboot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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…

Not arguing that the discussion is particularly useful, but clearly it is still desired among a large enough subset of HN readers that such stories get voted to the front page and commented on.

--

pg has a very known bias against "political discussions".

I would argue that all discussions are political, and anyone that can say with a straight face that they "don't like politics" doesn't realize how political that statement is.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#85

Post by babs474 »

bcoates wrote: post #72
babs474 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess we will never know how the conversation could have developed since the stories were killed prematurely.

Do you think the comments section of other types of HN stories are held to the same standard? Or do you think the promptness with which these stories are flagged has something to do with their subject matter?

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#86

Post by nether »

lmm wrote: post #11
jiggy2011 wrote: post #3

Is there any online discussion place that isn't to some degree an echo chamber?

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.

/trv/ has a remarkable ongoing discussion on living and working in Antarctica: https://boards.4chan.org/trv/res/751390. There was also one about working on freight ships.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#87

Post by _delirium »

theorique wrote: post #8

In other words, a place focused on particular subjects (technology, programming, science) collects people with similar life experiences, interests, worldviews, etc.

That explains some of it, but I think it's even a narrower focus than that. I participate in several communities that are broadly technology/programming/science, and they're quite different from HN (and from each other). For one thing, my impression is that there are relatively few scientists and engineers on HN. I occasionally will see a post by a biologist or a civil engineer, but it's not typical. Even among computer people, it seems like a particular social subset, perhaps due to being hosted by Y Combinator.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#88

Post by selmnoo »

potatolicious wrote: post #71
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 downv…

> I've given up on upvoting/downvoting any such discussions and simply don't read them anymore. This includes everything on sexism in tech.

You know, I've noticed a lot of the 'superstar commenters' on HN have polar opposite views from each other on a lot of these touchy issues. So, it's sad to see that what ensues out of smart people disagreeing is a plain refusal to talk about these very things.

Why does it have to be this way? Why are some of the most respected and the smartest commenters on this site unwilling to have an intellectually honest debate?

Is it because of time? I've noticed that if I just sound the first thought in my mind, it's likely to come out as being rude ("wow, this sucks", "this is the 100th time I'm seeing this", "why did this person make this obvious mistake?"). It takes effort and time to structure these first thoughts as positive criticisms. Presumably, the smart folks here don't have a lot of time, so maybe it's just that they end up sounding terse and rude only because they don't have the time to reword things to sound more polite and supportive?

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#89

Post by VLM »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #76
angersock wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might help the discussion to provide an example of something really borderline rather than theoretical exploration.

"Bird Bath: The Conservation of a William Morris Textile"

I didn't click flag because I have a certain fondness for dead media preservation, someones going to be writing something very much like this in 50 years for preserving 5.25 floppy media, or flash drives, or a museum preserving its vintage iphone 5, which gives you something to think about. And, after all, its jacquard woven which means a lot to CS/IT/tech people who know what that means (which is probably not many). But its really darn close to the line and I would not feel its excessively outta line for someone else to click flag, if they want to.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#90

Post by angersock »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #76
angersock wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is a &&, not an ||.

If they are well-written but don't involve technology, they don't activate the flag criteria. I may even upvote them if there are cool enough (many New Yorker essays, for example).

If they are poorly-written but do involve technology, they don't activate the flag criteria. I simply won't upvote them.

If they are both, they are taking up link space.

(I'm also personally opposed to the "Let's use hack to describe everything!". That said, I do appreciate good writing--for example, the piece on Frank Lucas that showed up a while ago.)

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