When you write to hacker news to say hacker news is an echo chamber I go into an infinite loop and run out of stack space, thanks a lot.
Hacker News is a social echo chamber
101–110 of 206 posts
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#102I'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 think the problem is that some people are not as thoughtful as you are when it comes to up/downvotes. The terrible "downvote because I disagree" is not as bad as in other forums but it's definitely on the rise. When people use the voting system to express an opinion instead of judging the quality of the comment itself it kills the quality of the discussion very very quickly in my experience. The people who don't ta…
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Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#103"The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research." I believe the credit we assign to peer reviewed scientific, mathematical, or engineering papers shouldn't be anywhere near the same weight we assign to peer reviewed social science papers. I dealt with quite a lot of these papers early in my career and they do a wonderful job of backing up grant proposals but a poor job of being correct. My…
While my inclination is to agree with your critical view of social science research, I think picking at this example misses the point of the article.
The idea that 'hivemind' discussions are drowning out 'other' viewpoints has merit with respect to this forum. There are copious examples, from role-of-government discussions to technical preferences.
Indeed, there are cases where the community massively promotes dubious science that it finds agreeable.
We would be foolish to throw out this author's commentary because one of his examples is not bulletproof.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#104"The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research." I believe the credit we assign to peer reviewed scientific, mathematical, or engineering papers shouldn't be anywhere near the same weight we assign to peer reviewed social science papers. I dealt with quite a lot of these papers early in my career and they do a wonderful job of backing up grant proposals but a poor job of being correct. My…
I think your second sentence reads the opposite of what you mean!
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#105The 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.
Exactly. I hate when people do that -- cite an argument that got torn to shreds as if it was widely accepted.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#106In other words, a place focused on particular subjects (technology, programming, science) collects people with similar life experiences, interests, worldviews, etc.
What does having an interest in technology, programming and science have to do with the huge libertarian/pro-capitalist bias HN has?
I think the pro-capitalist bias comes from the fact that a lot of people here are entrepreneurial. The site is hosted by a company that funds startups.
The libertarian part? I'm not so sure there, but I'd guess that it comes from a sense of "I'm just trying to build my business, it'd be awesome if a bunch of silly regulations and crap would get out of my way"
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#107I'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 when the story is deceitful or otherwise not a legitimate topic of discussion. I also rarely upvote stores, although I frequently up or down comments.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 know some people lost their ability to flag while doing exactly that (the 'flag' link is removed entirely when that happens, the removal of the ability isn't invisible to the user it happens to), but I am unaware of anybody being hellbanned for it.
I can no longer flag because I flagged every inappropriate political post on the front page for a couple days. (It was a pretty bad stretch). I knew it wouldn't help much but it made me feel better. As a result I was flag-banned.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#109Is 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.
Yes and no, maybe on /b/ but not really on the other boards.
For instance /v/ is mostly very sexist, /pol/ is mostly very antisemitic. Even when there's no voting/karma of any sort if an idea gets a lot of traction at some point people who disagree will get flamed and passed a certain point will give up/stop discussing the topic/leave the forum for some other place.
When someone posts a very unpopular opinion it can't be downvoted, of course, but it will either be ignored or flamed until the thread gets completely train-wrecked/expired/killed by the mods.
Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber
#110So are CSPAN, NPR, and most media outlets. Duh.