Isaac Asimov Mulls “How Do People Get New Ideas?” (1959)

I personally feel that's just blow back from the spam of "cancer is cured!" "marijuana heals quadriplegic man!" "fusion is solved!" and similar clickbait articles with little substance and big claims to rope in readers.

The fact that one can after reading an online article almost inevitably see all the problems they neglected to mention is less the readers fault and more the writers for presenting a biased opinion-piece under the guise of news. HN critics can of course be wrong just like everyone else but the majority of the time those comments are pointing out serious issues and providing the counterbalance.

I've always felt that a part of the problem on sites like reddit is that upvoting has essentially zero cost: just move your mouse and click the up arrow on whatever tickles you to do so. This means that a lazy comment which mildly amuses 1,000 people will get as many upvotes as an incredibly thoughtful comment which profoundly touches 1,000 people, and ten times as many upvotes as one which only 100 people appreciate, even if the appreciation runs far deeper.

If each account had a limited vote rate (perhaps tied to that user's activity), I think this might help to reduce this effect somewhat. Much the same analysis probably applies to downvotes: currently users will click the down arrow on anything they disagree with, rather than only downvoting comments that severely detract from the conversation. Of course you'd have to be careful about this system being gamed, but all voting systems can be gamed and it's not obvious that this approach is any more vulnerable than usual.

To some extent I think Hacker News' greater discussion quality is due to its poor user interface, as weird as that may seem. Upvoting/downvoting on a mobile device, for example, generally requires zooming in to hit a small target, whereas on reddit I don't need to do that on my iPad at all, and on my iPhone not as much. Commenting on Hacker News also requires visiting another URL, whereas on reddit it happens more effortlessly. These are small things but they can be the hurdle that causes someone not to bother to post that joke or upvote the 17th reply in a meme sequence.

I know this probably sounds like a technical solution to a social problem, and I don't mean to deny the important effect that cultural norms and community policing play. After all, subreddits have widely varying qualities of discussion depending on their community standards, and there's no question Hacker News' quality survives in large part due to community vigilance. But I do think the effortlessness of voting on reddit is a factor which contributes to the prevalence of lowest common denominator comments, and I'd be very interested in seeing reddit or other social forums experiment with imposing a scarcity of voting power.

From the same book, there's also his comment on Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from which he refused an invitation:

"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

Sites like Slashdot have this kind of system, however there are still a lot of comments that get buried, which means you have to browse at -1 or 0 in order to not miss something. Kind of like reviewing your spam filter periodically.

What I think could be a better system is for everyone to be able to mark what they like and don't like, then have the option of sorting by votes of other people that typically vote the same way you do. So people that like a lot of meme humor will see that more, and those that don't won't. Add in the ability to select from various "clusters", so you can also have the experience of reading comments based on alternative tastes, then I think you would have something that is immune from being gamed.

From a ways down the Wikipedia article on "psychohistory":

"Science fiction author and scientist/science writer Isaac Asimov popularized the term in his famous Foundation series of novels, though in his works the term psychohistory is used fictionally for a mathematical discipline that can be used to predict the general course of future flow."

So the humor lies mostly in the second line about how Asimov is not applying the discipline of psychohistory to his thinking about the future, when he wrote an entire fictional trilogy about people using said discipline. The comment you're confused by is written from the perspective of someone who lives in that fictional world.

If you have read this trilogy (which is one of the early classics of science fiction), there may be an additional layer of irony, as much of the story concerns the grand plans based on psychohistorical predictions going horribly awry due to not accounting for a wild card that comes up.