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Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#101

Post by Taek »

justsaysmthng wrote: post #27

HN is the most intelligent and open minded online community of this size that I know online. I have deep respect for you guys and girls and your opinions are always enlightening and thought provoking. I really feel much smarter because I have access to all these very valid points of view that you are surfacing. But even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think" which leads me to go into this…

Anonymity often brings relief to people who weight otherwise self-censor. 4chan is a really good example of this. Though it's got a terrible SNR, the peak signal is actually really high and sometimes you see really intelligent discussions about taboo topics like incest, furrydom, and racism. The anonymity allows people to state beliefs that simply wouldn't be acceptable anywhere else.

Maybe HN should have an 'anonymous' feature for accounts above a certain karma that allows a post to be made with no username attached, and no effect on karma. Behind the scenes, admins can still issue bans for unacceptable comments but the opinion gets protected from the groupthink.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#102

Post by Lawtonfogle »

lowglow wrote: post #2

The inquiry alone is frightening, although much less so than the implications of a surveillance state. Watching Trumbo and learning more about how the US dealt out the "Red Scare" is crushing to my soul. You want to assume people are inherently good actors, but that's not always the case.

>You want to assume people are inherently good actors

I wish I could assume such but having studied a bit of psychology, I have found no evidence to support such an assumption.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#103

Post by ars »

Grishnakh wrote: post #84
ars wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvote button is supposed to be for non-constructive (i.e. stupid/useless) or offtopic messages. Flag is for spam and very very inflammatory stuff. It is NOT supposed to be used for incorrect messages! (Or at least, if the message is grey, don't keep downvoting it just because there is a mistake in it. One downvote is enough.) And most especially it is not for disagreeing with someone - that's what the reply bu…

>Too many people come here from reddit with the mentality that downvote is for disagreement. I'm not so sure about that. I came from Reddit too, however I've been here for months now, and I still can't downvote anyone. From what I'm told, you need a karma of 1000 to get that ability. I can only upvote. So, you have to be a longtime HNer to even have this ability to silence other peoples' opinions. You cannot be some…

> Therefore, I think it's much more likely that what you're seeing (dissenting opinions being downvoted) is coming from both the heavy-handed non-transparent moderators, and from others in their "inner circle" of longtime members.

???

There is no such group on HN. Where are you getting this idea? (Look at my karma score and date joined - if there was such a group I'd know about it by now.)

And on top of that there are tons of users who can downvote, you don't have to be part of some mythical inner circle.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#104

Post by chimeracoder »

striking wrote: post #76
ywecur wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this: Replace the down vote icon completely with the flagging icon, as the down vote icon probably encourages aggravated people to use it in the wrong way.

HN rules don't say anything about the "wrong way" to use the downvote button. If anything, we're encouraged to use it in the way we feel is best.

Here's what dang, who's currently in charge of HN, had to say about downvoting a while back:

> Downvoting for disagreement is not always bad, but it sometimes is. There should be some nuance here. Don't be indiscriminate. When a comment is blatantly false, downvoting is probably ok, especially when there's something else wrong with the comment. But high-quality, polite posts don't deserve penalizing just because you don't share their position. When you see one of those in negative territory, please be a good citizen and upvote it back to par. Users doing that is one of the community's self-correcting mechanisms, and it's more important now that we've made some downvotes more powerful.

(Emphasis mine)

For what it's worth, I agree that this should be in the site rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606517

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#105

Post by fucking_tragedy »

lotharbot wrote: post #98
fucking_tragedy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend's account was shadow banned for discussing tech unionization in the era of certain companies pushing the "10x/unicorn engineer" myth. It accumulated quite a number of up votes as well.

it may be worth checking to see if your friend made other comments around the same time that may have actually been the source of a shadow ban. I've had half a dozen times where someone linked to a comment that supposedly got another account shadow-banned, and I looked at their history and found another comment made at about the same time that was a much more likely culprit. Like, "I got shadow-banned for this commen…

He's a lawyer who runs a blog that dips into related topics often. His identity was clearly associated with his account, so I doubt he was making such comments.

I'll see if I can get the account details because it's renewed my interest.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#106

Post by djibigwhje »

Most of these comments are unrelated to the article.

HN needs some meta site for people to discuss the site itself, feeling up a discussion with a meta discussion creates mostly noise.

For what's its worth, HN Moderation is complete BS, mostly made up of nepotism, sock puppets, and mod whimsy.

Siliencing pretty much any opinion is against the tenets of an open, free discussion. So of course HN becomes an echo chamber.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#109

Post by kaybe »

erichocean wrote: post #56
justsaysmthng wrote: post #27

HN is the most intelligent and open minded online community of this size that I know online. I have deep respect for you guys and girls and your opinions are always enlightening and thought provoking. I really feel much smarter because I have access to all these very valid points of view that you are surfacing. But even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think" which leads me to go into this…

I do the same on HN (self-censor, constantly) and have come to peace with it. I don't submit over 80% of the HN posts I write, and I immediately delete anything that gets one down vote. Furthermore, if I do post something that gets a down vote, I update my "don't post" probabilities to match, meaning I post even less. I'd encourage you to try and not feel bad about the situation. It's not your job to provide insight…

Let's hope I never accidentally downvote any of your posts then. It happens, and I've seen a few other people apologize for it, when your tapping around on a smartphone and try to hit the upvote button without zooming, or just scrolling. (We should really get that fixed, and add another step for downvoting, or such, seeing that it has such a negative impact on people and can't be taken back.)

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#110

Post by fucking_tragedy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

This suggests we should implement mass surveillance of law enforcement personnel. If, as many people assert, the bad behavior of law enforcement is the actions of a minority, then mass surveillance of law enforcement should provide a chilling effect on that minority and result in fewer examples of these abuses. Somehow I don't think that argument would win the day though.

If they have nothing to hide then they should have nothing to worry about ;)
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