Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study • Hacker News Board

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#161

Post by nitrogen » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 3:34 AM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #58

dhimes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea this kind of thing happened. I've never seen it (and known what I was looking at anyway). I have, however, looked at some hellbanned accounts to see what caused the hellbanning and sometimes it's not apparent- that is, replies that aren't particularly insulting or vapid or anything obviously antisocial. I figured they were banned for some other reason- like sneaking advertisements in or something (that…

Another account of mine was hellbanned for triggering some automated response based on voting patterns - which were very suspicious, but had a legitimate reason (specifically I downvoted comments that were of topic, which was most if not all the comments in that thread).

It would be nice if HN had some way to say, "this whole sub-thread together tanks the SNR". Sometimes a thread will go wildly off topic, but there are so many replies off the topic that more interesting on-topic points can't be raised above the noise. Sometimes I wonder if this could be a deliberate astroturfing strategy.

One recent example was a useless conversation about whether the US was a democracy or a republic, with 10 different people saying the same thing. Those 10 comments with replies fill several scrolling pages, so the real topic of conversation is buried.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#162

Post by wfo » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 4:20 AM UTC

williamcotton wrote: post #132

eternalban wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think" There is absolutely no social cost for downvoting without commenting. Adding costs and accountability: - force comment box on downvotes - deduct from karma - flagging only Is it important for HN's community to have a "psychologically safe" [1] at this point in time? I can not think of a more critical time for the "STEM" crowd to have a viable…

HackerNews is a marketing channel for a technology investment firm. Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations somehow promote criticism of companies that they are involved with?

They should care because they've created an excellent community and a wonderful forum for thoughtful discussion, not many of which exist on the internet. It's something to embrace and be proud of.

It's not perfect but it puts every other fairly large public internet forum I've seen to shame.

Not everything has to be done for economic gain. If you want to pretend it's all a ruse to make more money then you are free to consider having such a robust discussion forum to be good PR for Y Combinator; it garners an enormous amount of goodwill and respect in the tech community.

And they do care about earnest thoughtful balanced conversation. There are plenty of posts critical of YC companies or PG or you name it that are not censored. Mods interact with the community regularly to enforce standards and curate post quality.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#163

Post by elementalest » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 4:46 AM UTC

eternalban wrote: post #50

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…

> even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think" There is absolutely no social cost for downvoting without commenting. Adding costs and accountability: - force comment box on downvotes - deduct from karma - flagging only Is it important for HN's community to have a "psychologically safe" [1] at this point in time? I can not think of a more critical time for the "STEM" crowd to have a viable…

I like the idea of deducting karma for a downvote. However, forcing a comment on downvote, while perhaps leading to less downvotes, might also just lead to many more comments that are not thought out and simply put there in order to downvote.

Maybe we need more nuanced voting options? While this could get a bit complex, such a system may function better. People could upvote a post as it is well written/thought out and/or is provocative/clever/interesting, but downvote it as they disagree. The overall comment karma would balance out, rather than it just being downvoted as lots of people disagreed with it.

Facebook is now using a similar type of system with their multiple emotes. I think such a system would work well with the HN community. It may lead to more thought out comments, as simple opinions can be expressed more accurately via the voting system.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#164

Post by frik » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 4:55 AM UTC

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…

Some companies game the voting system on HN. You only need a few/dozens accounts with 2000+ karma to create group thinking by down-voting non-popular opinions that may harm the reputation of the company. We can regularly see this behaviour from a certain company from Redmond, their news on HN are heavily "moderated", and "not so great" news about them get flagged from the HN frontpage in no time and at the same time they release another "nice" news blurb that gets many votes in seconds. The HN users were more in favor of the competition, and since Build'15 a swamp of new HN accounts got created to form the opinion about new products, and give them a positive spin while on the same time hide and downvote all true comments about the evil spy features of their OS v10 and their other newer products that cannot be turned off by end consumers.

HN needs more logging to detect such coordinated (down-)voting rings to avoid group thinking and opinion shaping orchestrated by bad players.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#165

Post by akerro » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 5:20 AM UTC

USANEEDSHELP wrote: post #9

akerro wrote: post #3

Mass surveillance was created to work against minorities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/canada-en... https://overland.org.au/2014/07/surveillance-of-activists-is... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

Mass surveillance is meant to work against anybody and everybody

Snoopers’ Charter: Only amendment politicians have submitted to controversial bill is to stop MPs being spied on

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#166

Post by js8 » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 5:37 AM UTC

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…

> This is my 3rd HN account - I've abandoned the others (with lots of karma on them) specifically as a protest for (what I thought were) valid opinions being down voted and dismissed.

Hi there from my 2nd account! I have also abandoned about 1K points of karma, because I thought I should censor myself less and care less about it.

Surprisingly, I didn't get downvoted as much as I expected. Lot of comments I make and consider really silly get high karma, and yet other my comments which I consider to be a really good points are sitting there with 1. The moderation system seems quite random.

I think the big problem of modern moderation systems is the fleeting nature of all those discussions. Having a persistent discussion about a topic is difficult. I think something like Wiki or Stackoverflow works, but only to an extent.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#167

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 5:43 AM UTC

imron wrote: post #139

jacquesm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma economy: Every submitted link or comment: +1 karma, every upvote, another +1, but a -1 for the upvoter. In the case of a downvote on a comment: -1 for the comment writer, -1 for the downvoter.

I think the upvoter should remain karma neutral. That keeps a steady flow of karma currency entering the system, which is necessary when the primary mechanism for filtering and ranking interesting content is upvoting. If you penalise users for doing that, they'll do less of it, which will make the ranking/filtering less effective.

The writing of good comments and the submission of good links will already do that.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#168

Post by MawNicker » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 5:48 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #154

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd encourage you to stop 'self-censoring'. What matters a few karma points, if you have something important to say? You'll find that often an initial knee-jerk downvoting can turn around half a day later, as more considerate users join the conversation.

I comment a lot less on HN than I used to, and a lot of that I think has to do with the change in the community, the tone, something like that. For me I don't care about internet points, but upvotes and downvotes affect how visible your comments end up being in a thread. It seems as though there's a lot less substantive discussion on HN than there used to be. The front page moves faster and people aren't interested i…

Please comment more. It may just be that I like your username but I've read many excellent comments and noticed they were yours. This is totally selfish of me but I'd rather have you yelling into the void sometimes so long as that keeps happening.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#169

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 5:54 AM UTC

hammock wrote: post #160

jacquesm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma economy: Every submitted link or comment: +1 karma, every upvote, another +1, but a -1 for the upvoter. In the case of a downvote on a comment: -1 for the comment writer, -1 for the downvoter.

Each upvote on a submission: +100 for submitter, -1 for voter. Each upvote on a comment: +10 for commenter, -1 for voter. Each downvote on a comment: -10 for commenter, -1 for voter This aligns with the ladder of engagement, where there are 10x as many creators as commenters as voters, while keeping a steady stream of currency injection.

> 10x as many creators as commenters as voters

It's rather the opposite. There are tens of thousands of potential voters, a fraction of that in comments and a fraction of that in quality link submitters (once you filter out the spam). Anyway, regardless of the situation there is an easy way out of this: measure and adjust accordingly, I'm sure 'arc' has the ability to define named constants.

This would also answer the question 'what is karma good for?' once and for all.

Re: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

#170

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 6:02 AM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #105

lotharbot wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Be sure to mail Dan once you do.