181–190 of 204 posts
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...
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I am often stunned at how eloquent some conversations are on 4chan, and am dismayed when I realize this is because anonymity allows us to be truthful without the baggage of reputation and consequences of controversy - which is how we make progress. We must never lose our ability to remain anonymous when necessary.
> I am often stunned at how eloquent some conversations are on 4chan Can you show me some examples? I tried browsing 4chan, but the site's navigation trips me up badly.
Yes, some very smart people go there and some very intelligent discussions occur sometimes.
I wish you luck!
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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 th…
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I am often stunned at how eloquent some conversations are on 4chan, and am dismayed when I realize this is because anonymity allows us to be truthful without the baggage of reputation and consequences of controversy - which is how we make progress. We must never lose our ability to remain anonymous when necessary.
> I am often stunned at how eloquent some conversations are on 4chan Can you show me some examples? I tried browsing 4chan, but the site's navigation trips me up badly.
Then there is the crazy things that /b/ will do with a photo. There was a principal who was goading the group with a photo of two underage girls, the tenacious Anonymous was able to run down the school and principal.
It is scary and soothing at the same time.
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It is not "just karma". This isn't Reddit. On here, low karma means you can't downvote (while higher-karma people can, so they can use that to suppress the opinions of the low-karma people), which effectively makes you a second-class citizen here. Even worse, if the mods disagree strongly with your post, they'll happily detach it (so no one else can see it) and threaten to ban you.
> It is not "just karma". On here, low karma means you can't downvote (while higher-karma people can, so they can use that to suppress the opinions of the low-karma people) It is "just karma". Without karma, you can't negatively effect other people's karma, which is also just karma . This is the default state everyone started in. Moreover, you can still suppress opinions while having low karma - simply upvote everyth…
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> It is not "just karma". On here, low karma means you can't downvote (while higher-karma people can, so they can use that to suppress the opinions of the low-karma people) It is "just karma". Without karma, you can't negatively effect other people's karma, which is also just karma . This is the default state everyone started in. Moreover, you can still suppress opinions while having low karma - simply upvote everyth…
I disagree. On here, with low karma, you're a second-class citizen. You have much less ability to suppress opinions; you can only upvote, not downvote, so you can't target someone specifically. Hoping to drown them out by upvoting everything else isn't the same; only posts that are actually downvoted get turned to gray here. So because of this mechanism, this place ends up being exactly what you complain about: "an e…
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…
You're missing out. I regularly have posts that go to -2, -3, etc., which are then upvoted back into positive territory. Here's a fairly recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11332081 (I think that one got downvoted initially for the explicit religious imagery.)
The little mental boost I get from an occasional 'yo-yo' completely counteracts the 0 and -1 votes I get all the time. But mostly, I don't care about internet points. The point is to learn and share.
Which isn't to say that I don't occasionally delete a post, or wish that I had. Another word for "self-censorship" is "judgment".
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I disagree. I have sometimes faced reply comments that are quite unreasonable and at times meant solely as insult. It's very rare here, but still a risk. But what's far worse is that the moderation of Hacker News functions with very little transparency. Even just Googling for the moderator `dang` turns up a lot of angry rants on other blogs and in other sections of the internet, full of people who feel wronged by bla…
> And I'm speaking as someone with a lot of anti-authoritarian tendencies. I'm not shy at all about speaking my mind and I struggle with finding a way to feign respect for authority apparatuses that are not legitimate, like HN moderation. If I feel this apprehension and backlash, I can only imagine that more timid readers feel it to a much more damaging degree. (I'm preemptively sorry if I end up delving into the rea…
I also don't think that bad moderator actions are common either. Most users probably don't even notice it. It's arguable that this makes it even worse, since it's harder to get the community to care about healthy community-approved policies if they are only protecting a handful of people who are sometimes outside of the HN group-think.
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...
This goes for working environments too -- where it may not be ethnic or political minorities being intrinsically oppressed, but instead anyone expressing minority opinions within the context of the organization. Open-plan surveillance workspaces are meant to produce monoculture, and a whole generation of programmers has essentially gifted that opportunity to employers by failing to insist upon minimally acceptable wo…
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This goes for working environments too -- where it may not be ethnic or political minorities being intrinsically oppressed, but instead anyone expressing minority opinions within the context of the organization. Open-plan surveillance workspaces are meant to produce monoculture, and a whole generation of programmers has essentially gifted that opportunity to employers by failing to insist upon minimally acceptable wo…
But a company generally doesn't want diversity, they want predictability. Predictability as to how fast and when something will be done, predictability on the quality of the work. Sure having thought diversity in solving problems is a good thing, but look at how complicated software project scheduling is already.
It makes a lot less sense in knowledge work, where the problems are not standardized and often solutions are unknown. In these cases, the uniformity desired through these surveillance measures makes no sense. It's fundamentally not the same as a McDonald's burger, no matter how much management wishes so.
Worse still, even if you did want homogeneity of software design output, the best way to get it is to give workers conditions in which the environment supports their productivity. Taylorized fast-food kitchens support certain types of productivity and are a rational response to that business need. But it's more of a cargo cult superficiality to try to impose the same idea on a knowledge domain where quiet and privacy are fundamental to the product.
On the other hand, if instead of productivity the employer cares more about having a visually fancy-looking space, as a means for status signaling, or cares about having a good staff on-paper to heighten an acquihire valuation, then open-plan makes more sense. It's bad for the employees though, because of course the employer can't admit to hiring people just for status, show, or credential, so they have to at least feign concern over productivity, thus putting knowledge workers in the bind of having to be productive in a fundamentally anti-productive setting.