Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People • Hacker News Board

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#301

Post by ascar » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:53 AM UTC

maldusiecle wrote: post #155

XCabbage wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your point about the donald, you'll despair at https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/117289/86725 . Check out the history and the comments-moved-to-chat. Answerer suggests creating lots of social media accounts as a way to drive bad search results about you off the first page of Google, and lists a bunch of possible sites to sign up to, including Gab. The mention of Gab gets censored by a moderator, but not befo…

I'd encourage anyone convinced by this comment to do some research into the antisemitic and white supremacist comments which representatives of Gab have openly, publicly made.

So what? That doesn't justify reactions like rejecting an applicant based on having an account alone.

First and foremost political opinions have no place in most professional settings and no influence on someones work. If I recall correctly it's even illegal to judge someone based on their political affiliations in many countries.

Further, someone could have an account there to comment against the radical opinions or because he has friends with those opinions, which brought him to the network. And surely some more reasons why someone might have an account without sharing the extremist views of the outliers there.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#302

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

username90 wrote: post #287

airstrike wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's in the spotlight because she's an amazingly accomplished person. A 54-year-old black woman from the South Side of Chicago who went to Princeton despite her high-school career advice telling her "she wasn't really Princeton material". It also helps that she wrote a #1 NY Times best-seller that everyone is talking about[0]. Maybe if you read it you will understand what makes her so special. –––––––––– ⁰ https://w…

I don't understand, what makes her more inspiring than these women? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Burns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Brewer

I have heard Ursula Burns speak, and she wasn't inspiring. Although I was doubtless biased by her disengagement from the part of the company I belonged to.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#303

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

vinayan3 wrote: post #261

Shouldn't we thank these people for creating the content for in most cases is free? It makes the interest way more interesting. Like the OP is saying it is something we should keep in mind. However, the word insane has a negative connotation even though its usage in the OP's title might intend it. We should also note that the 1% rule also applies to traditional media be it news programs, tv shows, documentaries, or m…

"However, the word insane has a negative connotation even though its usage in the OP's title might intend it."

I've noticed even people who, for instance, work for mental health advocacy organizations casually use figurative terms like "crazy" all the time. It makes me a little uncomfortable, but not enough to protest.

I'm half on the side of those who say "PC is just civility" and half sympathetic to those who see it as hypersensitive hypocrisy.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#304

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 4:23 AM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #270

Missing in that writeup is that any group which spends more time online tends to be overrepresented in things like online comments. This includes the mentally handicapped and mentally ill. If you don't have a job, limited money, and social life is difficult, the internet has obvious attraction.

You know the xkcd about "I can't come to bed, someone is wrong on the internet"? I think there is a widespread syndrome where people need social interaction that they aren't getting in real life, but then on the internet, they need to express dominance to counter feelings of inadequacy. And expressing that often leads to hostile responses, and feeling unjustly attacked provides a sense of release.

Once I was able to describe this pattern to myself and recognize it in myself, I started trying to reduce the amount of posting I did that expressed "I'm right and you're wrong". Because no matter how right a person is, it's generally more of a selfish activity to tell other people about our rightness than we want to admit. If positive interaction is a goal, being right does not excuse telling people they're wrong.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#305

Post by commoner » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 4:28 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #158

bonoboTP wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That source (published by the developers) is a primary source. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tetriary sources that are based on secondary sources and not directly on primary sources. In other words, unless there are reliable secondary sources to base the article on, it is considered original research and is not a good fit for Wikipedia. I guess part of the reason that new contributors feel bad is confusion…

It's not just goals and nature. It's rules that can be pretty silly and unhelpful when they're taken to extremes rather than applied sensibly. In this case you have documentation that can't be referenced in a Wikipedia article. Yet, if someone wrote a blog post that liberally quoted that documentation, that would probably be an acceptable source. The basic ideas of not doing original research or relying on primary so…

Wikipedia does consider the documentation suitable for supporting information in the article, but not suitable for establishing the topic's notability.

The article needs independent sources (as in, secondary sources that are financially and editorially independent of the company who develops the .mix file type) to show that the topic warrants an article.

If an article has enough sources cited to show notability, primary sources like documentation pages can be used. If notability is not shown, then the topic doesn't meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria and the content of the article is moot.

Without this requirement, any company would be able to publish promotional articles on all of its products, and exclusively use its own web pages as citations. Wikipedia's notability guidelines are in place to prevent spam and to ensure that topics only get articles if they can be written about in a neutral way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#306

Post by commoner » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 4:38 AM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #288

cableshaft wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I made an attempt to get into it over a decade ago, and it didn't help that I was heavy in the Flash game/animation scene and felt that was the best way to contribute. I say it didn't help, because so few of those pass the ridiculously restrictive 'Notability Test' of Wikipedia. The animation could have 50 million views and be known across the internet, but because no 'reputable news organization' wrote about it…

Wikipedia's notability rules are generally about ten/twenty years out of late, and seem to be designed on the assumption the internet doesn't exist. As you said, they often miss out notable works that aren't reviewed by what they class as 'mainstream' sources, and they also often end up failing to consider the amount of credibility someone may have in their own area of expertise. For instance, in the gaming world, I…

Subject-matter experts, such as distinguished professors, are considered reliable sources regardless of where their statements or writings are published. I'm not sure if it has always been this way, but it is currently written into Wikipedia's policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...

You're right about fan sites. It's harder for people outside of the fan community to evaluate whether a fan site is reliable, and that contributes to the skepticism you see.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#307

Post by quantum_magpie » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 6:13 AM UTC

ebcode wrote: post #262

imjustsaying wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have 100,000 posts scattered about forums from the early 2000's, but very few (less than 1,000) since after 2010. The trend towards downvote groupthink is not an insignificant part of the reason I've dropped content generation.

Thanks for sharing this. It's an interesting trend that I was not aware of (but maybe intuited?). It does seem that, while on the one hand, upvotes are necessary for ranking crowdsourced content on HN and reddit, on the other hand, the voting on comments is responsible for the groupthink/hivemind/echo chamber that develops. In terms of fostering discussion, the comment voting is a silent killer.

In my experience, the worst aspect of current boards are the lifetime of threads. If you post a comment to a thread, and come back to the page couple hours later, the thread is no longer available anywhere; now you have to create the additional loop of going through your user account, locate each comment, and check whether anyone replied to it. I'd rather save myself the hassle and just shut up for the most part. And even if I do bother to find particular comment, seek out replies, and respond to them, they will go unnoticed if it's not done immediately, because it also requires the other users to go through these additional steps too. It's just impossible to write comments that have more than a couple of hours gap between responses.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#308

Post by r00fus » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

piaste wrote: post #268

airstrike wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's in the spotlight because she's an amazingly accomplished person. A 54-year-old black woman from the South Side of Chicago who went to Princeton despite her high-school career advice telling her "she wasn't really Princeton material". It also helps that she wrote a #1 NY Times best-seller that everyone is talking about[0]. Maybe if you read it you will understand what makes her so special. –––––––––– ⁰ https://w…

> She's in the spotlight because she's an amazingly accomplished person. I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that. 54-year-old black women from the South Side of Chicago who go to Princeton occasionally get an interview in a local magazine and enjoy fifteen minutes of something that if you squint might pass for fame. If they fight a high-profile court case, they may get a two-paragraph Wikipedia article wit…

Little unfair. She married a lawyer/community organizer who ran for congressman (lost) then Senate then President over 20 years.

She was almost as much part of the Obama presidential image as her husband.

That ain’t peanuts.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#309

Post by NeedMoreTea » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 6:58 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #195

Sargos wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because we don't have the (as the OP puts it, insane) temperament to fight some battle for days on end for something we really don't care that much about. It takes effort to dig up some random edit from years ago that wasn't important enough to fight about then and certainly isn't worth the stress to fight about now. It's a lot easier to just bitch about this obviously real problem instead of having to make th…

> It takes effort to dig up some random edit from years ago Yes, but a simple link to which article it was would be enough. What also might be useful is a user name and/or a rough estimate of what the time period was, but without even an article name, there is nothing anybody can do about fixing these things.

It was a lower tier event or personality of WW1 or WW2. Not a Churchill, Paton or D-Day, but something lesser without reaching insignificant. It was 10 or 15 years ago - in the days when it was still common for articles to be incomplete or missing. I couldn't estimate when that period of Wikipedia ended, but I'd guess at least 10 years+. I'd be amazed if someone hasn't managed to fill the gap since, as articles are generally much more complete. Current Wikipedia has other issues.

It was some hours I spent on a topic I knew well, and had a good selection of books on my own shelves to cite, triggered by finding an incomplete or missing article, or a glaring error. Nothing more. After the challenges contributing I lost interest and moved on. I was doing Wikipedia a favour and trying to contribute, they apparently weren't interested. I'm not going to fight for it, but as a result I'm not open for trying more, or ever again.

As for username, I have no idea whatsoever, but offhand I can only remember one of the several LJ usernames I had, some I used for months rather than just a few days. Mind I doubt I could accurately list all the topics I blogged about on LJ, either, but could cover the main interests easily. I'm not even sure a username was needed at all but it may well have been.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#310

Post by blablabla123 » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 8:11 AM UTC

gniv wrote: post #157

Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their…

I cannot really see anything that wrong with this. I mean most (=all) never post anything on Stackoverflow although on some occasions I strongly encouraged people to do so because they'd otherwise run into problems - sometimes I even posted questions for other people.

The point is: the hurdle to contribute or even create is quite high, no matter if it's on the internet or in the "real world".

Stackoverflow is not a magic community, they have guidelines otherwise their content won't work so well. Same goes for Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, either you know how these sites work and what is expected or your content gets downvoted and eventually removed. Even HN works like this.

So yes, then there is a small percentage of users that took the hurdle to internalize how things work. It's much easier actually when you do it regularly. In fact I used to be Wikipedia contributor but I gave it up because it's time consuming and frustrating. If you're not a frequent user, you can correct orthographic errors, anything else is pointless unless you're a writing genius/journalist.

Nobody ever complains how insane they are working 10+ hours a day for an unstable job and oftentimes bad salary.