Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hacker News is a social echo chamber

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 206 posts

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#61

Post by angersock »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #24
lmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan. Anonymous (well, you can use a trip, but you'll be mocked for it). No downvotes. Very limited moderation, and what there is has a lot of transparency. There's, inevitably, a lot of low-level trolling, but you also get some amazingly original insights.

4chan [...] amazingly original insights. On /b/? Where?

/diy/ has some really great maker resources, /g/ has good consumer information (mixed in with a lot of flamebait; daily programming threads are useless), the cooking board and the comics board have some good stuff.

Basically, the reason it can do these things is that nobody takes themselves too seriously--the whole affair is rather tongue in cheek.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#62

Post by DougWebb »

DanBC wrote: post #46
DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative: - I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions. - I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through…

You should visit new and upvote the interesting links, and consider flagging the links that should not be here. If a submission is good I always upvote it. I downvote quite often, but not for disagreement, only for comments that are not helpful to the discussion. HN would be better if more people used their tools.

You should visit new and upvote the interesting links, and consider flagging the links that should not be here.

Yeah, I know... I spend so much time on this site (it's my primary news feed) I really need to make more of an effort to do that.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#63

Post by jlgreco »

the_watcher wrote: post #39
jlgreco wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic is undoubtedly important, but is the discussion of the topic specifically on HN really vital to our industry? I question this because such discussions seem to be, in practice , the exact opposite of productive. They are not so much discussions as they are internet shouting matches. I doubt very few people walk away from those discussions with altered perspectives.

The point of Hacker News isn't "to discuss things that (insert whoever currently is complaining that the HN front page doesn't match what their list of most important links is) I think are important." It's to discuss what hackers find interesting. This is explicitly stated in the goal of the site. Hacker News isn't a democracy, there are other places on the internet to find that. ADDENDUM: To those who counter that H…

Well, if we are going to truly embrace that premise, then I see little room to be upset. Discussions being flagged off is the HN system acting undemocratically to shape the discussion to its tastes.

The flamewar detection system isn't smacking down topics, it smacks down types of discussions. Certain topics seem to generate little but flamewar and get regularly smacked down, indicating to me that HN has little interest in (or perhaps more accurately, ability to) discuss[ing] those topics reasonably.

tl;dr: I agree, HN isn't for discussing everything. Far from not being okay with that, I think it is a good thing.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#64

Post by jdjb »

VLM wrote: post #55
llamataboot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These stories regularly appear, get upvoted, inspire lots of discussion, then get flagged and disappeared within the hour. It's almost as if the people /visiting/ this site want to talk about these things but the people /running/ the site don't. Also, many of us have no problems with postmodernity and consider ourselves part of the political left. Which is fine, programming and god forbid "startup culture" should not…

"inspire lots of discussion" inspire lots of repeated, rehashed discussion. Hey you probably don't know this, but some guys working in sausagefest industry segments, like IT, exhibit uncivilized behavior around women, and I theorize acting like apes doesn't exactly encourage ladies to help us fix the sausagefest problem, bet you never heard about that story before! However, story 234243 on that topic adds nothing so…

Thank you. Far too often it's the same story, over and over again. Whether it's ageism, anti-gay or anti-women it's always the same issue and the same discussion that comes up. Everyone laments at the situation and then goes back to hiring young white male developers.

I feel the NSA stories are the same. We get it; they're intercepting as much internet traffic as they can get and trying to break SSL (which they haven't succeeded at it without the help of 3rd parties providing signing keys). It's always the same comments (my personal favourite are the Americans who are mostly outraged at the fact they're being targetted, like the rest of the world's privacy is somehow lesser) and adds nothing to the conversation.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#65

Post by Semaphor »

DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative: - I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions. - I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through…

- I flagged one story in my time on HN (- I see newer stories thanks to some chrome extensions showing a 2 column layout. I rarely upvote though as I feel I am too inexperienced to decide what others should find interesting.

- I upvote comments that made me learn something. I downvote "redditism", flaming etc.

Just as another data point.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#66

Post by VLM »

steven2012 wrote: post #30
gfodor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh no. You can criticize HN while also claiming pg has the right to do what he wants. Oh look, the article does just that: "Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. "

Oh look, I never once said the author wasn't allowed to criticize the way HN was run. I said that if he wants something different, then do it himself instead of trying to hijack HN for his purposes.

That's nonsense as management advice. The best way to implement a superior solution is to convince someone to implement it not do it yourself. Delegate!

If you have a better way to shovel stuff in bags, the most efficient and profitable way to implement "shovel stuff in bags 2.0" is to convince the guy in charge of 1.0 to upgrade, not go to the immense effort of creating a competitor, or start shoveling yourself. At least not as the very first step.

If you want to make a competitor, just do it, you don't need "cover" of some minor 1.0 vs 2.0 issue. Either way its not workin.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#67

Post by jlgreco »

danielweber wrote: post #57
DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative: - I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions. - I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through…

I heard about a guy getting hellbanned for flagging all but one of the "Steve Jobs is dead" stories on the day Steve Jobs died. Each time my finger hovers over the "flag" button I wonder ". . . is this really worth the hassle?" Then I close the tab and go off somewhere else. (I've flagged probably 10 things total.) EDIT : jlgreco corrects me. The guy I was thinking of was flag-banned, not hell-banned.

I know some people lost their ability to flag while doing exactly that (the 'flag' link is removed entirely when that happens, the removal of the ability isn't invisible to the user it happens to), but I am unaware of anybody being hellbanned for it.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#69

Post by unhappyhippie »

DougWebb wrote: post #37

I'm curious how many people who have the ability to upvote or flag stories actually do so. For my part, I'm very conservative: - I never flag stories; I may not find a story interesting, but I don't feel it's appropriate to impose my interests on others or 'police' their discussions. - I rarely upvote stories, mostly because I'm usually browsing stories that are already on the front-page. Occasionally I skim through…

My voting behavior on HN is very different from other websites. Since the saved stories and upvotes are the same, and upvotes cannot be taken back, I use the upvote as a "save story" button. There are many submissions which are not of a good quality, but the ensuing discussion on the wider topic prompts me to save the submissions as there is no option to save comments. I maintain a separate database of my saved stories, which I keep preiodically updating and pruning, primarily for NLP and ML experiments. So that is my personally "curated" list of HN bookmarks. Though I must say my visits here have become less frequent.

Re: Hacker News is a social echo chamber

#70

Post by untog »

beat wrote: post #34
kmfrk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of thinking betrays the idea of diversity existing within those fields.

Why don't we just admit that this whole post is just a response to offense at a single post getting bopped off the front page because of a flamewar, when some people really want it on the front page? It's a lot easier when we aren't tippy-toeing around the actual issue. Sure, the problems of that post were symptomatic of the broader social algorithms of HN, but I don't think they mean HN's rules and the underlying en…

Why don't we just admit that this whole post is just a response to offense at a single post

But it isn't, though - the post you replied to was specifically discussing that. The OP said:

a place focused on particular subjects [...] collects people with similar life experiences, interests, worldviews, etc.

which makes it sound very much like people from different backgrounds are going to face social rejection. If we're fine with that then so be it, but some of us would like to imagine we are more inclusive, and that as a community we could do more. The fact that tech keeps trying to portray itself as a pure meritocracy doesn't help.

Post reply on HN