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Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

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Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#81

Post by Jtsummers »

JDiculous wrote: post #78
gunn wrote: post #17

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy. Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules th…

This is a fantastic idea, and I'd love to see it tested out. Unfortunately I can't see HN or Reddit actually implementing this feature. They already have the monopoly over their respective communities, and thus have stopped toying with new features and innovating.

We do have an API for HN. I wonder if someone could create a variant of the content here. Show everything like normal, but pair it with this sort of friend-network based meta-moderation + the ability to hide individual posts (rather than just whole threads and subthreads).

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#82

Post by pjc50 »

hood_syntax wrote: post #12
sergiotapia wrote: post #4

Almost all of the popular communities online lean left, take your pick. You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. http://gab.ai recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.

> You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative IMO, it doesn't matter if the platform leans left as long as it fosters constructive and open discussion. You're correct that a lot of the heavy handed moderation (censorship?) is on popular communities that trend left, but that's just a money related trend imo. Companies want to make their product a "safe" platform for investors

It's about safety, but not so much of investors. You have a choice when running an English-language forum of whether to allow racism, homophobia, sexism and so on, and to what extent you'll give people the benefit of the doubt on those.

If you do, then it's like spam, it will become the "default" content of the forum. If you don't, it will end up left-leaning as a "safe space".

There are genuinely incompatible populations for audience/contributors and you have to pick one.

(And if you have a hardline free speech policy where you refuse to delete anything, you'll end up hosting child porn. You have to have a deletion policy in order to have a functional forum.)

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#83

Post by gunn »

creshal wrote: post #62
gunn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they…

I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to. How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here…

Scroll to the bottom to see what you're missing out on, or open incognito for a neutral view. I guess the system could throw in some randomness if it's necessary.

On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude.

What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view.

Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#84

Post by creshal »

ultramancool wrote: post #71
creshal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a site that indexes reddit's most downvoted posts Link?

http://notreddit.top Not much political stuff on the past day right now but if you look at the past month's posts about the US presidential candidates you'll see what I'm talking about.

Ah, thanks. This election cycle seems to be a singular shitstorm anyway, but the random non-election posts in between also seem to be tendentiously more right-leaning. Interesting.

Going by the coverage of the refugee crisis (more relevant to me in Austria) a while back it was looking the other way around, and I mostly stopped bothering with political subs.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#85

Post by pjc50 »

sergiotapia wrote: post #4

Almost all of the popular communities online lean left, take your pick. You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. http://gab.ai recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.

Do you really have to pick one? Is there no center any more?

Can you give me an example of some content from gabai that wouldn't be on twitter? It's quite hard to get banned from twitter for mere opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#86

Post by jonathansizz »

gunn wrote: post #17

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy. Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules th…

This could also apply to moderation in addition to comments; we could make it so only people whose moderations we respect actually count. Others' voting is disregarded.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#87

Post by gunn »

rootusrootus wrote: post #79
gunn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they…

In my opinion it is not really possible to have a good comments system when voting is simply up or down. The definition of up and down varies too much by person to really be all that useful for anything other than creating an effective echo chamber. I think we need easy, one-click ways of classifying a comment with a more specific assessment.

That's just what this is trying to fix. Currently an up means 'I think this comment is good for everyone'. I'm saying it should mean 'this comment is good for me and people like me'.

The one-click assessment would be closer to slashdot's 'interesting', 'insightful', 'funny' etc. approach, which could be an improvement but still runs into trouble because what is 'interesting' still varies too much between people.

My idea is that as you continue to vote, you teach it what insightful means to you personally.

I think it would mean I could avoid an echo-chamber of ideas because I could avoid being swept along by the status quo of group-think voting, and instead follow more thoughtful people. See my other reply to creshal for more thoughts about this.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#89

Post by eevilspock »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

I mostly stay here. The amount of political and economic discussion here is what I personally consider enough in my life; I don't think looking for more sources would improve SNR for me. I sometimes like to peruse Reddit for some well-defined topics - the trick is to find an appropriate subreddit for it. So, for instance, when I want to follow SpaceX news, I'll tune in to /r/spacex, because quite a lot of people ther…

The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. Or by an algorithm that systematically buries articles and users (whose accounts accrue ranking penalties) that generate any heated debate by challenging the slant. We're not talking trolls.

Check out the top comment under SF tech bro: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless’. It was at least generating some good debate, but HN decided to flag and bury it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896

See the dominant and buried comments for 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830

Why was Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems flagged to death? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414

Hell, even this post has been quickly taken off the front page despite having better numbers (70 votes in the last hour) than many items that are there now.

Politics and economics points of view are heavily filtered here. Rarely if ever does a challenge to the status quo make the front page. If one does it is then killed, ironically, for inspiring debate!

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#90

Post by Tomte »

barrkel wrote: post #50
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Metafilter is great, partly due to the $5 posting account cost. I've lurked there for years and not posted. CrookedTimber is the last of the oldschool blogs-with-comment-sections that I follow for this purpose, although it has some serious problem posters. HN isn't really politically or economically focused so you kind of have to slip under the radar.

Metafilter is a borderline groupthink echo chamber, so heavy is the moderation. It's best for purely factual stuff. Stray into opinion stuff, and it's really narrow and slanted.

I'd call it "toxic", from the one and only discussion I participated in.

Sure, probably an outlier. Bad luck. But I still hate thinking back to that experience, and I survived Usenet flamewars just fine.

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