[stoev]

I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently.

It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them.

Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees.

I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.

[lsmarigo]

> by the same group of people

Don't think it's the same group of people, it feels like intelligent and mentally healthy individuals have been opting to abstain from online discussions in general over the last few years in droves after realizing their time and energy and better spent elsewhere. Especially with the trend of comments being taken out of context to attack individuals employers/livelihood. That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).

[tluyben2]

Ah! I think you are onto something there. I noticed it as well; Reddit is the worst offender as even serious and well founded comments are butchered and lighthearted/funny ones are upvoted in the 10000s. If you have better stuff to do, you will just think; fuck it then I don't answer. I would love to have good discussions with new peers online, but doing that in open court seems to attract the weirdos so I just go do something else.

So that said; where do people go online who want to have serious (tech) discussions? Must be some secret place with a person like Linus kicking everyone out he doesn't like at first offense.

[kop316]

So far this seems the best we have, and this is the only community I really will comment in. I think keeping up such a community means we have to ensure that the serios and well founded comments are upvoted, and the lazy/annoying/"funny" comments are kept off.

[dEnigma]

Personally I found Hacker News to be the best place for serious and thought-out comments. Research and critical thinking is rewarded (most of the time), while silly jokes (when not embedded in more substantial comments) and inflammatory content are frowned upon. It's actually a joy to read comments here, while I really dread —and often avoid— it on other sites.

Apart from that, technical forums for specific topics, like the ones for certain Linux distributions or other open source projects, have their merits; but they are naturally limited in the breadth of topics discussed. (Some might have very interesting and broad off-topic discussions though)

[mseebach]

I largely agree, but HN has some blind spots in this regard - most discussions about the workplace, open plans, working from home and especially interviewing almost invariably descends into angry rants and borderline conspiracy theory. My gut feeling is that this had been pretty constant, but the comparison of this thread with two years ago suggests otherwise.

I've also had a couple of brushes recently where what I considered reasonably calm and uncontroversial posts on a technical subject got alternating up and down votes for hours. I don't recall that happening before.

[smaddox]

I can't count the number of times recently that I've starting composing a comment on here, only to decide against posting it due to laziness and/or disinterest in the response. In fact, just a minute ago, while writing this comment, I decided not to post this comment, hit the back button and started scrolling on. But then a minute later realized what I was doing and decided to come back and comment.

Maybe that's just a sign of my growing older, but I think some of it might be the degradation of the community's general moral.

[specialist]

I do this all the time. It's a form of rubber ducking.

Articulating myself, to myself, even if I don't share it, is often worthwhile. Why do I agree? Disagree? Is my observation novel? Enough to share?

Once I figure out what I'm thinking, do I care enough to share? Is the recipient worth my time? Do I really want to interrupt someone who's digging themselves into a hole?

Etc.

[pault]

Here. It's the best we've got.

[eulo__]

This has been my view for a while too. Most internet forums I use are a shadow of their former selves.

When I first started browsing hn I was blown away with how smart and insightful the posts were. Ideas I had never thought of and quite a few I struggled to even comprehend.

It's very rare to see that now days.

[pault]

Are you sure it's not because you're better educated and harder to impress? I thought the same thing until I did a deep dive on some old articles and the comments weren't noticably different.

[eulo__]

Probably a factor, I also think it's partly because the forums I use at the moment used to be programming centric, but have since broadened their appeal. Hn to Tech business, reddit to literally everything. Lobste.rs has been a fantastic alternative for decent discussion

[smaddox]

Thanks for pointing out Lobste.rs. I had never seen it before. It looks like it adds back some of the good ideas from the Slashdot of yore.

[specialist]

Everyone thinks this.

I was the hub of a PC-Relay network (the FidoNet era), a moderator on CompuServe, and very active on various game boards. It's never been any different.

Social circles have a life cycle, span.

When the current one sours, go find the next one. Or start a new one with some friends.

I think Clay Shirky's article about a group being its own worst enemy applies. Probably monkeyspheres too.

[soufron]

The Life Cycle of Social Circles... you got a book title there ;)

[emodendroket]

And what's with music and TV now? When I was younger everything was good, but now it's bad.

[eulo__]

Yeah nar, false dichotomy imo

[emodendroket]

Oh please. Everyone online is far stupider and more insane than before? There's an assertion wanting for evidence.

[jack9]

As the internet population increased the mean intelligence went down. Such an obvious and expected trend, I have to wonder if you're ok. Maybe you're so well-trained that you stop thinking when you jump to a conclusion.

[emodendroket]

That's only obvious if you take it as a given that the more money you have the smarter you are. Besides that, has there been a large change in the portion of the population with Internet access since 2016? And, besides that, the supposed "proof" the Internet has gotten stupider is becoming critical of Google.

[jack9]

> That's only obvious if you take it as a given that the more money you have the smarter you are.

Intelligence isn't a ladder, so that wouldn't make sense in any context. Effective understanding of the relationship of Google vs God vs a domestic country's population vs yourself, does require some sophistication that involves general intelligence (in aggregate) and education. There are correlations with median income and these factors. As the population of the world gains access, simplistic fears about shadowy organizations are bound to gain ground from a myriad of historical and cultural parallels, as the median education level falls (among other associated factors, like wealth).

[itronitron]

I think both of the parent comments are intended to be sarcastic, but I could be wrong.

[emodendroket]

I find it hard to tell.

[humanrebar]

> That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).

But also the stubborn, the foolhardy, and the idealistic.

[skj]

Yes, that's what lsmarigo said.

[kop316]

I wonder if it's simpler than that: Google (Alphabet) has destroyed a lot of good will in the past two years, and the comments in the section reflect that.

I can think of several instances in the past two years that makes me mistrust them more, such as taking down accounts at random and taking a peron's entire digital life with it (causing me to move as much as possible off of Google), the random flagging of documents (aka, they actively scan them and will take off content they don't like), etc.

On the stock Android phone (I have a Nexus), it has felt that they have been trying actively to suck up as much data as possible (the final straw for me to put on a custom ROM is when their google keyboard sent everything I typed to thir servers, effectively making it a keylogger).

I personally think the skeptism they have now is very warrented, and the days "Don't be evil" is long gone.

[goialoq]

Ranking documents by quality and choosing what to index has been Google's mission since Day 1. That never changed.

[kop316]

What I was referring to was the incident recently where they flagged people's Google docs (even private ones) and locked people out of it.

[110011]

That's a good point. I noticed the spectacular bias in the comments on HN as well. Anything relating to Google is almost surely beaten down for no good reason at all.

One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc."

While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.

[koalaman]

I don't think that they do this anymore, but under Balmer this was a key part of their strategy to compete. https://www.aol.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-googl... http://techrights.org/2009/08/30/anti-google-astroturf-lawme...

I suspect that the campaign was ultimately quite successful at bootstrapping an army of unpaid trolls.

[emodendroket]

There was a "spectacular bias" before too, but it was reflexively in favor of things Google did.

[indubitable]

Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. We should of course base our opinions of writings based on what is written instead of what is written about, but the vast majority of people do not do this. And it goes both ways. Is the response to this publication of the article unreasonably negative, or was the response to the original publication unreasonably positive? And of course as you aptly point out there's a much greater concern about bias in reporting now a days, and an article that is essentially a single sided puff piece for a company/individual/field/etc is something that is going to draw far more scrutiny than it might have not all that long ago.

[dageshi]

> Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years.

I would note perhaps that as someone outside the US, it appears like opinions of people in the US about large tech companies appears to have shifted very recently, within the past 6 months so it seems to me.

Personally I feel the same about Google/Amazon/Facebook as I ever did.

[pault]

People are starting to realize that the productivity gains of automation aren't being shared by everyone, and they've decided to blame the automators instead of the politicians. I am slightly concerned that being a developer will become anathema in certain circles. (As usual, I blame Reagan)

[perl4ever]

As someone inside the US, I feel like there was a theme of opposition to fracking not long ago, and it switched to opposition to tech, almost as if it was orchestrated. This could be just my paranoid tendencies speaking, but if the anti-silicon valley sentiment is largely genuine, why does it seem to me like the anti-fracking sentiment has disappeared from the forums I read? It's as though some astroturfing campaign was attacking what was perceived as the strongest industry in the American economy, and when it didn't make much of a difference, moved on to another target.

[indubitable]

That is an interesting observation that does seem true. However, I also think there's a very benign explanation for it. Something we forget is that news agencies are not benevolent. The themes a news organization publishes are not going to be based upon what is most valuable to society, but what is most valuable to them.

Right now all traditional media (mostly as opposed to social media) is seriously struggling. Traditional media has been experiencing constant downsizing/layoffs and other consequences. And this includes big names like the New York Times. Cable news networks are likely only continuing along since they're owned by huge, profitable, corporations that can subsidize their operation in exchange for the valuable ability to use them to push agenda.

So what I'm getting at here is that if public reception and 'excitement' towards anti-fracking started to decline, news agencies would begin to cover it less and move to more exciting things that bring in the clicks which bring in the revenue. Blaming Silicon Valley is something that will likely continue to bring in hits since we live in this really paradoxical economy. By most of all measures, our economy is doing terrifically - yet simultaneously we're seeing things like real wages remaining stagnant for decades. So people want things to blame. And Silicon Valley is an easy target as it's seen as a realm of excess and increasingly societal apathy on part of the big players. This [1] single [phenomenally well framed] image is likely an embodiment of how many see the increasing divide. Makes for good clicks in any case!

[1] - https://i.imgur.com/hCK2OiS.jpg

[brudgers]

The same story can generate different conversations depending on the tenor of early comments, who makes those comments, who sees those comments, and if and what response those comments illicit. Things as small as whether or not a post appears on a weekend or weekday (the previous was a Thursday -- $ date --date="618 days ago") makes a difference.

On the other hand, the perception social science, psychology, and even STEM as science has changed a bit in the last several years and part of that change is increased scrutiny and skepticism.

[dogruck]

That’s a fair insight. (And, yeah, title needs 2016 added).

Now I’m curious to see how the comment thread grows. The negativity at this moment could be anchored in the observations of the first couple of top-level comments.

Certainly it’s fair to characterize this as a PR puff piece. It’s common practice for companies to buddy-up with news publishers on stories such as this.

But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.

[xxs]

The article was published on the 25th of Feb, 2016 (so 2016 in the title).

[emodendroket]

> But, yes, between 2016 and today we’ve definitely leapt into the era of Fake News.

Have we, though? The evidence for "fake news" as a phenomenon qualitatively (or even quantitatively) different than chain e-mail forwards is, to my way of thinking, pretty slim.

[dogruck]

The phenomenon is as old as news. The terminology and hyper awareness is fresh.

[tyingq]

I think a fair amount of it is a change in how some of the HN crowd feels about Google.

Any negative comment about Google used to be met with an instant swarm of downvotes here.

That's changed somewhat recently.

[mattmanser]

It's Saturday, HN turns incredibly hostile at the weekends.

[caseymarquis]

This is interesting. Has anyone else noticed this (I havn't)? Could probably do a word count on the top 30 articles over the course of a few months to find out.

[linkmotif]

Interesting take! I’ve wondered this too. But have thought just recently HN is a place where ppl have good healthy conversations on the whole.

[oxryly1]

I think it's because team management in tech, despite acknowledgement of the results of these studies, hasn't actually integrated the results meaningfully, so we're not really better off 2 years later.

[icantsayr]

I love the articles and links here but absolutely hate the obnoxious arrogant pedantic audience.

[draw_down]

> disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees

Works for me. People should be disdainful of that.