[_r0fz]

It's also very very funny to me the general tone of self-congratulatory nonparticipation all over this comment section about how superior we all are for not using social media or twitter or whatever.

HN is social media too! I've heard the arguments why it's not but they aren't compelling to me; it is one. The main difference between here and twitter is the tone.

On here there is a cultural expectation that you will perform dispassionate erudition but if you read beyond that at all very few comments are any more intellectually stimulating than an average tweet. Less, honestly, at least people on twitter still seem to value joy and humor and whimsy.

[qPM9l3XJrF]

HN has an interesting business model relative to other social sites. Instead of serving targeted ads, the site itself is essentially one giant ad for Y Combinator. That creates better incentives to promote high quality discussion because low quality discussion more directly harms the YC brand. But it's still gotten a lot worse over the years.

[Nextgrid]

HN's business model does not rely on "engagement", which means they encourage interesting and in-depth discussions instead of flame-wars and low-quality clickbait content.

Furthermore the "algorithm" is well-understood and is driven by users as opposed to a black-box algorithm designed to optimize "engagement".

Finally human moderation here is competent and keeps things in check, as opposed to treating it like a cost center and outsourcing it to underpaid people working in terrible conditions who most likely don't speak our language natively and might misunderstand the context or meaning of things (which becomes a problem when you're supposed to draw the line between what's offensive/snarky and not).

[rantwasp]

counterpoint: 1) the difference is on hn, shitposting, trolling and straight up being offensive is strongly discouraged. 2) I have experienced joy, whimsicality and humor in here. We are people not machines. 3) i have learned about more new things than in any other place. I have frequently changed my mind because of the quality of the arguments 4) no matter what the subject is people with deep expertise seem to show up and it’s a joy to actually hear from them

[_r0fz]

Look I just really disagree sorry. The flavor is different but the beneath it's the same stuff.

You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.

You can find joy on here sure but it's despite the culture here not because of it.

[dang]

> You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.

That is deeply not the case, and if you or anyone finds examples of it, you should let us know at [e-mail]. If people are being cruel and not getting moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Oh and we don't give a fuck about swearing.

The generalization you're making is so false and so mean that I would call it a slur, both of this community and of the people who work on it.

[Tomte]

For what it's worth, I feel similarly.

I've just deleted the longer part of this comment because we've had this discussion in private mail several times, but for the record: I think you're focussing too much on naked words, and ignore evil behaviour (like intentional misrepresentations of the other one's position) too much.

I'll concede that your job is hard and you're doing a mostly good job. I just think it could be better.

[_r0fz]

The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.

Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.

[tptacek]

It took 15 seconds. I just typed "poor" into the search bar, sorted comments by dates, and the first comment that used "poor" in the sense that you did easily qualified:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320284

It is wildly not the case that the median HN commenter who writes on stories related to economic inequality is biased against marginalized people.

This is a pretty clear instance of what Dan refers to as the "notice-dislike fallacy"; you've noticed people writing callous comments, because they rub you the wrong way (as they do me), but haven't noticed the countervailing comments, because they're boring (to you).

[rantwasp]

i think we may be moving the goalposts a little here. we were talking about joy, humor, whimsical and we shifted to a straight-up utopia where everyone is kind to everyone and no bad comment is ever made.

Philosophically, I would say HM is like a wealthy suburb. You don't see trash in the street. People mostly follow the law and are good neighbors. Everyone wants their neighborhood to be okay and are okay sharing/learning about gardening and home improvement from each other. Now: are some people disconnected from the what other people experience as the harsh reality somewhere else? Absolutely. This is the case everywhere. What you do when you see or hear someone with a completely different perspective is listen and try to understand what they are talking about. We all need to get better at this no matter where we are (work, store, hn, twitter, etc)

[samatman]

You do a great job, dang. Frankly I'm baffled at how you do it, and I can see why this comment would upset you.

But all you can do is push the nastiness below a certain threshold of passive aggression. It's literally impossible to do more than that.

I've found it just a bit more unpleasant to post here with every few months which pass. Insults still get moderated and downvoted, sure, but bad-faith dismissals and pugnacious pedantry become incrementally more common, not to mention drive-by downvotes on neutral and factual posts which maybe signal some kind of tribal affiliation, no matter how weakly.

I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

[dtx1]

> I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.

[eitland]

> Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum.

Here is an important observation I think I've made over the years:

All else being equal, the HN model (full names voluntary, IRL connection voluntary i.e only username and password, long lived profiles encouraged) has been better for interesting civil discussions.

Why?

Full name policies only encourage this explosive mix:

- People who don't realize the foolishness of commenting publicly using their full name on a controversial case.

- People with fake but real-looking accounts.

- People who realize it is stupid but does it anyway sometimes because even newspaper comments sections deserve some adult voices.

Very many of the people you'd want to hear from are silent because they don't want your name mixed in with the regulars in the comments there.

[munk-a]

I don't know about that, I'll occasionally post lightly trolling comments out of whimsy and not malice and they generally don't get downvoted into oblivion.

I also really disagree that tone is a minor and unimportant factor, keeping the discussion civil manages to open up the door to a lot more discussion between people who disagree strongly. One of the users I recognize on here I recognize not because we agree - but because usually when we're talking in a thread it's an interesting conversation despite a really deep philosophical disagreement.

[zemo]

right, HN only cares about conforming to protocols. If you conform to the social protocol, you can advocate for the most horrible of positions on this site.

[munk-a]

Just to clarify - why would we ever not want that to be the case? If someone is making a well reasoned argument that's clearly wrong then I'm happy to read it - I have faith in myself and those on this forum that they'll be able to comprehend the statement and read out the same conclusion - if it's hidden or using underhanded conversation techniques those will generally be called out but there might be a few interesting nuggets in an otherwise incorrect argument.

[zemo]

because if you have one party that is nice and polite and uses proper decorum and they are actively doing harm to another party, and that other party is upset because harm was done to them, and your response is "I will listen to the person that is behaving according to decorum", you are taking the wrong side. Bad actors -love- decorum, especially when access to understanding the rules of that decorum is itself a marker of class, tribe, or belonging in some way.

[throwamon]

It's really pretty simple: Being polite is better than not being polite. This doesn't mean you should never listen to someone who is angry, but it makes perfect sense to make it a site-wide policy to disallow this sort of behavior when the goal is to have productive discussions.

The problem is not politeness vs. impoliteness, but rather acting in good faith vs. pretending to do so. As readers, it's our responsibility (now more than ever) to tell good faith from trollish decorum.

[oceanplexian]

I'm not sure that it is true that there is even such thing as decorum on social media, or if there was, if you could reasonably define it. The Internet is a global communications system linking hundreds of countries, thousands of cultures, and perhaps millions of sub-cultures, class affiliations, and tribes. Even the fact that we are here, on HN, speaking English puts us squarely in the minority of people who use the Internet.

[JW_00000]

For me, that's exactly what I want: any opinion is okay to be expressed, as long as it's expressed respectfully. My problem with Twitter is exactly its "social protocol", which is often leaving out all nuance, taking things out of context, and provoking on purpose (in anything vaguely related to politics).

[mr_toad]

> If you conform to the social protocol, you can advocate for the most horrible of positions on this site.

You shouldn’t assume that every argument made against a particular solution to social injustice is an argument advocating for social injustice.

While there are some people who are just plain racist or bigoted or have certain religious views; and therefore believe that racial/gender/etc injustice is inevitable, many others are just arguing against a particular solution.

For example, not everyone agues against dialectical materialism because they want people to be poor. They just don’t think communism can work.

[itsoktocry]

People have been talking about how "superior" the conversation on HN is compared to other fora for as long as I've been participating (over a decade). I don't find it much different.

It certainly has its share of silliness, especially around the subjects of VC and Silicon Valley culture generally. And economics...

[BoorishBears]

If Twitter is multiple echo chambers HN is one echo chamber.

It's no surprise within the echo chamber things seem harmonious, but there's something really funny about seeing people from here thumb their noses down at Twitter.

If you follow the right people in tech on Twitter, their replies are pretty similar to HN, and it's a lot of the same people.

Crapping on Twitter while acting like HN is above it all is kind of like saying your favorite coffee shop is so much better than the entire City of New York.

[zemo]

> the difference is on hn, shitposting, trolling and straight up being offensive is strongly discouraged.

you can be deeply offensive on hn if who you are offending is people outside of what hn considers to be its own audience. hn posters will defend the harm their software does to society all over town. people on this site care only about decorum; the syntax of kindness without the semantics.

[dang]

The site guidelines say "Be kind" for deep reason, and we attempt to encourage that in every way we know how. I don't know who you think "hn considers to be its audience" but the answer is: anyone with intellectual curiosity. That's basically everyone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm biased of course, but I also see more of this place than anyone else does (at least I hope I am, since I get paid for it), and comments like yours do not reflect the community at all accurately. "People on this site care only about decorum" is a cheap shot, and—speaking of syntax without semantics—is a cliché at this point too. People in this community care about considerably more than that. ("Syntax without semantics" is a great phrase, though. Did you come up with that? I like it.)

The denunciatory generalization you're making seems to me an example of unkindness, and so a little ironic whilst denouncing others for unkindness. I don't like seeing anyone unjustly accused.

If you, or anyone, has a good idea about what we can do to make this place more kind, I'd love to hear it (as long as it doesn't reduce to "ban my ideological enemies", which turns out to be what a lot of people would prefer, but is not viable given the mandate of this site).

[zemo]

> I don't know who you think "hn considers to be its audience" but the correct answer is: anyone with intellectual curiosity.

That's what the HN organizers think it is and want it to be, but I don't think it's an accurate reflection of how HN users actually behave. It's prescriptive, not descriptive.

> People in this community care about considerably more than that.

I've been here many years and that has not been my experience. I come here to look for updates on libraries and tools I use and to hear about new libraries and tools. In the years I have been here, I have found this to be the most nihilistic, false-equivocating social media site I have ever encountered. What I have witnessed all too often is that admissible HN opinion talk stops at "what makes a computer program well-constructed", and very rarely considers "how might computer programs cause harm to their users and to society". Often times when people say "hey maybe that use of technology is harmful to [group of people not well-repesented on HN]", that discussion is immediately downvoted into oblivion. When it comes to software criticism, that is, the well-reasoned consideration of how software affects society, HN gets an F. HN doesn't care. HN would look at a Java program for a police torture system and would say "it should be written in Haskell" instead of "maybe we shouldn't be building instruments of torture". Maybe a given individual user wouldn't, but that's how the votes would land.

> If you, or anyone, has a good idea about what we can do to make this place more kind, I'd love to hear it

Sure. Here's a few.

Remove all visible scores from the site entirely. The idea that a person is aware of points given to them for saying the correct thing incentivizes saying things that get points, not saying things that improve the discussion. I'm not saying that no system of tracking the success of comments should exist. I'm saying that currently, the mechanics of HN allow people to see their own karma and are rewarded for saying things within the HN zeitgeist with more karma. The karma system precludes the Overton window from shifting.

It's a discussion board. There should be no point reward for comments posted. The reward is the replies you get from others.

Experts and beginners are given an entirely equal footing, but beginners outnumber experts in every topic; that's what makes them experts. If all of the experts in a topic think one thing, and all the beginners think another thing, should the beginners always win because they are more numerous? Hmm.

One solution might be to implement something akin to pagerank, but on a topic level. E.g., if a thread is posted about Ants, a user that had participated in a lot of past discussions about Ants should have their upvotes/downvotes weighed more heavily. There are doubtless other solutions, and since I'm not in your codebase I'm not sure what solution is actually reasonable.

Separately, make posts a limited resource. The mechanics of this are, I imagine, proper difficult to get right. Very very difficult. Some ideas that would have to be tested: You can only post if you have a post token. You're awarded a post token every six hours, even when you're gone. You can hold a maximum of four post tokens. Add in some mechanic where users can cause other users to gain post tokens. Some concepts along that line: When you reply to someone, they are awarded a post token (or a portion of a post token). Upvotes grant either post tokens or portions of post tokens. If a user really loves a comment, they can give one of their own post tokens to the person that made that comment. Users in their first week are given only 1 post token a day.

[throwaway675309]

"What I have witnessed all too often is that admissible HN opinion talk stops at "what makes a computer program well-constructed", and very rarely considers "how might computer programs cause harm to their users and to society". Often times when people say "hey maybe that use of technology is harmful to [group of people not well-repesented on HN]", that discussion is immediately downvoted into oblivion."

Could you cite some specific HN submissions where you've observed this behavior? I honestly cannot recall a single one.

[dang]

I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to respond to this in detail but I really appreciate your taking the time to share your perspective and your ideas.

[mr_toad]

> defend the harm their software does to society all over town

I accept there are people who feel that an argument in defence of certain types of software is in bad faith, and an argument made deliberately to hurt and exclude others.

It’s not much of a leap, given that harm obviously exists to many in society, and software isn’t helping, or at least that some people get much more benefit from it than others.

However, not everyone believes that software harms people. Not everyone believes that that harm is deliberate. Not everyone believes that anything can be done, and even if they do it’s probable that they have differing ideas on what is to be done.

I get that when people see problems, and they see others ignoring those problems, or arguing with them, that they feel that those other are being callous, cruel and disrespectful. As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

I sympathise, but I can’t agree. There are so many solutions to the world’s problems and so few who agree on any of them. I can’t just assume that everyone who adopts a contrary position is deliberately being cruel, deliberately acting out of selfishness or deliberately acting to exclude and suppress other views.

[ryandrake]

A good concrete example of this are MBAs, one of HN’s favorite punching bags. With any article about something bad or stupid happening in a tech company, eventually someone will prop up an anonymous MBA straw man to blame and start beating on it. You’ll see vitriol targeted at MBAs that will get you a cooling-off ban if directed towards Rust programmers or entrepreneurs.

[rantwasp]

what about an rust developer with an MBA? /s

when you see a strawman point it out. people may not like it, you may get downvoted but... something about being the change you want to see.

for example: I routinely get down-voted every time I say something positive about cryptocurrencies. Should I stop telling people my opinion when the overall sentiment on HN is pretty negative when it comes to the likes of bitcoin and ETH?

[rantwasp]

nope. I disagree. I make a living from writing software and I will not defend the harm software does to society. I will go even a step further and say that I will not work in any place where it's clear that net result of the software produces does more harm than good.

people on this site care more than just decorum. sweeping generalizations like this rarely hold water.

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

Yes exactly! This is a much better description than I was able to come up with.

[joeberon]

honestly 1 3 and 4 used to be true, but I haven't felt that here in a while. Nowadays there are way more crackpots and conspiracy theorists here than I'm comfortable with