[paxys]

There are so many comments here blaming Twitter while blissfully unaware that HN fuels the exact same online outrage. Almost every day there's a "<company> did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob. You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.

[unethical_ban]

Crucial distinction:

* Individual identities are less important/influential on HN than twitter

* The community is much smaller on HN than twitter

* The conversation is more nuanced. We have paragraphs vs. 240 characters

* We have voting to squelch really low effort or trolling. The informal guidelines of the community discourage downvoting an otherwise decent post because you don't agree.

---

This all adds up to a very different kind of "mob action".

[young_unixer]

I don't think those are the important differences.

Reddit has most of that, and a significant amount of subs there are just cesspools of hate.

[unethical_ban]

Points 2 and 4.

HN is like the equivalent of a small, curated, relatively mature subreddit that avoids being discovered by other reddit users.

[anigbrowl]

Accurate, but this is a somewhat imperfect strategy in many contexts. You will probably find this article interesting.

https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/

[sbagel]

100% and in many cases communities like HN are worse than sites like twitter because it has upvotes and downvotes which effectively drowns out and silences marginalized voices. You can't downvote or flag a twitter post preventing others from reading it.

I mention flagging because users here regularly flag opinions they strongly disagree with in mass as a way of removing them from discussions to great effect.

HN culture is arrogant and overly pragmatic which is especially egregious when dealing with nuanced topics. At least on twitter you can find takes from different viewpoints of a topic, not the monoculture hivemind created by social sites with upvotes and downvotes.

[joshlemer]

What might be a better mechanism to bring the best content forward, which doesn't suffer from this issue? Would you just advocate against downvoting in general, or is there something else you have in mind?

[sigotirandolas]

Traditional forums (such as phpBB) where posting "bumps" a thread are better in some regards. "Bumping" a thread at least requires you make more effort than clicking a button, posts inside a thread are unranked, and they encourage more in-depth discussion since threads can be long-lived.

RSS is great once you find interesting content but it doesn't help much in finding new content.

Otherwise... if you browse ranked boards such as HN/Reddit/etc., for topics such as politics (anything without a demonstrable answer, really), its also worth looking at both the stream of new comments, as well as the worst-rated comments. Most often the worst-rated comments are often just dumb spam or someone who makes no logical sense, but if someone tries to make a point and still gets massively downvoted for it (as opposed to just ignored), he may be striking on something.

[Zpalmtree]

I was under the impression that twitter replies with more retweets/likes were displayed higher up in the reply list, similar to HN?

[mavsman]

These are two really good points. I feel much more innocent attacking a large corporation than I do individuals.

> You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.

I think this one is even more important because it's more far-reaching and applicable. It's easy to point fingers but hard to look inside and cleanse the inner vessel.

[seattle_spring]

> Almost every day there's a "<company> did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob

It's even worse than that: Frequently there's a "Cool technology blog by company," and people come chime in with their completely unrelated grievance with <company>.