[PragmaticPulp]

> Other humans acknowledging your existence and even agreeing with your various opinions is a very very euphoric experience, it is true of any social media. Suddenly you have hundreds or even thousands of people that "get" you, that understand how great and clever you are. This is the drug that people can't quit.

It’s always funny to see people discussing “social media” as some insidious drug that other people use to get confirmation about their opinions from other people…

…as comments on Hacker News, a site that lets people post their opinions and have other humans acknowledge their existence and validate their opinions (upvotes == likes).

We can debate the differences between real names and screen names and pictures or no pictures all day, but when it comes down to it Hacker News is a social media platform and you’re participating in the very thing you’re describing. It’s time we stopped pretending that “social media” is only something that other people use, while the rest of us on HN and other social platforms are doing something more noble. It’s all the same.

[greggman3]

I'm interpreting your comment as HN is like Twitter, HN is good therefore Twitter is good but I have the opposite opinion. HN is like Twitter, Twitter is bad, HN is bad

HN for me, HN's social media feature (the POINTS) are as bad as twitter and i've banned myself from it twice because of how addicting it is for me. (blocking it in my browser, setting my noprocrast to billions, even blocking it in my DNS server).

Seeing those points go up, a stupid as it is, is that "euphoria" mentioned above. If I notice that little number jump then I immediately want to know "wow, what comment of mine did people like" and similarly if it goes down I immediately get defensive and want to go respond to whichever comment was downvoted.

This time I wrote a chrome extension to remove the points which for me as a force multiplier in it's addictiveness.

https://github.com/greggman/hn-points-exorcism

[kortilla]

It’s not the same. I don’t have an option of who to build my echo chamber with.

On Twitter and Facebook you get to remove anyone that challenges your thought process. That’s what makes it so dangerous and euphoric. Everyone you see is clapping for your stupid ideas and people just live in different realities now because of it.

On HN we all get the same front page, same comments, etc. You might not like what gets the upvotes, but at least you saw it.

You’re right this is social media, but it’s not the cancerous “choose your reality” style that people usually are talking about when they decry “social media”.

[PragmaticPulp]

> It’s not the same. I don’t have an option of who to build my echo chamber with.

Maybe not immediately, but Hacker News is absolutely an echo chamber. People who don't toe the line on certain popular opinions (e.g. social media bad) quickly learn not to comment because they know they'll get massively downvoted.

Hacker News upvotes and downvotes are supposed to be about whether or not the comment is a quality post that contributes to the discussion, but in practice they tend to function as "agree" and "disagree" buttons. Post something that is disagreeable on certain echo chamber topics and it's immediately met with downvotes, regardless of the quality of the content.

This effect is most obvious in posts about social media, big tech companies, drugs, and certain parts of the law. For example, I hesitate to even participate in posts about "LSD cures depression" stories any more because most of the commenters don't even read the studies and any comment that isn't 100% enthusiastic about psychedelics curing depression is met with a wave of downvotes.

Likewise, when I see a story about social media I can tell before clicking on the comments that it will be full of comments that start with "I don't use social media but..." and then a straw-man caricature of social media that doesn't match reality.

These comment sections are absolutely an echo chamber. People who disagree are barraged with downvotes and abusive comments, so they simply leave.

I actually had to change screen names on HN once already because I pointed out some flaws in a certain author's books, and one of that author's fans tracked me down and tried to argue with me on my personal e-mail address. Nothing like that has ever happened to me on any other social media site.

[kortilla]

> Maybe not immediately, but Hacker News is absolutely an echo chamber. People who don't toe the line on certain popular opinions (e.g. social media bad) quickly learn not to comment because they know they'll get massively downvoted.

That’s not special to social media. There have been unpopular opinions among communities since before the internet. This all part of being in a large community based on interests. Learning how to deal with that is critical to learn how to function in society.

The other components of your reply complaining about the community having emergent plurality opinions completely misses the point. HN is better because these biases and things you disagree with are right in your face.

> I actually had to change screen names on HN once already because I pointed out some flaws in a certain author's books, and one of that author's fans tracked me down and tried to argue with me on my personal e-mail address. Nothing like that has ever happened to me on any other social media site.

People get stalked and harassed due to their Twitter posts all of the time by using their real name. Swatting is a thing. An argument over email is tepid in comparison to the real violence that happens from people using real identities on public social media every day.

[cmckn]

Totally agree that HN checks a lot of the same boxes, but there are some significant differences.

1. Advertising. (Or lack thereof)

2. Moderation. Downvotes here literally slowly erase content that the community doesn’t like; I think this compliments the swift hand of dang in a great way.

3. Participation. This is just a WAG, but i think more HN users post comments or submit stories than Twitter users tweet. There is a very low percentage of users posting the vast majority of tweets. I like HN because I can actually interact, not just follow.

We really had realized most of the promise of online socializing with forums 20 years ago, IMO. Twitter is exhausting.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Downvotes here literally slowly erase content that the community doesn’t like;

Most of the time downvotes are used to erase abusive content, but it's shocking how quickly some of the well-formed opinions in the content sections go gray if they don't agree with the popular opinion on HN.

At this point, I almost don't bother replying to HN comments if I know they'll just be met with waves of lazy downvotes.

The invisible hand of HN creates an echo chamber by teaching us not to post "content that the community doesn't like", which is often just comments that disagree with popular sentiment.

[macintux]

HN also lacks an algorithm tuned to encourage “engagement” through divisiveness.

[type0]

In fact it has the opposite algorithm, someone more knowledgeable might know how it works, has something to do with the ratio of downvotes to comments if I remember correctly.

[civilized]

I think there is a meaningful difference between social media that centers the person posting vs. centering the content. Twitter centers the person, HN centers the content. One is not uniformly better than the other, but the UI/UX differences promote very different cultures. Imagine the discontent if HN people were forced into a Twitter or Reddit style UI that spends lots of screen real estate on the person posting.

[ryanianian]

> Twitter or Reddit style UI that spends lots of screen real estate on the person posting.

Not sure I follow this. Reddit focuses on the content just as much as HN. The nature of the network (and quality of content in general) is quite different from HN of course.

There's a lot to not like about Reddit, but it's the only social media apart from HN that I still enjoy using after quitting FB/Twitter/Insta/Snap.

[civilized]

Old reddit is like HN but new reddit has a slot for an avatar by everyone's posts and generally a lot more distractions.

[christophilus]

The quality of Hacker News discussion is orders of magnitude better than any other platform I’ve tried. (Thanks, dang, for everything you do!)

So, this is the only social media I use.

[belval]

When writing my reply I actually thought about mentioning how ironic it was that every upvote on my comment would have exactly the effect I describe. I completely include myself in the "human" group.