[brimble]

> The reason that the "yet you participate in society" argument works in the original comic you're quoting is that the peasant with sticks on his back is saying "we should improve society somewhat" and the peasant isn't allowed to choose whether they participate in a society.

If we're gonna cite the comic, three out of the four panels of the comic do not rely on this, and are precisely about using something by choice even while saying they should be different. The last panel is even more extreme because it's funnier that way, presumably, but the core point does not rely on lack of choice.

The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have seatbelts.

> but you don't actually believe that.

Nice mind reading. Shall I baselessly speculate about your posts while accusing you of being a bad actor, too? No, no I shall not.

[Edman274]

Sure, but you chose only the last panel as your witty rebuttal. Honestly, I don't think that the first panel is that off. If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that you're doing something that's a little hypocritical. People see the contradiction and then wonder how strong the conviction and argument is when the person making the contradiction is hidden.

You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?

Let's ask this:

1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?

2. If not, what would you change?

3. Do you use it?

4. Do you think that it should exist?

5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?

[brimble]

> If you go on the internet to criticize a company, be intellectually honest and acknowledge the fact that you're doing something that's a little hypocritical.

It's not, though? Else we are all constantly hypocrites in this regard. We may think the electoral system is broken and should be reformed, yet rarely vote for a candidate who supports that (because the current system provides few such candidates), et c. So calling it out seems pointless. We all deal with imperfect information and with the choices that the current system presents, but not others that might exist (or, rather, represent more-practical alternatives than they do now) instead, if the system were different. Prefacing criticism with public confessions when it's not very relevant is just a waste of space, and is stating the obvious.

> You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?

The "something" being improved would be worker protections, essentially. Publishing other people's stuff would probably require human review of it all. Given that AFAIK publishing houses aren't inundated with tsunamis of abusive content, I don't think that level of review is a problem in practice, as far as being abusive to the people doing the work—rather, it's the fact that abuse gets through with some regularity, that draws it in the first place. What's done now with review of user-posted online content clearly is hurting people, and it's the way certain businesses operate that are causing the problem.

If you asked me to draft legislation for this, I'd at least consider a carve-out for very small (low head count) operations. That's already super common in all kinds of business and, specifically, worker protection, regulations.

> 1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?

It doesn't seem to be a significant part of the problem, no, but I'd happily lose it in the name of reforming social media (=publishers with terribly lax submission and go-to-print standards) generally.

> 2. If not, what would you change?

Oh man. Nothing related to this, actually. Probably put in better poster-identity-tracking capabilities so it's easier to remember when you've already been down an unproductive garbage-thread with someone, or watched someone else do it (I do not have present company in mind here, to be clear) and over time people prone to creating those stop drawing replies at all and hopefully go away. There's a lot of inside-the-rules shitty posting that can't easily be user-policed right now, as it is on some other sites. I get the motivation behind weakening poster identity across threads, but I think it's beyond clear that it does more harm than good, now. Posters I read elsewhere today on HN, who were wondering how some subreddits can see HN as a cesspit: this is a big part of why.

The main downside is that meta-discussion about who's what kind of poster is low-value noise, but norms around here do an OK job of policing worse than that (provided the content being policed follows a clear pattern), so I think it'd work out OK. Just allowing personal tags for users, maybe with color-coding (visible only to the tagger) for posts, would go a long way. Some kind of hide-user functionality might help too, though it'd take some thought to make it work OK with HN's threading. Probably have to hide entire sub-trees they're at the root of, but I've definitely seen users for whom doing that would strictly improve my reading experience and I wouldn't miss a thing worth reading.

> 3. Do you use it?

LOL.

> 4. Do you think that it should exist?

Again, I'm not sure the entire category of thing is, fundamentally, not a crazy thing to bring into the world. It's like having an open email relay then trying to police messages passing through. Clearly insane. But, also again, most of the harm seems to kick in at scale. So, I dunno, maybe.

> 5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?

Chiefly in size. Fewer users, fewer employees, way less visual or auditory media to evaluate as a percentage of posts (I'm counting links, or it'd be zero). Arguments in favor of one and not the other are purely the practical sort—what's doing harm in practice, and how do you narrow in on that as specifically as possible—not the iron-clad-pure-reason sort; but, again, that's a pretty common approach with this kind of thing, for good reason.

[mannerheim]

> The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have seatbelts.

This is more akin to posting from an iPhone and saying phones shouldn't exist.

[brimble]

If someone wrote an op-ed saying they thought newspapers should be abolished, including some amount of explanation for why, sent it to the NYT, and the NYT published it, would you think that's slam-dunk proof that the author of the op ed is lying?

[mannerheim]

I'd be a bit confused if it turned out the author was a regular reader of the Gray Lady.

[brimble]

Why?

You may also be surprised to find out I'd prefer much more bike- and walking-friendly city planning, even to the point of making it harder to drive places, while in fact I drive almost everywhere.

Dealing with the current reality does not prevent one from advocating something else. Am I the one taking crazy pills, thinking that's super-obvious?

[mannerheim]

It's possible to make the case that you need to drive to get somewhere. Recreation is an entirely different matter. You don't need to read the New York Times. You don't need to read or post on Hacker News, either. You could go your entire life without these things at very little personal cost. In fact, it costs your attention to be doing these.

The fact that you supposedly hold such a strong position as saying 'this platform shouldn't exist' when the cost to you for not using this platform is minimal makes very little sense to me. For the example of a phone, it's not entirely incongruent for someone who's already bought an iPhone to be upset with Apple, and if they generally wish to use a phone, other companies might not be much better. But if somehow they get the notion that phones or smartphones shouldn't exist at all and continued using them, that doesn't make sense. I know people who get around fine without smartphones. If somebody really thought smartphones shouldn't exist yet continued using them, I question the strength of their convictions, and am more inclined to believe they hold their position more for the value of controversy than genuine belief.

[brimble]

I think what's twisting people up is that I'm advocating a position that might (maybe) threaten this site if it became more popular, but I'm not advocating that position because I don't like using HN. I'm not even advocating the position because I don't like Facebook's site or functionality. The two things are hardly connected, except that the harmful part of it may be (as advocates of these services typically claim) necessary for them to operate as they currently do.

I object to the idea that we have to psychologically wreck some workers. No, Facebook (and Twitter, et c.) do, to stay in business, evidently. We don't have to. We could say they aren't allowed to do that anymore, as we have with other worker safety issues in the past. We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm operations and cases in which that kind of work really is something resembling necessary (police work, say). There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that similar worker protection regulations deal with those sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a problem any other time), I'd personally be OK losing HN over that, sure.