[teej]

In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help.

I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink.

I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right.

patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes.

I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made.

So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.

[tshtf]

In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment.

I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning.

If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.

[JoachimSchipper]

I occasionally repost unjustly [dead] comments, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967831. See http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22[dead]%2... for more examples. This is a useful safety valve on HN's moderation, and I wish more people did it. (Of course, I only resurrect posts that clearly shouldn't have been killed.)

It's also possible to track down contact information for most HN users, either via "about" or Google. I have notified several hellbanned people who were (now) making useful contributions to HN. After all, if people have learned to behave they should be encouraged to participate. (Of course, some people are spammers or incorrigible, see e.g. "los etho s" without spaces.)

[nirvana]

I have showdead turned on as well. It breaks my heart to see these comments from people who are trying to contribute. I don't go look up all their past history, but I'd say %75 of the comments are attempts to contribute to the conversation (even if they aren't great attempts or original) and about %25 are just comments that don't really add anything, but aren't really offensive or spammy or inappropriate.

[billpatrianakos]

I have gone through the history of a few people like the ones you mention and I have to say that I didn't really see anything worthy of banning. In every case I looked at (around 10 or 15 I think) I saw comments that were either sincere but not adding too much value (mediocre, let's say) or sometimes just not in agreement with popular opinion.

The really screwed up thing is that I've looked through the comment and submission histories of obvious spammers and I saw a guy with about 132 spam submissions with an account about as old as mine (almost 200 days) and his account wasn't banned. It seems that you can disagree around here but only to a point.

I get that maybe some are afraid of diluting the community but by being so overly sensitive you can really be doing everyone a disservice. Lately I feel like I have to watch out for the karma police. The guys who downvote anything that disagrees too much even if it's totally rational and put in as nice of terms as possible. And despite protests from the "in" crowd it really does seem like what they say gets auto-up voted. Experiments be damned, that reputation and age of any one profile really can make or break you.

Here's an experiment I'd like to see:

Pg, patio11, edw, reagawald, and the others all make new profiles and about commenting as always while not letting slip who they really are. Then let's see if their karma and average end up climbing at their usual rate.

[DiabloD3]

In short, you can't stop the group think.

Continuing from this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354448

I'm not even sure if I get the point of trying either. I mean, I believe I have provided at least some value to HN, but every time I've "been unafraid to call people out", all I got was a bunch of crap for it.

Although you say we shouldn't lose hope, I think I already have. Its frustrating to have to deal with people claiming everything is the next new previous thing or the new black or the new white or the new Apple or the new Google or whatever else meme you can think of it.

I find startups intriguing, I like deeply scientific and mathematical discussions, I like hearing about stuff going on in the open source world. You'd think HN would be my thing, but there are simply elements of the HN community that rub me the wrong way and no matter how much you try to stop them, no matter how many times you down vote them, they just keep coming back stronger than before.

Honestly, there are just some people here who'd be happier over at 4chan than here, and I wish they'd just go.

BTW, I expect to get downvoted for this, and I don't care. I don't sugar coat the truth, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now.

[billpatrianakos]

Can you be more explicit about who or what type of people those are that'd be more at home on 4chan? I'm just curious. I often times feel like maybe I shouldn't be here either. It took me a while before I quit being a lurker and sometimes I wonder "am I HN material or do I belong with the rest of the riff raff?"

[DiabloD3]

I don't think its possible to differentiate the two. Some people intentionally cause trouble, some constantly but unintentionally drag threads off topic, some think "math is hard, hey lets go shopping".

There is no clear cut definition. Although, if you're asking the question if you should be here the answer is implied to be yes since you bothered to ask the question in the first place.

[tokenadult]

Your user name wasn't immediately familiar to me, but I see when I look back at your comments that I remember some of those very well. You have indeed posted some comments in the last few months that provide good examples of disagreeing with groupthink while referring to facts and acknowledging other points of view.

I have a different style (I think I don't ever f-bomb in online comments) but your manner of making comments is food for thought, especially on issues where what I've learned in more than five decades of life experience leads to different conclusions from the majority opinion here on HN.

[nirvana]

You had 3.5k karma before beginning this experiment and you're a cofounder of a YC funded company! You're already part of the "in" group.

The first comment prior to this one on your comments feed starts of with: "Your entire comment is bullshit and it pisses me off. You've never worked at Zynga, so to purport that you know exactly what it's like to work there is bullshit. Your comment reflects exactly what Silicon Valley nerds think of Zynga externally. They think that Zynga is nothing but people refining skinner boxes for people to play in. You've probably seen one or two talks of Mark Pincus talking about "doing every dirty trick in the book" or something like that. Have you ever met him? Do you even know the last time he worked directly on a game? You're allowed to have whatever opinion you like, but this opinion is bullshit. Your entire comment is ridiculously biased and unreflective of Zynga internally or externally."

This part of your response is mostly a characterization of the commentator based on your own speculation about whether he's worked at Zynga or met Mark Pincus. While strictly speaking you're only characterizing the comment, this comes off as a personal attack to me.

Meanwhile, other people have been hell banned for linking to wikipedia pages defending scientific facts, because those facts go against the dominant ideology on hacker news (or that of the people with their finger on the ban button.)

I'm tired of hearing the refrain that reason and rationality rule the day here, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you're a liberal, an apple hater, an open source advocate who opposes property rights, you get a free pass for personal insults, but if you're none of those things, no matter how reasoned or rational you are, you risk being hellbanned.

I try to restrict myself only to commenting on safe subjects for that reason. I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned. That's not the kind of environment where "reasoned and rational discussion" are really going to flourish.

[teej]

To be clear, my "foundership" of a YC company wasn't publicly knowledge until 4 weeks ago.

My last comment isn't my greatest accomplishment. I'd hope that my behavior would be looked at in whole, instead of cherrypicked.

That being said, I was characterizing the general feeling of HN as a whole. Of the 100k+ readership of HN, very few are actual Zynga employees. So in that light, I defend my comment. There is a large anti-Zynga sentiment on HN and that sentiment is driven by media-fueled propaganda.

I can't account for why others have been hell-banned or downvoted. But from my experience being very contrarian in my own way, I haven't seen that at all. In fact, I've seen the exact opposite.

[georgemcbay]

Of the 100k+ readership of HN, very few are actual employees of any single company. Does that mean we can't discuss any companies here?

[lookhard]

"Don't criticize Zynga because you don't have any actual real-life experience with what it's like! And don't criticize me and my comments with actual real-life experience of my comments! You're just being spoonfed the message that whale-hunting "social" "games" aren't actually good for you!"

[teej]

It's not like that. I want people to make a reasoned opinion based on the big picture, not just on what Mike Arrington says. There are plenty of reasons to hate Zynga. The reasons TechCrunch and WSJ feed you are crappy reasons.

[mirkules]

"I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned"

Why do people worry about getting banned? It's just a screen name, it's not like you can't just make another one. Even if it's based on IP address, hacker news should be full of people that know how to get around that.

Just sayin' - if you've got something smart, constructive to say, say it. Who cares about banning if it's what you really believe in?

My personal rule about posting is simple: if a future employer links my HN profile to the "real" me, would that be grounds for not getting the job (or losing a job with my current employer)? If yes, then it's probably neither smart nor constructive, so doesn't belong on HN.

[tomkarlo]

It's not about the difficulty of making a replacement account. It's about the loss of profile / reputation / recognition. The longer a user has been contributing, the more painful losing all of that becomes.

[mirkules]

I guess I never saw it that way. Personally, I don't really care for reputation / reputation. Case in point, I've been on HN for almost 2 years, and I only recognize a handful of names: patio11, edw(somenumber), tptacek and pg. Usually, I read comments without even looking at the name, unless the comment is so profound that I have to know who said it This is why those 4 stick in my mind - they have said incredibly insightful things many times - I'm sure that a) they always say what they want and b) they have enough karma to burn anyway (e.g. patio's post about SEO for which he got absolutely blasted).

[tomkarlo]

I'm sure they'll be really bummed if they had to give up their name and start from scratch. It's not an issue of numeric karma. It's brand value.