[epolanski]

Controversial content is discussed more than positive one, that's a well known phenomenon from gossiping with friends to discussing politics online to whatever.

I always bring the same example: if one of your best friends has troubles with it's partner you'll hear for hours. But when things go smooth they have nothing to say and you have little to add.

[cloverich]

This is well known, and why forums that wanted to maintain their quality would consistently lock such threads going back at least 20+ years when I started using forums. Reddit, Facebook, et al, do the opposite. Its why they feel so bad to use over time - they are engineered to tap into this and to promote it. HN thrives because they very consciously do the opposite.

I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.

[redserk]

I'm tired of this point being repeated. This is not universally true. I'm in communities where the more active discussions are not ragebait.

I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.

[pixl97]

>I'm in communities where the more active discussions

And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/

>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.

This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.

[redserk]

How can you know the moderation style of the spaces I visit, when I haven't even linked them here?

[pixl97]

Because you exist on the planet Earth with humans.

For any forum to remain positive the following occurs.

1. the forum population is tiny and self controlling.

2. There is a lot of moderation to keep it from turning into a burning garbage dump.

3. There are no other choices, the above two is all that exist.

[redserk]

Again, how can you make these assertions without even knowing what these communities are?

[pixl97]

Are your communities non-human?

[nospice]

> And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.

So? You have to do that because it takes one toxic person to poison the well. HN is aggressively moderated to get rid of articles and opinions that don't belong too. Without it, it would be just a constant stream of self-promotion and politics.

The point is that in certain other places, someone (the moderators) worked to nourish a positive culture and it worked. HN didn't and it shows. I don't think that negativity is necessary to keep the forum interesting. Especially given that HN's negativity really isn't all that insightful. A lot of negative takes are bad, and many of them are written without reading the article, or by cherrypicking a single sentence and attacking that.

[SoftTalker]

I'm a bit confused, you say that "HN is aggressively moderated" and in the next paragraph seem to imply that they don't do enough?

If anyone wants to get a taste what an unmoderated HN would look like, check out /new and see how much garbage is submitted.

[nospice]

I'm saying it's aggressively moderated in some respects (off-topic content, politics, etc), but it's not moderated to root out a certain breed of snarky, I'm-smarter-than-you negativity. Many other forums police that second part and are doing just fine. This includes forums dedicated to technical hobbies.

In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep rationalizing it.

I remember working on a technical blog post for my company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could. And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to expect in our industry.

[pixl97]

>HN didn't and it shows

You don't get tech without negativity. And honestly HN is very tame compared to most forums when it comes to the deeply negative.

The problem with maintaining (only) positivity in tech is you turn into $large_companies marketing department. We have to step up and say security flaws exist. That companies outright lie. That some idea (when it comes to programming) are objectively bad.

Hence why the OP is here on the thread talking about what negativity means in this particular case, because it also counts criticism.

[nospice]

> You don't get tech without negativity.

This is something we tell ourselves to rationalize bad behavior. How come that 3D printing forums or woodworking forums or car maintenance forums can exist without toxicity, but tech somehow can't? There are people pushing products everywhere. You can ban marketing content or set ground rules for it.

Further, performative cynicism really isn't that helpful. It's not insightful to hear that every company is evil and greedy, every personal project sucks, every scientific study is wrong, and every blogger is incompetent.

[epolanski]

There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and controversial content has multiple psychological effects of high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect and toxicity breeds retention.

We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing than to agree and add much.

And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.

[redserk]

It depends how you want to measure engagement and activity. Quality of discussion is something to consider. It's very difficult to have a proper discussion when all of the responses are the same expected replies to low-effort ragebait.

[slfreference]

There's a saying : No News is Good news.

[Y_Y]

Unfortunately "No News" doesn't make for a very good website.

[Aurornis]

That’s a factor, but the Reddit hive mind can take even non-controversial posts and turn them into a toxic, cynical cesspool of comments.

When I was still visiting Reddit my subreddit list was short and focused on a few hobbies and tech topics. Even those subreddits had become overtaken with cynical doomerism and toxic responses to everything. For a while I could still get some value out of select comments, but eventually everyone who wanted real discussion gave up and left. Now even when interesting or helpful topics get posted it’s like the commenters are sharks circling and waiting for any opportunity to bring doom and gloom to any subject.

[rvnx]

It depends on the platform. Most of the platforms reward content engagement, no matter if the content is positive or negative.

Engagement means money. Even if this is bait content then you get rewarded (on TikTok, X, YouTube, you directly get cash).

Even here controversy is indirectly rewarded here because it creates engagement, and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone;

You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.

These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

[...]

and it helps to bootstrap your project or grab new customers for free (at most 1 day of writing the bot script).

Let's say, you want to launch a new Juicero, and nobody knows about it yet, it's great to be able to push it on the homepage of HN, otherwise nobody is going to notice.

[lurk2]

> These points have utility: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

<1: Troll

<10: Throwaway

<60: Troll

<300: Probably a throwaway. Quality varies widely.

>500, <1000: Normal people

>1000, account less than 6 months old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory.

<1000, >10,000, account less than 5 years old: Mostly normal users. Quality isn’t generally great.

<10,000, >30,000, account 10+ years old: Usually the best quality posts; karma and age suggest consistent contributions overtime without any of the personality disorders that go with being terminally online.

>100,000, account <5 years old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory. Lots of flagged submissions about US politics.

>100,000, 10+ years old: Domain knowledge expert. Usually an older user with enough of a reputation that a subset of users know the user’s real identity. Will occasionally post absolutely unhinged comments.

[lostlogin]

This is hilarious, particularly the last sentence.

The absolute key feature is the domain experts, not the karma. Any time any subject comes up, someone appears that knows everything about the subject and lives in the field. It’s the single best thing about HN by a million miles.

[chasd00]

The domain experts present here is pretty amazing i have to agree. I love when you get a comment that's like "oh, you have that wrong it's X instead of Y. I invented this technology 30 years ago, here's the reasoning behind X..."

[epolanski]

You can have millions of upvotes just with jokes.

I remember a guy that had millions just because on any reddit AMA asked "tits or ass?"

[RiverCrochet]

You can also have hundreds of thousands of downvotes if you work for EA and are completely tone deaf.

https://fandomwire.com/karma-slapped-ea-with-the-most-downvo... (there are probably better articles about it out there, I quit reddit a long time ago)

[mjr00]

The commentor was talking about HN karma, not reddit.

You're right about reddit karma though. One of the good things about HN is that throwaway joke posts like that are downvoted/flagged/otherwise discouraged. I can guess the top comment for any given Reddit comment section with like 90% accuracy just because it's going to be the most obvious joke possible based on the submission title, and Reddit users love upvoting those for some reason.

[JKCalhoun]

I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.

I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not whoring.

And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on, bandwagoning—antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.

I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to what I actually believe in order to call myself out—or, you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too—it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and champion it.

In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment in the thread, I don't comment.

[rvnx]

I like to defend the devil here as well, because I see it as an interesting challenge / puzzle. It is very intellectually motivating and difficult to find compelling arguments that can move someone's opinion. Like verbal judo.

[JKCalhoun]

We might be called contrarians.

I'm okay with that.

[jonathanstrange]

I think it's 500 points, or at least it used to be.

[totallynotrvnx]

Just checked, 1 point can upvote but not downvote

At the end, just saying that the best way to increase engagement is to increase bait / rage. Ironically that increases retention on the platforms too, so they don't need peace, if there are juicy flame wars.

[CDRdude]

It probably still is. I have a bit below 500 points and I can’t downvote.

[JKCalhoun]

(I just helped push you closer to the mark.)

[latexr]

> and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone

Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.

> You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.

I don’t think that’s right. You don’t get points for replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get also affect your overall karma, though you don’t seemingly have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I’m not sure of the ratio (half? one third?).

> These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

I don’t think that’s right either. Once you can downvote and flag (500 karma?), more points don’t give you anything extra. Personally I rarely check someone’s points, only when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers and other obvious bad actors.

> This is why I am collecting points on all my fake accounts, because once I have collected enough karma points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using these shadow accounts.

HN has voting ring detection. Though I can’t speak for how effective it is.

[immibis]

I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a boost.

Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.

[nosianu]

> Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.

If that is an example for how your usual comments look like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the site.

[JKCalhoun]

I've seen plenty of anti-Capitalism comments on HN. To be sure, not the popular opinion.

[mschuster91]

One thing I've noticed over the decades here: anti-capitalism used to get you flagged to death in the past... but since Covid and especially since the Russian invasion and associated price shocks / cost-of-living crisis, it takes a lot to even get downvoted.

The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

[mjr00]

> The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

IMO it's more the HN userbase has expanded, a lot, and now includes a lot of people who aren't the same tech enthusiasts the site had historically. Yeah, I know, eternal September and all that, but to put it into perspective: Trump's first election victory got 2215 comments[0], his second election victory got 9275 comments[1]. There are some mitigating factors here--iirc HN was having downtime issues due to the traffic in 2016--but HN was already pretty popular among tech enthusiasts 9 years ago, and it's grown 400% from that!

I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057647

[mschuster91]

> I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.

"Eternal September" explains (correctly IMHO) why there are more people of a different background, but more people doesn't explain why it is very noticeable that downvotes and deathflags don't happen as frequently as before.

[lostlogin]

> last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of a good side to it all. Work from home maybe?

It’s back a ton of progress on many fronts. Counter examples welcomed.

[rvnx]

I am genuinely none sure.

I would tend to think that this goes naturally:

you get boosted by a circle of people you know, and who wants you to succeed, because if you succeed they will get money), so there is the incentive in some way.

but it's still plausible that getting a boost on HN is part of the package (but I am not sure it is needed, because of this natural push that you get from let's say 100 people around you).

What you said about capitalism is true, I noticed it too, and it sounds even strange to me, as we are literally on a board that is initiated by a capitalist fund.

[zzzeek]

"you're posting too fast; please slow down"