[clicks]

I suppose he's gotten slightly better at talking. He seems nervous, but isn't a complete wreck (see interviews from 2 years ago, he has improved a lot since then). As I understand it the markets responded well to Zuck's talk with Arrington and now with Bennet -- fb stock shot up after each of the interviews. But that doesn't excuse the fact he is a cartoonishly twisted guy and entrepreneurs and consumers alike should be leery of his every move. Does he seriously expect people to buy his latest spiel about immigration? This is the guy who created a political movement that went so far as to fund ads for oil drilling in arctic national wildlife refuge and putting down Keystone XL pipelines, so, sorry, I'm not buying that he's in this cause because he met someone who couldn't attend college because they were illegal immigrants. Having talked at length with people who knew him in his Harvard days, he's ruthless, relentless, and rapacious -- he has determined he's going to approach the immigration issue in the public arena with stories about illegal immigrants not getting accepted into colleges, and this seems to be the way he's going at it. Pity. He's the face of a serious issue that warrants genuine people looking at it with sincerity and good faith, instead we're stuck with Zuck.

This is the guy who literally called the users of his site "dumb fucks", and was literally willing -- no, eager to hand over private details of his site's users to his friends. I ran forums that garnered about 12k users per month when I was 16, I took the responsibility of safeguarding my users' private information very seriously.

The only thing that's changed about Zuck is he's learned to not say these things out loud, play a nice PR game, and meet people and convince them that he's a nice fella who wants best for everybody and "connect the world!" through Facebook (no matter if you want to be connected to it or not).

[enko]

> The only thing that's changed about Zuck is he's learned to not say these things out loud

I am not a fan of Zuckerberg, but I don't think you have any right to claim such a thing. People can change.

It's good to hear you were so responsible at age 16, but not everyone matures so quickly. My own personality has basically done a complete 180 since my high school and uni days, from the biggest prick you ever met to someone who genuinely tries to show compassion and consider others' points of view. Is it all a façade to conceal the inner asshole? I'm sure you could make that case, but in the end it's outcomes that matter. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the flip-side of that is that sometimes people who might still be assholes internally can do a lot of good.

Track record is important, yes. But giving sincere people second chances is also important, and that goes for Zuck, too.

[runawaybottle]

He's also very normal on a human level if you just step back for a moment.

He's a programmer, so being awkward in interviews makes sense when he's starting out. He's young and arrogant, and therefore there's probably records of dumb comments he's made. He's also getting older and more mature, so I'm sure he's changed his mind on a few things.

All of this strikes me as a normal, reasonably honest person, and really that's about as much as you can ask for.

[Jormundir]

The road to heaven is paved with assholes.

[samstave]

People can, he hasn't.

[pg]

This comment seemed to me a perfect specimen of the type that drags down forums: vitriolic and ill-informed. I've hypothesized before that the problem is not that people make such comments (which seems inevitable if you have open, anonymous signups) but that others upvote them. So I analyzed the votes to see if there was a pattern, and indeed there is. The median karma of upvoters was 644, and the median karma of downvoters was 1814, almost 3x as high. If this pattern holds up it could be very useful.

[oskarth]

What does the ratio look like on a "neutrally controversial" comment look like? That is, a comment that isn't toxic, but merely dividing the community.

[dylangs1030]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that pattern is sustainably observed, then it almost certainly means the upvote/downvote privileges should be changed, correct?

Elsewise, the pattern will continue like entropy, until the majority of comments are like that.

[nostrademons]

There already are certain privileges to karma: you need a certain threshold to downvote comments at all, and I suspect that thresholds to get onto the front page are based on the karma of who upvotes your story. (There've been times where my upvote alone, going from 2 to 3 votes, is enough to get something on the front page, while many times I've seen new stories with 4-5 points that don't make it.) I suspect PG is thinking of tweaking the weights, automatically, until there's enough of a weight to high-karma downvotes to kill bad comments. You could easily train an SVM or other classifier on some set good/bad comments and then pull out the coefficients to figure out what signals should go into weighting point totals.

[robg]

One thing I've never understood about forums of this type: Why assume all votes should be equal?

In any knowledge community, some voices mean more than others (e.g., experts and novices). Why shouldn't a similar distinction translate to votes?

[krapp]

Karma doesn't necessarily translate to expertise. Most of my highest-karma comments have been utter nonsense. High karma can mean people have agreed with you, or that you've been here longer than not, and it probably is a good measure that you can conform to the norms of the community, but it doesn't necessarily mean you know what you're talking about.

I mean, people will listen when tptacek talks about cryptography, but that doesn't mean his opinion on design should necessarily matter more than that of a designer with less karma just because tptacek has the bigger integer attached to his name. It's not really more 'fair' for votes by high karma users to outweigh votes by lower karma users.

Unless it already works that way in which case it's the best thing ever and clearly pg is going God's work.

[robg]

I've worked on content-based Bayesian voting schemes. They work well weighting votes by content words. tptacek + cryptography should matter more.

Here, though, it seems as if HN experts and novices may be representative. pg used to run the front page based on karma. Comments seems like a place where that simplistic approach could work well.

[herdrick]

How about the 'age' (since registration) of both? And btw why not just do the simple thing and disenfranchise newer users, anyway?

[tptacek]

I can't understand this comment at all. Do you think Zuckerberg secretly agrees with ~50% of America about building a new oil pipeline through Canada? Or do you think he's ambivalent about oil pipelines and happy to quid pro quo them for immigration law support? Or is it something else?

[Uhhrrr]

If you look at who the ads are for, it's pretty clearly a quid pro quo.

[Helianthus]

This isn't worth your time.

[gruseom]

The only thing that's changed about Zuck is ...

Pure projection. You can't possibly know such a thing.

To be a public figure is to be a cartoon character in a lot of imaginary dramas. Elsewhere on the front page right now is a story about successful companies with founders no one has heard of. It's easy to see why they'd prefer to keep it that way.

[nostromo]

I'm pretty sure I said worse things to my friends in private when I was that age. I shudder to think what it would feel like to have it disclosed publicly.

[jmduke]

I strongly disagree with your characterization of him as 'cartoonishly twisted' and think that if you're going to write someone off for being overly glib in a private conversation while they're in college, then you're casting an incredibly wide net.

[skybrian]

There are other people saying the same thing about immigration law's effect on high school students [1]. So don't discount this particular argument just because it comes from someone you don't trust.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/the-surp...

[jamesaguilar]

I'm confident that if you or most people existed under as much scrutiny as Zuck, they'd find something equally damaging you'd said somewhere in the past.