zlacker

>>notion+(OP)
It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.

It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.

These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251

>>dang+c7
As an Australian, I see most political HN discussion revolving around US interests. For the most part this is to be expected, but in the rare cases that other country's politics enter HN (particularly new laws that affect tech), there seems to be a heavy bias toward comparison to the US's laws, so much so, that I think I understand more of the US laws than I do my own! Again, this is probably to be expected with the big tech companies largely residing in SV...

But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community.

So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.

>>cmroan+So
I point this out a lot [1]. The problem is the statelessness of the internet [2]. No matter how often you repeat something, the population that receives the message has measure zero.

There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].

It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>>dang+kA
HN is more stateless than the average internet forum. HN could embrace moving the forum forward beyond threads and votes, and maybe you'd have a platform that you could moderate fairly and didn't require so much self censorship; a platform that elevated unpopular but thoughtful ideas. It seems like HN is proud of being low tech, your community management issues are solvable.

>>hashkb+fD1
I'm skeptical. Also, such changes come with high costs and risks so one can't just slosh things around. That's one of the lessons of the OP!

>>dang+qQ3
(this ended up longer than you probably want to read; thanks for your time and consideration)

I think the only "risk" of moving away from upvote/downvote (or at least publishing some type of suggestions for how they ought to be used) is that you'll start seeing more diverse opinions rise to the top of threads; and folks with majority opinions will have to engage instead of the drive-by-downvote. The positive feedback cycle of compounding diversity should be easy to imagine; and the chilling effect of downvoting as it exists today is a well documented bug in our reality.

As for the costs, even if all you could bring yourself to do is to separate downvote into "disagree" and "this is low-quality content", but scored them both just as you score downvotes today, you'd be providing better feedback to commenters as well as raising the quality of the discussion. Today the downvote (here and in so many other similar communities) is a huge contributor to the groupthink driven division-without-discussion that's poisoning our society.

To lower the cost to essentially zero, just turn off downvoting for a while and see what changes. If you're willing to experiment with cutting off entire topics, why not experiment with the structure of discussion?

I think there is even a strong case that HN's current policies are inconsistent. From the HN guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

But isn't that the essential function of the downvote? I'd much rather have someone say, "This isn't interesting to me" than just get the downvotes.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

OK ... but why is there nothing saying "consider a thoughtful, constructive critique instead of a downvote; use downvotes only for _________". What actually is the purpose of the downvote? Why is it a feature of this discussion tool? Was it included thoughtfully, or just because HN is a Reddit clone? Ironic that PG launched HN to be a "better" Reddit, but then you have in the guidelines:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

HN suffers from one critical weakness that Reddit pioneered - the downvote. I'll end the comparison there; HN isn't turning into Reddit; but it has an opportunity to pioneer this type of threaded discussion and really differentiate itself from Reddit; if you're sensitive to the comparison, eliminating or improving upon voting is how you'll free yourself from that complaint.