That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.
It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!
The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me.
This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.
I'm at the point now where I immediately hide submissions that seem like they have anything to do with American health care or American transportation.
2007-2012: The first 5 years everything was new and cool and shiny and we were just going thru the economic crash.
2012-2017: growth and scaling. Slightly more political posts, but that's mostly because tech and politics mix a lot more then the previous 5 years.
2017-present: stabilization. An even mix of similar articles, voting sentiments, repetitive opinions. The main thing missing is actual NEW ideas. We get tropes on "AI will rule the world", "10 reasons we need universal basic income", "why self driving will/will run the roads in 5 years", "FANG is evil", etc... all very predictable dicussions.
The revolution will not come from Hacker News : )
For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates.
Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities
In its earliest years HN felt to me to be a decidedly American place, steeped in the politics, culture and views you might expect of its origins. Now, there's far more Europeans, Asians - and increasingly Chinese as HN apparently isn't firewalled. The attitudes to many things have moved to being more international, whether that's in terms of politics, healthcare and regulation, or simple corrections to the trivial but often fascinating things that are just done or viewed differently around the world.
Sometimes the split shows up quite clearly with votes going one way when it's mostly the US awake, and quite another once Europe and Asia has had a chance. Early GDPR discussions were probably the clearest follower of this pattern. :)
Typically when I find my statements are downvoted it is because I had a quip that could reasonably be construed as negative, combative, etc. I tend to edit and remove those bits.
When I find things to be "reflexively" (probably the wrong word) downvoted, it is in regards to simple questions. Simple example, there was an article regarding Manning's confinement yesterday. One top-level comment asked "Why is this not cruel" to which I asked the opposite, "How is it cruel?" - simple as can be. I watched that one go down to fairly negative, then bounce back up, settling on a score of 0. I don't care about the score itself so much as what that delta represents.
Perhaps I'm just too narrow minded, but I fail to come up with a reason to downvote a simple question asking for perspective that doesn't involve me reading some kind of intent. One of the core tenets of this site is to assume good faith, assume the most charitable viewpoint. When I say that I believe HN culture is dying, it is this that I am talking about. There seems to be less and less good faith discussion as time goes on.
As always, I'd love for an alternative perspective that I'm (probably) missing here.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.
Perhaps I'm just an old man yelling about "back in the day," but on these axis I feel HN is trending downward.
In other words, perhaps the perception of a drop in HN quality makes people more likely to reflexively assume bad faith.
The original question seems fine as a conversation starter, since for one thing it identifies a particular motivated action that most humans would agree is cruel: 'admittedly imprisoning someone for "coercive" reasons', but if the only responses it had inspired had been more meta-conversation like yours then it would have been suitable to flag the whole subthread. Fortunately there were lots of thoughtful responses.
In the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was not to disclose personal info on the internet because it was understood that "the IP stack" was designed with maximum liberty and tolerance for all kinds of garbage (with personal tools to filter, and the assumption of personal responsibility). Comparing the dynamics of Usenet vs. FB is quite revealing and brings insight into the discussion about distributed vs. centralized power. We've dumbed everything down to the point of ridiculousness.
"They're nihilists, Donny."