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
Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
- John Stuart Mill
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above.
If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work.
Edit: Oh, I wonder if it's a spillover effect; the amount of politics doesn't change, so having those threads on topic avoids spill over into other threads
There's not many places for that. It happens here because of yalls dedicated work and magic touch. I say you're doing the human race a service, and thank you for it.
There is absolutely no other way to express your political opinion.
We have to keep shoving politics down HN readers throats for their own good.
given that HN isn't an analogue for the world at large, one wonders if this lesson learned on HN translates at all to what may happen elsewhere as a result of the ongoing corporate 'de-platforming' campaigns.
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
It does not look like there will be any underpinning of all values and morals that a majority of us will accept or understand. So that leaves us the question: how should we disagree? I think the current way is fine, perhaps we could all strive to be less enflamed by views contrary to our own held beliefs, but do not think that the situation couldn't be way, way worse.
It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently?
Or is this just selection bias on my part?
If you watch the moderation actions on this site, you'll see people corrected every day for using the site solely for nationalist or political or ideological flamewar. I can't think of many times anybody has ever been called out for problematical linguistics flamewar, or for using the site solely to litigate a particular way of writing SQL queries, or for using the site solely to talk about quantum mechanics.
Politics nowadays is irreversibly different, and an attempt at a detox now would be even worse.
One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
What people want to do and what should be done are entirely different things.
This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
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.
The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing.
One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.)
Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
I'm laughing at the naivete of this. Don't quit your day jobs, y'all.
If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.
In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].
[1] I'm not saying it's very good at this. But it's all relative, and what matters is outrunning the bear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725436.
Does a post on climate change count?
Does a post on city design and public transport count?
I triggered the second Erlang day and it made pg mad at me for the one and only time that I'm aware of. That was before I was dang.
What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.
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...
I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.
It's the same as if you complained that we're all writing in English, and you'd prefer that we didn't. Porque todos los articulos y comentarios estan en ingles?!? Debemos tener mas contenido en español! Es un comunidad global, no?! La gente aqui asuma que todos los lectores son anglos? Es un barbaridad!
Oh, wait. No it isn't. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You're insinuating there is and requesting the mods act accordingly. I disagree.
Seriously, I don't speak for the mods, but I don't recall it being stated anywhere that HN "serves the global community". In fact I just double checked the FAQ. It doesn't. HN has mostly been a site meant to cater to Silicon Valley tech startups for as long as I've been using it.
Let me know when ycombinator.com.au is up and running and we'll join you there and not talk about American laws. Until then...
While not as polarising as a Jim Jordan or Ted Cruz, people like Christopher Pyne and Paul Keating made Australian politics mildly interesting. We seem to have two very centrist parties right now which is a welcome change.
I hear people talk about "Proposition XXX" restricting "stuff", and I wonder if other Americans from different parts of the country would even know what that was.
And incidentally, the FAQ don't mention the United States, either.
But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
I theorize it is because America is so big and powerful and there isn't a visible friendly society with different cultural views in the neighborhood that matters. Large societies that matter are far away, and rivals at best, enemies at worst.
There is a strong sense of "the American way is obviously the best, and everybody who disagrees or has been socialized on different norms is an idiot and must be destroyed".
Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
It's a minority of posters, I'm sure, but they downvote and flag just about everything that isn't "America's way or the highway".
Nobody asks them to declare the Finnish, German or Japanese way to be better. But they simply cannot accept that other societies might be happy with other choices.
And those threads are really garbage.
That's not accurate. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to everybody. The only prerequisite is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Intellectual curiosity exists everywhere, HN's userbase is 50% outside the US, and at least 90% outside of Silicon Valley. That's important for people to understand.
Reading political discussion alone gives me a heavy heart; I can't imagine moderating it.
> The problem is the statelessness of the internet.
I fully understand your frustration. I always thought forums are much better since Twitter is a worse offender - you have to repeat what you've just said 10 minutes ago after a new person has joined the conversation - but for someone who moderates forums daily, I guess it's basically the same experience.
I think some of us are acutely interested because what's happening now is historically significant and could have very interesting(?) downstream effects.
Meanwhile, I've tried to see if this bit of info can be added to the HN repo maintained by Max Wolf.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-i...
To state the obvious, I don't think anyone spends as much time on HN as the moderation team, in the sense of reading comments widely. At least... I'd hope none of us dedicate that much time. (Btw, always thanks!)
There are a few other places you can do this, like the slate star codex culture war comment spinoffs: r/theMotte and https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php
Due to rightwingers often feeling unwelcome elsewhere a lot go to those places, meaning both communities think they need more leftists to balance things out.
The US outputs a massive amount of media, news, and culture. But how much does it actually influence other countries, at the personal level?
I'd assume, in order of impact: (1) visa / immigration, (2) free trade deals, (3) sanctions, ?
Is there any truth to the "US sets world tone on climate change, etc"? It seems like even the smallest countries are more than happy to make their own choices (in their own best interests!) when the US isn't trying to compel a position.
In which our multi-national law enforcement and legal protagonists grapple with translating their own expectation into their crime's country's actual laws.
I’ll get my coat.
In another comment, you said that HN isn't siloed[1]. I think otherwise, there's definitely a certain vibe of groupthink going on, which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day, but mostly has strong common undercurrents of what are acceptable lines of thoughts and what are not in the greater HN community. And then within a given timezone, there are thought-cliques that share common counter-positions.
I would say, HN is siloed, it just has a few silos.
At the moment there's a xenophobia/refugee crisis in Europe, refugees that are escaping conflicts in e.g. Syria or Afghanistan. Arguably Syria isn't the fault of USA (although ISIS grew from the chaos of the Iraqi occupation), and the xenophobia has a bit to do with austerity politics of Merkel.
And then someone started bombing Yemen and now there's another proxy regional war there..
On the other hand, the status quo at least is known and not as bad as it could be (e.g. Bronze Age Collapse)...
Definitely looking less and less like the US sets the tone for much at all, but Australia and the USA have an important military alliance and we're part of the Five Eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%9...
After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Juice_Media#Honest_Governm...
Frankly, their election fraud thread - which has hundreds of comments demonstrating both extreme misunderstanding of statistics and the voting process, coupled with a willingness to make or support incredible claims without any substantive evidence or knowledge of the subject matter - says a lot about that community, in my view.
> But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
Many of us certainly can, however, America is often whalloped over the head for not being like other countries. In some threads this is made out peacefully, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766884
In others, America is widdled down to very reductionist arguments that Americans already debate endlessly. Things like, "This is a very uniquely American point of view" as if to eschew our problems like they don't still deserve debate because we should be just like everyone else. An example is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486350 Of course, this can be pretty frustrating because America isn't all the same, though I know it can be easy to perceive it that way. States in America are more like countries in the EU with respect to their homogeneity, or lack thereof. In some ways we have some overtones that are the same, but we're all different. As dang pointed out, HN represents a lot of people from outside Silicon Valley too.
You seem to allude to this here:
> Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
and I agree. Maybe this is people learning they actually are part of a more global community and how to respect one another while also fostering thoughtful, curious debate. I can tell you that I often wake up in the morning to read my threads from the night prior because I want to know what the global community, outside of America, has had to say. As I'm doing right now in fact. That's to say, hearing your voice matters at least to me.
I'll try to pay attention to what gets downvoted, and if that's happening you'll get my upvote.
This seems to be true. I noticed on my comments I get pretty consistent waves of upvotes or downvotes depending on the time of the day. My comments are usually pretty politicized and polarizing, so my guess must be that the US wave likes my content less and the European wave likes it more.
Before or after, you can.
In other words, at the height of political emotion the experiment was bound to fail. That's not necessarily the case at any other point in time.
What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label.
on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
Instead, the decay of social media happens as the platform transitions from a place where one talks with people to a place where one talks at people.
If I reply to your political thoughts by telling you off, I'm probably not trying to convince you to change your mind. Instead, I'm performing for the attention (and upvotes / retweets / kind comments) of like-minded peers.
That's obviously alienating for the person who gets attacked, but this kind of performance is also self-radicalizing. The validating reinforcement preferentially goes to the strongest attacks or defenses, favouring rhetoric (as you noted) rather than substance.
One of the few things that suppresses this cycle is exactly what HN does reasonably well: have the community be about something else, diluting political content such that there's less often a chain-reaction.
Or another one issue which is deemed of high importance (terrorism, for example).
I'm the odd-duck for having lived in Seattle for 5 years. But I eventually moved back of course - because if I'm being honest with myself: Even I don't understand the mindset of anyone who lives anywhere other than here or why they would live somewhere else.
- As you said, concern about Covid diluted the vitriol in a lot of political threads
- In 2016, t_d was in ascendancy, and its members would flood other subreddits with their talking points. After that, sub moderators established stronger anti-brigading rules. In 2020, t_d was either banned or made private, I forget which.
- A lot of the highly charged flash points of 2016 were no longer that relevant in 2020: Syrian refugees, trans bathrooms, 'identity politics'
- 2016 also had 2 polarizing candidates. In 2020 only one was still looked at that way.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
You wouldn't have noticed McCormack in charge but for him opening his mouth and spouting some retarded crap (about COVID19) and some very poorly thought out and articulated comments on BLM vs the Capital insurrection. The only person I think mostly has the right of it as far as comparing the two and the police responses was Sam Harris from his last podcast.
All in all Aus put in a solid performance with this pandemic - one of the best, I reckon, and markedly better than that of Japan, where I currently reside.
I'm sorry, I don't care enough about your community values not to laugh at that.
Besides, this idea of the value of civility in the face of much worse issues is the worst kind of enlightened centrism. You're quite right that "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege," but it's clearly a lesson you haven't learned.
> Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely.
If you could explain how you reconcile everything you quoted about politics with the ban on politics, I could perhaps help you understand. I can't really grasp what it is you don't understand.
This is passive-aggressive and childish.
In another comment, you were lecturing me on community values. How do you think the above claim, applied to a wide swath of the site's users, fits with those so-called "community values"?
You're pretending to be above politics while engaging in it in a dirty, underhanded fashion.
I'm in Qld and the response/outcome so far has been better than New Zealand's (with comparable population size).
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.