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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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...
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!)
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..
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Juice_Media#Honest_Governm...
> 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.
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.
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 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.