That is a clear, thoughtful, and worthwhile message; but not just sitting with that, you've followed it up with a goal, awareness and action
I would encourage you to write and maybe expand on it somewhere more permanent
I particularly like your ending - the nature of real peace and community! It is not your goal, but I feel this is a powerful message to both online and offline communities. Inability to live in the same room is a massive driving force in say politics and global exchanges
Maybe 'we' and 'they' will still disagree in the end, but even agreement can be meaningless if we haven't the ability to sit down together - in peace
I appreciated your technical observations on silos and voting, which are essential to running HN; but would like to suggest that you expand your vision a little to beyond HN, or to how you use even us (the scorpions in a bottle) to display these things more clearly
I agree that HN has such a large userbase whilst not splintering it off in a way that division forms in sites like Reddit / Twitter is really unique.
And it's a site where excellent discourse can be had because there's an expectation of spending time to explain your point of view or back it up.
How things like dumb joke replies get downvoted is a testament to how the community wants to keep the quality up.
Personally, it's because the site is so good, that when discussion quality drops it's more noticeable.
Like in this case, I was remarking on how knee jerk the comments were that they are like predicable cliches.
But also a lot of the ideas expressed with vitriol are the majority opinion.
In the same vein. Anything that Lennart Poettering has developed seems to get the same treatment where people often respond with snark/vitriol by default no matter the reason systemd/pulseaudio or something else has hit the news.
Also a few weeks ago there was a post something to do with online game services. And a developer at a large publisher commented about how the cost of hosting servers is done on a per user basis. And they ended up replying to someone with "I've been in the industry for 6 years, I know you hate me" at the top of their response.
That kind of thing seems par for the course on Reddit / Twitter, but I guess because of the high quality of the forum, I feel sometimes that for other topics the discourse can be better.
> no other site is even trying to do this
many websites are designed this way. Really, think about it. Segregation doesn't happen automagically. Now, you could ask "but are the user bases as large as HN"? A few are and other aren't, I'm sure.
> it isn't like John Lennon's 'Imagine'
In the Anarchistic vision of 'Imagine', you would probably have a lot of HN-style arguments too, but they don't devolve into inter-national or inter-faith wars. When the "world lives as one", it's just like you describe - a lot of friction and discomfort but no segregation of hostile factions.
Finally, we need to remember that the level of hostility on HN right now is a lot for some people regardless of what they're used to. That doesn't mean we need to censor ourselves, but just to be aware that many people are more conflict-averse than the typical HN reader - and this aversion may well be correlated with, say, gender. So problems remain despite the positive view that you justly present.
Of course I may be wrong about this—I probably am. But in that case I'm curious to know what they are, so we can learn from them.
It isn't just about scale, but also scope. If a forum has a specific topic—Lego, let's say—then the problems I'm writing about are off the table, because it's easy to tell which posts are about Lego and which aren't, and the community will happily support moderation of the latter.
That being said, without considering our own opinions on a given topic, you can easily reproduce the experience of visiting random HN threads and finding a well written dismissive post on top of the thread, no matter what the subject is, and almost systematically (and thus, when someone is interested in the topic, that's the first thing they see). This is hardly explained by the "monster neighbors shock" effect. If you agree with this observation, how would you explain it?
Second, though, I think you might be describing your own shock experience here. Not every thread starts with a shallow dismissal—some do, but actually most don't. (Moderation is a factor, because we downweight petty and indignant comments whenever we see them at the top of a thread.) My bet is that you're seeing these sometimes, and because they're shocking and unpleasant, they somehow expand into your experience of HN overall. That's a shock experience, because the things that strike us unpleasantly end up dominating our sense of the whole. I've written about this a lot, but in slightly different terms: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Trying to figure these phenomena out is an ongoing process.
Out of curiosity, do you have any leads on what may replace a voting system for emerging insightful content? It sounds like a job for AI, but I guess any bias in it would be hated even more passionately.
There's a bit more discussion about this at https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=23157675.
When Digg introduced voting on links, it was initially seen as having way better content than the rest. And then Reddit did it with comments as well, and nobody looked back.
The main reason, I think, is that nobody read a whole thread. They look at the few top level comments (in upvoted threads) or at the last ones (in a forum/mail threads) and will reply to that - so that the quality of the whole discussion is determined by what people see first.
That being said, it indeed comes with a lot of problems of its own. Upvotes/downvotes favor hive mind thinking (you want to be loved, so you'll give people what they want) and mobs (if something is downvoted, you'll just add one more downvote).
A couple years ago, I went back to using mailing lists and it's indeed a less frustrating experience, from my point of view. But I'm not sure it's about the technical aspect, it may just be because there are just less people in it.
I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.
I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.
If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.
I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.
And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.
(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).
By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.
Another word I've used to describe a related dynamic is "demons": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... That's a similarly exaggerated usage.
Many of my friends who left this site did so because of how alienating these threads can be to people not represented in this community. I think that's been overlooked.
The goal here is to have a healthy community that's organized around intellectual curiosity. Every time we lose one intellectually curious user, to me that is a disaster that cuts into the core of the site. To the extent that people aren't here because they feel unrepresented in the community, that's a big deal. We need their curiosity as much as anyone's, and diversity—if I may use that word literally—is a must-have for intellectual curiosity to function at all. Curiosity thrives on diffs.
And of course there is a vicious circle: if they leave, then they are even less represented here. I'm open to ideas about improving this. The problem is not that it is overlooked (by us, at least). It's that the same forces that make it hard to solve in society at large make it hard to solve here, and in one respect even harder, because people misinterpret the nature of this community in the way I described above.
This discussion can be tricky because it overlaps with the ideological question, which is not the same thing. Sometimes people want us to ban everyone who expresses the opposing ideology, because that's the only sort of community they feel welcome or safe in. Even if we wanted to do that, it wouldn't work. That does not mean we don't care about inclusion. We care a lot about inclusion. In fact I spend the majority of my waking hours trying to nurture the conditions for it here.
By the way: if any of your friends would be open to it, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com. I would very much appreciate hearing their concerns.
Not everyone is comfortable talking to you privately, given all the ridiculous warnings you give out. I wanted to talk to you about turning off downweighting of my comments that you secretly enabled, but there is no easy way to say anything to you publicly.
This occurs, right now, here on HN, and IMHO it comes from the comments feed, a feature I find only useful to moderators and manipulators. Even the mention of certain topics from even a meta-discussion perspective receives down-votes, sometimes within seconds. This seems further amplified in communities where senior community members are granted super powers.
> Many of my friends who left this site did so because of how alienating these threads can be to people not represented in this community. I think that's been overlooked.
I am one of the commonly dissenting voices and nearly left about two years ago. When I decided to stay, I decided my accumulated karma was to be sacrificed in the downvotes of those lurkers who disagree without having the courage to engage.
When my karma runs out I will leave the site forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYkEqDp760
TLDW: Lean into the trolling; don't just feed them, stuff them. Come at the person in good faith and respond to them until they prove otherwise. Destin's video has a lot more to it though.
Though such a 'countermeasure' is not what dang is talking about here, I think the advice is good for just about any online discussion. Lean in.
The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
(Edit: I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.)
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in a single bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
But this is a misunderstanding—it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.